Affiliate Marketing 103: Winning Strategies for Affiliate Marketing Contests

Affiliate marketing is one of the promising business on the internet, and with it, there is no limit to the income a person can make. The market is so rich that a publisher can make money even when no marketing effort is made and there is no end to surprising income alerts.

However, profits do not come by just registering with a network and sharing affiliate links. It requires that an affiliate understand the game and also adopt the winning tactics to overcome the growing competition.

Are you a novice in affiliate marketing? Are you tired of sharing your affiliate links on social networks without making a penny? Then you should grab your coffee and read through this blog as I share the best affiliate marketing tips.

1. Choose a profitable and dedicated niche

Achieving success in affiliate marketing starts from the beginning when you are making the list of products. The mistake of some newbies is that they want to market everything that is profitable. They go from body fitness to weight loss, and then digital marketing. However, the success strategy in affiliate marketing is choosing a niche.

Choosing a niche is not as hard as it seems. It requires that you consider the things you are passionate about. Do you love music or art? Meanwhile, you can consider a fashion niche if you have a passion for shoes and the latest dresses. The role of passion is that it encourages you to write and share your ideas about the product. Moreover, you would be able to answer questions and defend the products.

The next thing is to make a quick research about competitors in the niche. Is the niche competitive? And do you have the chance of getting to the top? To attain success faster and reduce stress, you need a niche that is less competitive with much traffic. In addition, you should select a niche that is highly demanded by people. For example, many marketers are going to the fitness and weight loss niche because there are lots of people who are really annoyed with obesity and want to get rid of it as fast as possible. Meanwhile, you can simply make use of keyword research tools to survey the population of people who are making enquiries about the products in your niche.

Also, you will like to select a niche with a wide depth. Wide depth in the sense that there are many products to sell and more articles to write. Such a niche will give you the chance to explore and you will never run out of products. There should always be a new product to offer to the world every day because they would get bored if you are only sharing links for a single product.

So choosing a niche should not be difficult. Just select a niche that you love, profitable and less competitive.

2. Start a blog

Having a blog is definitely not a prerequisite for success in affiliate marketing, but it does great in promoting your marketing skills and beating the competition. The secret behind affiliate marketing is how much you can share the links with potential customers, in essence, people who need and know the value of the product. There is no point in sharing a link of a keyword research tool to friends on social media who have no knowledge about digital marketing.

A blog will help you to advertise your affiliate products with people that are interested in your niche. Meanwhile, with a blog, your market is now bigger than your social media friend and relative, and every internet user is a potential customer. Moreover, you can leverage amazing content to drive traffic to your affiliate products. A blog can also be used to review as many products as possible so far they offer the same benefits. For example, you can review 10 detox teas from different brands stating their pros, cons, and differences with the affiliate link of each included.

These reasons and some others have caused bloggers to add affiliate marketing to their blog, and some small business has begun to use their website to share affiliate links. Meanwhile, it doesn’t have to be a blog, a YouTube channel can yield more result. Research shows that videos and images go a long way in convincing people than long-text articles.

The only challenge to this strategy is that it doesn’t produce quick income as expected. And you may have to go through the process of search engine optimization, and backlinks generation to get enough traffic on your website. However, you can’t predict how much you can generate the moment your blog gets enough traffic. Then, income generation will remain passive so far the blog post is not deleted and the domain name is available on the internet.

3. Email marketing

Email marketing is another part of digital marketing, but can also bring many profits if applied to affiliate marketing. Email marketing is the act of sending promotions, business updates, and commercial messages in general to a group of people. It is a better alternative to television advertisement because it offers a bigger ROI (return on marketing investment).

Companies and small businesses make use of this strategy to promote their product and to make more awareness about their business. However, the question on the ground is how can affiliate marketer make use of email marketing to get more sales?

Email marketing requires that a publisher build an email list of people who are interested in their niche. Then, they will begin to mail them using email marketing software also known as auto-responder like Aweber. The content of the mail can be an introduction or short review of the products, promotions like discounts and other interesting stories. However, a publisher should be very careful in the creation of the content so as not to make them bored or sound too obsessed about making profits.

More caution should be taken in building a list. As stated earlier the email list must contain people who are interested in your products. An email list is best collated from your blog or YouTube channel subscribers because these are people who love what you are offering.

However, some affiliates do buy an email list or hire a freelancer to send a message to their list which is not always effective. Using another person list may not bring about a high conversion rate because you are not sure of the category of people on the list. Imagine, advertising a product for baby mothers to a man. Such a person may eventually sign out of the blog or tag your mail as spam.

4. Be dynamic in your advertisement

Your success in affiliate marketing depends on how well you can maximize all internet advertisement medium to your advantage. There are other means you can reach out to potential customers apart from blogging and email marketing. Have you thought of guest postings? By using a guest post, you are converting fellow blogger subscribers to your buyers. This guest posting can be an article related to the product or reviews. And then, you can strategically place the link under a text within the content.

Social media is another platform you can leverage. Although there is no guarantee of a high conversion rate, you can use them to create product awareness. Meanwhile, you can increase the conversion rate by targeting some groups of people through the use of tags or posting on group pages. However, an affiliate must be careful in doing this to prevent his account from being banned as some social media frown at too many affiliate links on their platform. Meanwhile, some social media users may not want to go through the advertisement content once they sight an affiliate link. Therefore, you should make use of tools like Bitly to make the links look good and informative.

Don’t forget that you can also use ads to promote your affiliate link. Google ads and YouTube ads are also at your disposal. You can also opt-in for banner adverts on third party sites. Always remember that the best way to overcome competitors is by being a step ahead of them.

5. Don’t be scared to try new things out

Being a step ahead of your competitors demand your uniqueness and the courage to experiment new thing. Affiliate marketing is unlike other digital marketing with strict rules and there is no restriction on how you promote your products. Therefore, the affiliate also known as a publisher should see this opportunity as a means to explore and develop a new strategy.

Also, affiliate marketers should always engage in regular tracking of results to know what is working and to cut away that which is not working. This analysis can be done by search engine analytic tools that are available on the internet.

Affiliate Marketing Series

Affiliate Marketing 101: What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing 102: Best Affiliate Programs In 2020

Affiliate Marketing 104: 7 Unforgivable Mistakes Every Affiliate Marketer Should Avoid

Affiliate marketing 105: A Complete Guide to ShareASale Affiliate Program Mastery

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are ‘affiliate links.’ This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no additional cost to you.