You dive into the affiliate marketing world and realize it is a great field to start side hustles. But you do not know how to maximize the earnings from this field.
Well, you are not alone.
Many starters in affiliate marketing are in the same feeling.
Don’t worry; this article will help you boost your affiliate marketing performance with the best affiliate marketing tips.
Here you will find the fundamental information on affiliate marketing and the top 19+ affiliate marketing tips and tricks. Let’s check it now!
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is an online money-making method where affiliates earn by promoting another individual or company’s product. Like dropshipping or POD, affiliates do not need physical products to start in this field.
Can you imagine the market size of the affiliate marketing industry? It’s $17 billion in 2023! An impressive number, right?
The income of affiliates varies, depending on their niches and capabilities. Some creators can earn more than $150,000 annually. So, do not miss out on this lucrative industry!
How does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Now, we know the affiliate marketing market’s size and potential. But how does it work exactly?
Well, it is a three-party model with the participation of the merchants, the affiliates, and the customers.
The merchants, who want to reach more audiences and sell more products or services, will run affiliate programs. They provide the products or services to promote and the affiliate links in such programs. When sales happen, they pay affiliates.
The affiliates will join the programs and get the links for introducing products and services to their community. When a customer makes a purchase, they earn a relevant commission. Their duty here is to create engaging content to attract and persuade their audience to click and buy.
The customers are the people making the sales happen. They consume creators’ content, click on the affiliate links, and get their desired products. This process helps the merchants to increase sales, and the affiliates to get more commissions.
So, how can you earn a lot from affiliate marketing programs as an affiliate? Come to our next part and see the best tips for affiliate marketing!
19+ Affiliate Marketing Tips & Strategies to Boost Income
You might have wondered how to be successful in affiliate marketing more than once. Here you will see valuable tips for affiliate marketing.
Now, let’s go through them one by one.
Gain Audience Trust
Why is gaining audience trust important?
It helps you to have a loyal audience who will make frequent purchases via your introduction and affiliate links. In other words, gaining audience trust means obtaining a more engaged community and sales.
But how to make it?
First, you should join affiliate programs of companies with the same niche as you. Their products or services will be relevant to your site or channel.
Next, create engaging and useful content to make your audience interested and believe in your communication. You can also comment with your readers or viewers to build good relationships.
Then, don’t forget to attach an affiliate disclosure on your site. It makes things transparent to your audience, helping you to get their trust.
Visit Hawaii is a travel blog from Sheila and Andy. They join travel affiliate programs and promote travel services and related products.
They produce detailed articles on guiding many activities related to traveling to Hawaii, such as how to pick the best Hawaiian islands, choose the best flights to Hawaii, choose the best places to stay and dine, etc. Their audience stays with them because of their useful information, book services, or buy products via their affiliate links.
Research & Understand Products You Promote
When you thoroughly understand the products, your opinions will be more comprehensive and persuasive. Being an expert in the niche and you will get more sales.
Think about it.
You introduce a product to your audience but only write about its features and manufacturer. It’s so boring, right?
The reader can easily find such information on the selling website without effort.
But wait. If you do extensive research on that product and understand it clearly, you will serve better content. You can let the audience know its pros and cons, in-depth reviews on key features, and comparisons with similar ones.
Such knowledge will make your audience more satisfied. It also means driving more sales to your site.
Diversify your affiliate portfolio
Now, come to the diversification tip. It is one of the affiliate marketing basics you need to know.
Putting all your eggs in one basket is not a wise choice. It’s full of risks!
Instead, you should join more affiliate programs and have various partners in your niche. When one has problems, your affiliate marketing business can still move forward with others.
Here you can see:
If you focus on the travel niche and you only affiliate with Tripadvisor, someday, the brand will close its affiliate program, and you will come to an end, too.
But if you diversify your partners, join Travelpayouts, Expedia, Booking.com affiliate schemes, etc., their closure cannot affect you.
Decide on Distribution Tactics
Distribution tactics should be an essential part of your affiliate marketing strategy. It relates to the platforms where you deliver your content with affiliate links to your audience.
A good distribution strategy should result from deep research on customers and the market. Do you want to know how it works?
Let’s start with questions like:
- Where are your potential customers available?
- Do they prefer to read blog posts, or do they tend to watch Youtube videos?
- Do they want to browse pictures of the products?
Creating a travel blog or Youtube channel seems a good option if you do affiliate marketing in the travel niche. However, if you promote home decoration pieces, uploading nice pictures of the products on Instagram can help.
Join Affiliate Program with Recurring Commission
Do you want to promote one product bringing you a commission every month? Sounds interesting, huh?
Participating in affiliate programs that have recurring commissions can help you do that. The brands here keep paying you when clients still use their products. Some examples of the programs are the ClickFunnels affiliate program and the BoldLeads affiliate program.
