Recommend a product to people. They buy it, you get a commission. Affiliate marketing looks really simple on the surface. The commission percentages can get really good depending on what niche you are in. In many cases, you can start earning commissions without getting permission to sell ahead of time. It’s all so simple and ready to go.
Send people, get sales, and earn commissions. Sound familiar? Yep. It’s got roots in insurance sales, real estate, and door-to-door sales. Simple, but that doesn’t mean easy. These three T’s will lower your difficulty.
* Trust
Door-to-door sales involve gaining trust really fast. People good at it can quickly pick up on what they see to find common ground and move forward. When things move online you lose that. The human interaction has been removed, for better or worse. It takes no more than a click for people to leave your site.
Your email subscribers can leave at the click of a button, or send you directly to trash so you can’t even tell. The online sales world is similar.
People online are generally looking for information or entertainment. Even in more practical niches such as baseball or blacksmithing people are looking for these two things, often both in the form of “infotainment.”
This means content needs to be as entertaining as it is helpful. It needs to hold people’s attention while their phones are sending notifications and their browser is dropping even more notifications.
To avoid rejection online, whether it’s seen or not, make the content you provide entertaining and useful. Build trust with the person consuming your content. Do it with any tools you have available, infographics, videos, pictures, and of course, writing.
Put the seed of a problem solution via products you are suggesting into your readers’ minds. Do it subtly though.
* Traffic
Another thing to realize with online marketing is that you have no storefront or territory. There is no going door to door, and nobody will randomly wander in while passing the store. Prospects are gained in a little different way.
Sure, your website is a storefront for everyone, everywhere – but so are all the websites in the world. You need to get traffic to your site. Notice, get traffic, not wait for traffic.
There are numerous free and paid ways to get traffic. They are beyond the scope of this article, but rest assured you’ll want to learn a few and get good at a couple.
* Tracking
You can only improve what you track. Track visitors. Track where they come from and what they d while visiting your site. Don’t forget emails, they need tracking too.
What about ads? If you’re paying for traffic and not tracking it, you might as well toss the money out the window.Â
These are just the beginning when it comes to tracking and metrics. This data tells you what does and doesn’t work and how you can scale up your business in the end. It also shows you where you aren’t getting any traction and should stop working. Track everything you can, use the data that makes sense, ignore the rest but don’t stop tracking if possible – it may become relevant as you scale.
Those are three T’s for affiliate marketing. Trust, Traffic, and Track. Remember these three T’s as you work on your business and you’ll be steered towards success.
Which “T” are you ready to work on? I can help you level up in any of them, just reach out through the link below.