For bloggers and content creators, one of the proven ways to monetize online activities is through affiliate marketing. This involves promoting products from other sites on your blog. Once your audience purchases a product through a direct link in your content, you will then get a commission.
Affiliate marketing can be a way of earning passive income. However, given the right attention, it can become a source of full-time income as well.
But first…
What Are “The Best” Affiliate Programs?
What are actually the best affiliate products and programs? Well, they have a few features that can translate into a regular stream of income for your blog. These include:
- You will be offered a clear and well defined commission structure which shows how much commission you can earn after fulfilling certain requirements.
- You will have access to the payment structure which explains how you will receive your commissions after having earned them.
- You will be provided access to analytics and data, which you will use to analyze your sales allowing you to make necessary changes to improve your commission.
- You will have access to many links, promotions and banners as well as special offers. All these will help your blog achieve its end goals which is boosting traffic and conversions.
- You will have access to a variety of affiliate programs and products allowing you to choose the most suitable products for your blog and audience.
- You will be provided support and guidance as an affiliate since you’re just starting out. This allows you to get started fast, and will help you avoid any future issues.
Tips For Finding The Top Affiliate Programs
1. Choose Products That You Love
The first tip to finding the best products to promote on your blog is to choose products that you would actually use. This prevents the process from feeling like a task.
Begin by purchasing the product yourself and finding out as much as you can about it. What is its level of quality? How effective is it? Does it fulfill the objective you bought it for?
Go online and learn about similar products. When you get down to promoting the product, you will be able to provide your readers with firsthand information and experience. This way, they are more likely to trust you as they can tell that the information is genuine.
2. Choose Products In Your Niche
This is something that many bloggers take for granted, but it is crucial if you want to be successful in affiliate marketing. For instance, if your blog is about dogs, then it would only be natural to promote pet products.
This means that readers would find you knowledgeable about the product at hand, and this encourages them to be more willing to trust what you have to say about it.
You can also gain success from affiliate marketing by promoting hotels that can accommodate pets, pet-friendly flights, and many more, so long as they fall within your site’s niche.
3. Promote Products From Competitors
Once you have started affiliate marketing for a product, and you notice that readers are responding positively to it, you may also want to promote other products from competitors. This way, you increase the chances of conversions.
While you may promote products from different categories, most of your readers may be interested in a specific category. In this case, it would pay to promote similar products from competitors.
4. Opt For Products That Your Readers Want
Granted that before you started your blog, you likely did your homework and learned the importance of content marketing for your audience. This is how you would continue to provide them with useful information.
This same principle should also be applied to affiliate marketing. Not only should you provide the content that your audience wants, but you should also promote the products that they want and need as well.
To understand the needs of your customers, you can reach out to your current customer base and ask questions about what they require.
Secondly, you can also study their buying patterns and find out what they are more likely to buy.
Finally, go to social media and read customer comments. You will get a clear picture of the problems they are facing. From here, you can find and promote products that will solve their issues.
5. Find Out About Commissions
This is one that confuses many content creators. Naturally, you would want to go for products with high commission rates. However, keep in mind that these could be products that are harder to move.
Often, the products with a high rate of sales will come with a low commission. Thus, don’t be surprised to earn more on a low commission product in the long run than on one with a high commission.
Again, do your homework and find out how easy it is to move certain products and just how much your readers are willing to buy them. This point goes hand in hand with finding out what your audience really wants.
6. Consider The Product Price
Bloggers will often prefer to promote lower priced products in the belief that they are easier to sell. While this is true, there are still plenty of customers who will benefit from high-cost products. If you want to optimize your income, then, high-priced products are worth considering.
Think of it this way – if you are looking to make $6000 from affiliate marketing each month, you can achieve this target by promoting $10×600, $100×60, or $1000×6. Clearly, you will reach your goals faster by selling higher priced products.
To increase the chances of making a good sum at the end of the month, a blogger may choose to promote both low-priced and high-priced products.