Where can you find such programs?
You can easily get them by browsing networks or marketplaces like UpPromote. Here you will see the fundamental information about the affiliate programs, too.
Disclose Affiliate Links Appropriately in Different Formats & Content Types
In the affiliate marketing industry, success doesn’t come from simply dropping a link anywhere on your blog and waiting for purchases to happen. So what to do here?
Sure, you should put links in different formats and content types. Of course, it must be proper and natural.
Here’re some examples of article types to insert your affiliate links:
- Product reviews
- Top lists
- Comparisons
- How-to’s
Depending on the niche, the products, and the content, you should choose the right places to make the affiliate links effective.
Use Email to Build Trust with Audiences
Regarding an affiliate marketing guide, we always recommend email marketing as one of the most helpful affiliate marketing tips.
You may wonder why?
When you make an email list and contact your audience frequently, you can have lots of benefits like:
- Building trust with your audience: direct communication via email in a personalized way can increase audience engagement
- Increase affiliate income: you can properly insert affiliate links in your email content and turn your email followers into paying customers.
- Generate more leads to your site: introducing new content via email is also a nice way to get more web traffic, right?
So, how to build an email community?
You can start by sharing a free template or ebook on your site, then request to fill in the information to receive it. For instance, if you operate your travel blog, you can make a free ebook on guiding how to explore the magnificent mountains in the world.
Don’t forget to use email marketing apps like MailChimp or Klaviyo to send emails to your lists. They will help a lot in an email marketing strategy.
Write Product Review Comparisons & Recommendations
One of the affiliate marketing tips for beginners is creating comparisons and recommendations when writing product reviews. Do you know why?
People prefer this type of content when finding information about their targeted product. Also, this content will help them to make their buying decision. So, you can boost your sales by creating reviewing articles with comparisons and recommendations.
The website Runblogger is a member of the Amazon affiliate program focusing on promoting shoes. Here, Pete Larson, its owner, creates comparisons between shoes like Hoka Huaka Running Shoe vs. Hoka Clifton or Saucony Virrata vs. Saucony Kinvara 3. After comparisons, he also picks the winner from your point of view for the reader’s reference.
Use TikTok to Build A Large Audience
Have you known the huge number of users of TikTok?
It has up to 1.06 billion active users in 2023, making it one of the most famous social media platforms.
So, using TikTok to build a large audience is one of the affiliate marketing strategies for beginners. It’s especially true if your targeted market falls into countries with numerous Tiktok users like the US, Indonesia, Brazil, etc.
You can create funny and attractive videos to catch your audience’s attention. Then, they will visit your profile, where you put links in the bio. The links can lead them directly to your brand’s website or other channels, depending on your strategies.
Remember that you will need to upgrade your personal account to a business account to place a clickable link in your TikTok profile.
Besides, you can refer to third-parties tools like Linktree or Beacons to create a bio link. When users tap on the URL, it will lead to a page with all of your affiliate links.
Here’s an example:
Create an Instagram affiliate account
Instagram launched its affiliate scheme in June 2021, allowing creators to earn money from product tags in their posts or stories. Unfortunately, this scheme has ended since August 2022.
However, Instagram is still a platform where you can build your audience via beautiful images. Following the niches that require nice pictures to attract people will be advantageous.
For instance, you promote home decoration items on Etsy. You can build your Instagram account as an expert in decoration with many pictures on different nice home corners.
On Instagram, you can’t put the links directly in your content. Tagging affiliate products is now impossible due to the end of its related policy. So, you can only use the bio link, created with the tools like Linktree, to do affiliate marketing.
Run Facebook Ads for More Targeted Audiences
Do you know which social media platform has the biggest number of users? Yes, it is Facebook, with 2,958 million monthly active users.
So, do not miss out on this platform when performing your affiliate marketing strategy. Using Facebook ads will help you to reach more audiences.
When setting your ads, Facebook allows you to adjust the characteristics of targeted users like gender, age, hobbies, etc. You can set the basics first, then optimize more while running the ad campaign.
For instance, if you join the Amazon affiliate program and promote shoes for middle-aged women, you can set the ad distributing location as the United States, the targeted audience’s attributes as 35-60 years old, etc.
Use Affiliate Dashboard & Apps
One of the best affiliate marketing tips is using affiliate dashboards and apps. They will serve as a nice tool for your affiliate marketing management.
You can choose UpPromote as your tool. It is one of the top-recommended apps on Shopify for both affiliates and businesses.
Here you can track your affiliate marketing results like pending or approved commissions. You will also get promotional materials and marketing tools. Also, UpPromote provides you with analytics to check your performance and improve it.
Track Which Links Bringing the Most Commissions
Have you tracked your affiliate links during your work? If not, you should take this matter into account.
