3 Tips for Growing Your Affiliate Marketing Business
It’s no secret that affiliate marketing represents an excellent opportunity for the enterprising entrepreneur. The internet is filled with stories of fabulous success for affiliate marketers.
However, it is important to note that, just as is the case with every other sort of business venture, success with affiliate marketing comes down to establishing a strategic approach and executing that strategy consistently.
Here, then, are three tips to help you grow your business with a well-designed and implemented plan.
1. Choose Your Products Wisely
Whether you are just starting out or are a well-established affiliate marketer, the importance of choosing the right products for your program never wanes. Contrary to what may be the popular notion, choosing a product that is hot today may not be the best long-term strategy.
What is important, however, is that the products you choose are matched well with your niche audience. The more you understand your niche audience, the more likely it is that you will choose products that appeal to them.
Avangate offers this advice: “Not becoming the customer will only make your work harder and you will eventually fail. Consequently, it is important to give your product as much attention as possible and take one product at a time.”
That does not mean, of course, that you should not consider a product’s likelihood of going viral. Keeping an eye on sites like ClickBank and ShareASale can help you find promising products to promote. And sites like Buzzsumo will help you discover products that are trending on social media. YouTube can also tell you much about what people in your niche are watching and sharing.
2. Diversify Your Keywords
As an affiliate marketer, you know that SEO is an essential piece of your marketing strategy. It is, in fact, one of the best ways to grow your website traffic. Because this is the case, you must put some serious thought into your keywords.
Entrepreneur gives this word of caution: “Many site owners in affiliate marketing focus on keywords with high buyer intent. While that’s not a bad strategy, it can present some risks. First, it’s important to have keyword diversity. Relying too heavily on one or two keywords can lead to your site being penalized by search engines. So, when you’re building links, be sure to vary the anchor text.”
Once your site is penalized by a search engine, it is exceedingly difficult to recover. So, the best course is to keep search engine algorithms in mind and try to avoid gaming the system. For search engine penalties, an ounce of prevention is worth much more than a pound of cure.
In addition to simply avoiding penalties, however, keyword diversity also has the positive effect of increasing traffic to your site, so long as your keywords are chosen with care.
3. Build Out Your Traffic Sources
Generally, the more traffic sources you leverage, the stronger your affiliate program will grow. Just as a tree’s root system spreads underground to find sources of nutrients deep beneath the surface of the earth, so too, you want your traffic to originate from a rich variety of sources.
To the end of increasing your traffic, it is wise to use:
- Email marketing
- Paid advertising
- Social media marketing
- Blogging and other forms of content marketing, including podcasts, videos, and infographics
While some of these traffic sources will likely yield more results than others, it makes sense to diversify your traffic sources as much as possible within the framework of your budgetary and time constraints.
The Takeaway
Affiliate marketing can be an exciting and lucrative business, so long as you treat it as a business and build strategies that work. Choosing your products with care and diversifying your keywords and traffic sources will set you on the path to success as an affiliate marketer.
Once you begin to see the fruits of your labors, do not neglect to make payments simple and convenient for your global audience. Take a moment now to check out Payoneer’s payment solutions for affiliate marketers.