7 Steps To Optimize Your Affiliate Marketing

To succeed in affiliate marketing, you’ll need all the gears in your affiliate marketing ‘machine’ to be perfectly aligned so that the machine runs smoothly and generates sales like clockwork.

In order to reach this stage, there are a few factors that you must be aware of and make sure that they’re all optimized so that your marketing efforts yield the best results.

Getting them wrong can end in frustration and a loss of time, energy and money, so you need an effective affiliate marketing strategy.

Let’s look at an effective 7 step affiliate marketing plan to get you started in the right direction.

Formulate A Plan

If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail. Before even getting started on the content creation or buying a domain, you’ll need to assess if your niche is worth targeting.

Is it overly competitive? Are there enough products to promote? Will you be targeting long tail keywords?

You need to know your plan of attack and exactly what you’re going to do. That is your first step.

Research And Reach

The second step is research and reach. You must do a lot of research before diving into the niche. It’s fine to even spend a week or two doing thorough research.

You’ll get a feel for the niche and know just how far your reach will be. Better to be well-prepared than to get started and be unprepared.

If the niche you are in has a very small audience, your earning capacity will be limited. While you can still give it a try, it’s inevitable that you reach an income ceiling that you can’t seem to break through. So, be aware of this.

Traffic

Traffic is of paramount importance. The more targeted traffic you have, the more sales you’ll make.

So, you need to know where you’ll be driving traffic from and what you’re going to do.

Focus a huge chunk of your efforts on getting the right traffic to your web properties.

Content Creation And Marketing

No matter what affiliate product you’re promoting, there will be some type of content creation involved.

You could be writing blog posts or creating infographics or just pinning images on Pinterest – whatever the case, it is content creation and marketing.

People come online looking for information. They’re looking for content. The better and more engaging it is, the more visitors you’ll attract and retain.

Your goal should always be to help the visitor out. Avoid appearing like a rapacious marketer who only hard sells and hypes products up. It’ll just turn off most people and cost you sales.

Promoting

When you’re online, you must promote your content. Actively post your images in image sharing sites, share your videos in as many places as you can, get in front of as many crowds as you can, etc.

There are people on Pinterest who love gardening. There are also people in Facebook groups who love gardening. Let’s not forget all those people who subscribe to gardening channels on YouTube… because they love gardening.

Guess what? Most of them are not on all 3 sites. The audiences will be different. So, by promoting your content on different platforms, you’ll reach more people.

Analyzing

Analyze your traffic stats, clicks, sales, conversions, etc. Even if numbers scare you, after a while you’ll get a hang of things.

Once you understand the numbers, you’ll know how to scale your efforts and improve upon the winning strategies while ditching the poorer performing ones.

Knowing your numbers is a crucial skill to learn for any successful entrepreneur or affiliate marketer.

Rinsing And Repeating

Last but not least, find out what’s working and keep repeating your efforts. Rinse, lather and repeat.

Consistency is everything and your repeated efforts multiplied over time will result in avalanches of sales.

Follow the 7 steps above and you’ll be an affiliate marketer par excellence.

Now you have a plan, let’s look at some of the folks you will need to deal with in the world of affiliate marketing.

Who Are The 3 Types Of People Involved In Affiliate Marketing?

In your affiliate marketing journey, it’s very important to know that you’ll encounter 3 different groups of people. Knowing who they are is very important because you need to know how to deal with them.

Each group is different and poses its own type of challenges. By understanding how the different people in the groups behave, you’ll be better prepared to handle them and be in their good books.

Let’s look at the groups now.

The Publishers

The ‘publishers’ refer to affiliates just like you. These are the people who create niche sites or run YouTube channels or Facebook groups. Even the affiliates who use paid ads can be considered as publishers.

The goal of most publishers is to put out relevant content or ads that attract people who will click on their links and buy their affiliate products. The publishers are your ‘competition’ and you must watch them closely.

If you have a niche site on fishing tips, where you promote fishing-related products, the other sites that show up on the first page of the search results are your competition. They could be affiliates or actual brand name companies selling their products.

You’ll notice that there can be an overlap here because affiliates can sell their own products too. Let’s look at the next group to get a better picture.

The Advertisers

The ‘advertisers’ refer to the companies who create the products you promote. They recruit affiliates to do the selling and they also advertise on their own to boost their sales.

An affiliate who promotes other vendors’ products but also creates his/her own products to sell, now finds himself/herself in the advertisers group. Similarly, the company that’s selling fishing rods and publishes lots of fishing tips and content on it’s official blog is now a publisher too.

So, the groups can overlap. What’s important to know is that while fellow publishers can be your competition, you can also network with them to promote their products if they’re vendors too. So, now your competition has become a mutually beneficial relationship.

At the same time, the vendor whose products you were promoting, might end up ranking for a lot of keywords that you’re targeting, because their marketing is on point. So, the vendor you were trying to support, has now become your competition.

Alas, the tangled webs we weave! Generally, companies try not to compete with their affiliates. But if you notice that the one you’re supporting is posing competition for you, you’ll need to reassess your marketing strategy and see if you wish to still support them.

The Consumers

This group is without a doubt the most important of the three. The consumers are the people who come online looking for information and solutions to their problems. Most of them don’t come looking to spend money or buy stuff.

They want help. Your job as an affiliate marketer is to give them enough information to help them a little and whet their appetite for more information that will help them solve their problems faster and easier.

If you have a website on back pain, the content in your site can talk about the different causes of back pain and natural remedies that could help. However, if they wish to bring much needed relief, you can mention that the special ‘Pain Away Pulse Massager’ has been shown to help many back-pain sufferers.

Now, not only is the visitor better informed about his condition and has a choice of home remedies that he or she can try, but they have been subtly introduced to a product that brings much needed immediate relief.

What do you think they’ll do?

Soak in that Epsom salt home bath which is a home remedy… or get the pulse massager to ease their pain quickly?

Most of them will get the pulse massager. The content you provide is a vehicle that not only helps them become better informed, but also transports them through the invisible journey that they need to traverse to go from reader to buyer.

Understand the different people who are involved in this affiliate marketing circle and you will be much wiser in your marketing efforts.

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