Tracking which links bring the most commissions will let you know which performs well and which does not. This helps you understand where the buying points of your audience are. With such data, you can optimize your links and increase its performance.
Let’s take a simple example:
You write an article on TripAdvisor’s booking service and put three affiliate links in your content. The first works well, and the second does not. Try to analyze why the first make it, what’s content here, or what persuades users to make purchases here. Then, you can apply such experience to other posts with affiliate links.
Besides, you can also track where your leads are from if you use UpPromote. To enjoy this feature, follow these steps:
- Click “Get link with source” on the dashboard interface
- Fill in the source, e.i: Facebook or Twitter
- Click “Generate”
- Click “Copy & save”
You can create as many links as you want, depending on your sources. This will help you to know which platform brings you the most data and conversions.
Monitor Your Affiliate Program Regularly
Monitoring your affiliate program is crucial whether you have just started your affiliate campaign or run it for a long time. It’s one of the important affiliate marketing tips we emphasize here.
How can you keep an eye on it?
Here, an affiliate dashboard can help. You can check the dashboard’s clicks, conversion rates, or total incomes. The data help you to overview your performance and identify potential problems of your campaigns.
For example, you are promoting Luxi’s products. When observing the UpPromote affiliate dashboard, you can see that your links have many clicks but a very low conversion rate. With these statistics, you can improve the rate by rechecking your chosen products, relevant content, etc.
Master Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
Pay-per-click programs can bring you a lot of money. So, learning how to master them is worth trying.
When joining pay-per-click campaigns, you do not need to persuade anyone to buy products or book services. Just focus on attracting the audience to click on the links.
Thus, you should study some copywriting skills to make effective ad copy. Also, target the right keywords or audience and measure your campaigns regularly.
Do you know where to learn to create better ad copy?
Simply starting by Meta Blueprint or Google Ads Help. They provide basic but helpful tips on their platforms. Then, you can think of reading blogs on copywriting or participating in related courses.
Network with top-tier affiliates in your niche
Top-tier affiliates are the ones with the best results and highest income. Finding and networking with them will bring you potential benefits, e.i. learning from their affiliate marketing strategies.
How can you connect with them?
Well, you can write emails to them or comment on their blogs. Furthermore, you can join the events where they appear and interact with them via Q&A questions, etc.
Anyway, contacting and learning from them is one of the tips for affiliate marketing!
Stay Updated With Affiliate Marketing Trends
Are you an up-to-date person keeping alert to trends? You should be in the affiliate marketing field. Staying updated with affiliate marketing trends allows you to define new chances and make better content to boost your income.
You can make it by keeping your eyes on blogs related to your niche, joining relevant affiliate marketing forums, or researching affiliate programs regularly. For example, you can join AffiliateFix and dive into thoughtful discussions in the affiliate sector.
Be Aware Of Affiliate Marketing Scams
Affiliate marketing scams can harm your affiliate marketing career. So, being aware of them and avoiding them are necessary.
When diving into the affiliate marketing industry, you may face scams such as cookie stuffing, fake products, get-rich-quick schemes, spoof traffic, etc.
As an affiliate, to avoid affiliate marketing scams, you can try the following tips:
- Check the terms and conditions of the program
- Search for the company on Google
- Try the customer support service of the company
- Check the anti-fraud policy of the company
Run seasonal marketing campaigns
Taking advantage of the peak time in the year is always one of the best affiliate marketing tips. You can boost your sales and income by running seasonal marketing campaigns.
Brands tend to offer various deals and promotions on Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, or Black Friday. So, do not forget to utilize such days to increase your affiliate conversions.
For example, if you do affiliate marketing in the shoe niche, you can push your ads or emails during Black Friday to alert your audience of the promotions of shoe brands. They will click the links in your ads or emails and buy their beloved products at a discounted price.
Don’t Stop at Only One Affiliate Program
Now, come to the last one in the list of affiliate marketing tips – don’t stop at only one affiliate program.
Of course, why do you only join one program? Nobody prohibits you from participating many at the same time.
Remember that don’t go too far from your niche or confuse your audience. And feel free to choose different affiliate programs to join.
You are doing affiliate marketing in the travel niche, right? You can take part in travel services affiliate programs, travel product programs, travel insurance programs, etc. It’s your choice here!
FAQ
Is affiliate marketing easy for beginners?
Can you perform affiliate marketing without showing your face?
Can I become an affiliate without a website?
Conclusion
Now, we have gone through affiliate marketing basics and affiliate marketing tips. Have you understood them well?
What tips will you try first? Will you use email marketing to build affiliate-audience relationships? Or do you study more to master pay-per-click programs?
Either way, we hope you will succeed with our best tips for affiliate marketing!