7. Consider Offers And Upsells
These provide the blogger with a chance to make even more cash. Upsells are where the seller may give a customer offers for extra items. If the customer chooses to buy these items, the affiliate marketer gets a commission.
A good example is when a customer buys a mobile phone; they also get a screen guard and a phone cover as part of the offer.
8. Pick Top-Quality Products
There is no denying the importance of promoting high-quality products. You want a product that will not only solve a problem, but will do so for a long period of time.
By promoting premium quality and durable products, you will create a good name for your blog. As a result, more and more customers will choose to buy products through you. This will also boost your rankings on search engines, opening up your blog to more customers.
9. Use A Supportive Vendor
More likely than not, customers who buy products through your website will have certain questions. Some of them may even be dissatisfied with these products. Because of this, it is important that the vendor is able to provide prompt and immediate support.
By referring the customer to the vendor, they could have an item replaced or their questions answered. The sooner either of these is accomplished, the better, as it is never a good idea to keep a customer waiting. The best vendors will offer support through email, phone call, or live chat.
10. Work With A Vendor Of Good Repute
It is important that you work with a vendor who has already established a good reputation with their customers. This gives you a level of assurance that business is going to run smoothly and as expected.
However, this doesn’t mean you should completely ignore new vendors as you may come across one who is providing good commissions and high-quality products.
11. Decide On The Type Of Products
Here’s another question you need to ask yourself: what type of products should you promote? Basically, products can be divided into physical products and virtual products.
While physical products are great, it is always a good idea to include virtual products as well. These include software or music. They require no packaging and shipping fees. Once the customer pays for a virtual product, they will receive a download link where they can access what they have purchased in minutes.
For the affiliate marketer, it is possible to sell over 1,000 units or copies of such products without the hassle associated with physical items.
12. Use An Affiliate Marketing Site
A simple and highly effective method of finding good affiliate products to promote is by registering to an affiliate site, such as ClickBank. They list thousands of products from various niches. But, it doesn’t end there! Such sites will also offer payment processing, thus ensuring that you receive your money on time, and with few delays.
Sometimes, the number of options may overwhelm you. A simple way to get around this is to choose products that are already receiving promotion by at least 20 other individuals. This is good proof that such products convert well.
Also, as mentioned above, it is best to diversify not only by the vendor, but also by the price of the product. Choose both higher priced and lower priced products.
Your guiding factor should be to promote products that you are not just passionate about, but those that are able to provide solutions to problems.
13. Use Google Search
One of the simplest ways to find affiliate programs and products is to do a simple google search. By searching “affiliate programs” + “your niche”, you will see a list of many different programs and products that you may want to promote.
Another way to go about the process is to type in a merchant name plus the keywords “affiliate program”. This allows you to see the products that a specific merchant has on offer.
You can then scroll down on the results while noting the affiliate programs and products that you will want to promote. You need to take care not to pick local products if you don’t plan on promoting them in their local country.
14. Utilize Affiliate Ads
Another great way of locating affiliate programs and products that pay very well is to use ads from websites similar to yours. However to do this, you will require knowledge of your competitors.
Begin by searching and creating a list of similar websites. There are two main ways that you can do this.
First off, enter the website link in SEMRush or Ahrefs and these tools will list websites that are similar to yours. You can then click on these websites and find the affiliate ads. Note that you can only do this if you have a well-established website.
Secondly, if you just published your site, you can find one website that is already established and offers similar content to yours. Then you can use the website link to find even more similar websites.
The next step is to visit the website where you will search for affiliate promotions. You can do this by finding the products and clicking on their links to locate the affiliate ID. Once you find the affiliate program or product, simply go to the website and sign up for the program.
Now you can begin promoting the program or product on your website.
Final Thoughts
Affiliate marketing can be a great source of passive income.
While it may seem difficult, there are several tips you can use to help you become successful at affiliate marketing, such as choosing products you are passionate about, choosing the right products, as well as working with a reputable vendor.
When choosing products to promote, ensure that your readers are interested in these products.
This will mean doing research and learning more about the needs of your readers to be able to offer them what they are looking for.
Also Read:
