Art of Promoting an Affiliate Product On Your Blog

It’s fine to read about the secrets of Affiliate marketing, but let’s get serious. One of these days you’re going to have to implement what you have learned & start promoting the product. Now, it’s time to get into action mode & learn the art of promoting a product on your blog.

Do remember, there are other ways of promotions like PPC marketing, Email marketing. For now, I will be focusing on promoting via blogs, and later on you can use email marketing or PPC to quadrapulate your earning.
 

At the end of this chapter, I will also be sharing one mistake which many innocent affiliate marketers are making, even though it’s easy to fix.

Affiliate marketing tips to promote Affiliate products:
 

Review post:
Nothing beats better than a killer review post about the product. A review article introduces the product to your blog readers, and at the same time your opinion, guides will help them to understand, why they should be buying it. There are few things that you should always remember, when writing a review post for your
 

affiliate product:

◉ Review should be honest. Most of the time, people just focus on pros of the product and ignore to mention about downside of it. An honest review should show both the side of the coins. Don't forget to add product images, and give all useful information.
◉ Write a review in a personal tone, as people look for a personal recommendation on review articles.
◉ Pick a product that you are more likely to use for yourself.
◉ Take advantage of star-rating in search engines to get more CTR for your review articles. You can use Author hReview plugin to add star-rating on your blog post. Your results in SERP's will look like below image.

What is Niche affiliate product?

A niche affiliate product means; product based on your blog topics and your blog readers. Suppose you write a blog on health niche, you will be promoting a product related to the niche of your blog. My advice for you is to select the hot-selling product in your niche and start writing about it. It will help you to boost your conversion rate. The difference between successful and failed affiliate campaign is determined by its conversion rate. If you are getting 100 odd clicks on your affiliate campaign but 0 or 1 conversion rate, you need to start over with your strategy.
 

Now something important about selecting an affiliate product is, try before your refer. It is the most common mistake done by any blogger. I have seen blogger referring high-end products without even using it. Personally, I recommend you to not do that. Will you ever believe in any such review? At least I will not. Giving an honest review will increase your credibility and reliability. Now getting to the point. Now suppose you have selected a product, make sure you read its TOS.

I suggest you to either signup for a free-trial if it's available, or ask the product owner to give you a review piece. In worse case scenario, you can buy and use the product to come up with an excellent review.
 

Note: 60% of my affiliate sale comes from review & tutorial related to product. When you signing up for any affiliate program, here are factors that you should look at:

◉ Available Banners
◉ Promotional matters
◉ Affiliate control panel
◉ Minimum Payout
◉ Payment method
◉ Tax form required or not

Such things will help you to decide if you are ready to promote this stuff or now. Suppose you select a seasonal product, and its minimum payout is 1000$. Are you sure, you are going to get that much conversion in that particular season?
 

Bonus tip: Associating with famous brand will be added advantage to your affiliate marketing campaign.

How to Select Best Affiliate Product for Your Blog

To be a successful affiliate marketer, you need to pick, and promote the right product on your blog. 76% of newbie affiliate marketers’ fails to earn from affiliate marketing because they never pick the right product to promote.

Getting success in affiliate marketing is not easy, but it's not hard too. You need to be persistent, consistent and have a proper marketing plan to be successful in affiliate marketing.
 

For example, what affiliate products you are selecting, what medium you are using to promote it. I always select product that I use for my day-to-day blogging, and write tutorials, guides, which also helps in promoting the product I'm pitching. We have already talked about how to start with affiliate marketing and affiliate marketing vs. AdSense before. In this guide, I will share some tricks that I follow to choose the right affiliate product to promote.

Start with Affiliate Marketplace:
The best place to start hunting for affiliate products is marketplace like Clickbank, ShareASale, Commission Junction (CJ). Now depending upon your niche, you can find best of the affiliate products to promote. For niche marketer, CJ, and Clickbank, are highly recommended. Start joining hottest paying affiliate product in your niche from these marketplaces. Here is a screenshot of ShareASale, where I can see there top 100 affiliate programs, and join them:

What you Need to Get started with Affiliate marketing

I have shared all important topics below to become a master of affiliate marketing, but first lets take those baby steps which will help you to get the basics right.

Promotion Channel:
I would have talked first about product, but realize it’s more important to talk about promotion channel first. You can promote any product on various platforms like Google, Facebook and etc. What I prefer is and suggest to other; User blog for affiliate marketing. Promoting a product on your own blog will help you to keep earning in longer run, and more over you can earn more money from your blog using various other methods. It’s a good idea to learn about other techniques as I mentioned above, but blog should definitely be a part of your promotion channel. I have shared a link at the end for you to understand how you can use for promoting an affiliate product.

Picking the right product and marketplace:
If you are one who likes to give value; I suggest you to pick a product that you personal use or want to use. If not, you can always be a good critic and try product to share your review and opinion. Most of the product in online market have affiliate link associated with it. It can be any eBook, cheap web hosting and more. Make sure you select the best product based on your niche. Else you might get 1000+ clicks but your conversion rates will be 0%. Here is a useful guide to learn how to pick good affiliate products for your blog.

Sales pitch
For selling any product, you need to create a sales pitch. The sales pitch can be in the form of a blog post or can be a static web page. Many companies provide you with a product-landing page. Creating a sales pitch in simple words, you need to make your readers aware of what are they getting with their investment. The things which you need to keep in mind before selecting your product is, who is
going to be your target audience, do you have any current target audience related to same product, or you have to start from scratch. In both the cases your strategy will be different.

Can you have Amazon Affiliate And AdSense on same Page:

Let me take an example of Amazon affiliate ads, as they are one of the popular affiliate program. You can replace it by anything like eBay, hosting affiliate or other affiliate programs you can think of.
 

Answer is "Yes" you can place Affiliate ads along with AdSense ads on the same page, and this doesn't violate AdSense policies. Here is a screenshot from official AdSense help page, which clearly says: "We do allow affiliate or limited-text links."

To add more to it, here is what you need to know to use any other ad network with AdSense. In simple words, Affiliate ad is also considered as different ad network here. Here is an excerpt from official AdSense help page:

Before you jump with joy and start adding tons of affiliate banner ads and link ads on your blog, here are few important things that you should know.

◉ If number of ads or affiliate banner/links is more than the original content, this will put your AdSense account in danger. So limit the number of ads on your blog, and focus on adding value and quality of your website. I suggest you to keep an optimum limit of Ads on your blog, and place it in a way which doesn't hamper user-experience on your website.

◉ Your affiliate ads should not link to content which are not allowed in AdSense policies. Ex: Adult content. AdSense treats other ads (Ads from other ad network or affiliate ads) on a page as part of the content, and it should follow their content guidelines.

◉ While using Affiliate links on your blog, make sure they are No-follow. This has nothing to do with AdSense, but using Nofollow tag is a good practice from SEO point of view. You can use this guide to learn how to add nofollow tag or better use Gocodes WordPress plugin.

Affiliate or AdSense: Which is Good?

By far you have learned about affiliate marketing basics, Glossary of affiliate marketing & important elements of an affiliate program. If you are an old blogger who is already monetizing your blog with AdSense, you must be having this
 

question:
Should I continue using AdSense or remove it all together?

At vsrlinks.com I don’t use any AdSense ads & on few of my blogs such as Letstalkrelations.com I use AdSense + Affiliate products. In my personal opinion, AdSense is good only when you are running a multi-niche blog. If there is a relevant product to your niche blog, Affiliate marketing can do wonders for you.

Whenever we start with Affiliate marketing, the very first question that comes into our mind is Affiliate or AdSense? And this is a trap question, as you might be in the stage like me (professional blogging), where you can't play with your recurring income and you can't even afford to miss trying affiliate marketing, where real money is.

In this chapter, I'm going to share some of my experiences, and you can decide which is right for you: AdSense or Affiliate.
Now, talking about my model: I use Affiliate marketing banners + AdSense + Direct advertisements to monetize my blog. People have a most common misconception that Google is against affiliate marketing and which is not true. Google says, keep the affiliate link but on a quality blog. If you write sneaky and low-quality content and put ten affiliate links, that will affect your website search engine ranking.

Things to know: AdSense vs. Affiliate Marketing:
◉ It's easier to get into Affiliate network than AdSense
◉ Affiliate Marketing pays higher than AdSense
◉ Most of the affiliate companies offer PayPal as payment method, whereas AdSense doesn't.

Features that should be present in an Affiliate Program

In past 6 & half years, I have been an affiliate with almost 67+ direct affiliate programs and everyone is different in their own way. Different in the terms affiliate policies, payouts and their affinity towards affiliates like you & me. Especially when you are joining a new affiliate program, you should look for certain features. Here I’m highlighting those features which are important & If few of them are not available, I ended up not signing for it. Let’s have a look at what are those options:

Payment option:

This is the very first option I want to discuss, because I know I have skipped many affiliate program due to lack of PayPal payment option. Especially in India, where the best possible way to get money from offshore companies is via PayPal, I would love to see PayPal as one must have payout method. Apart from PayPal, cheque is another option that is good.
 

Update: These days most of the companies including CJ.com, ShareASale offers
direct bank deposit.
 

Single product Affiliate link: (Deep linking)

Imagine you sign up for an affiliate program with a WordPress theme club and you can’t find a direct affiliate link to individual product, how annoying this could be for you. It’s very important for every affiliate program or product to offer individual link to their product. If possible buyer lands on homepage instead of product sales page, most likely he will skip and move to somewhere else. Do you wish to lose a sale just because of one important feature?

Custom link option:

Following up from my above point, obviously price page will not be considered as an affiliate product page but to showcase the product, you might like to link to price page. A direct link? Well boy, you might be going to lose some sales here. How about an option to create a custom link for any page using your affiliate URL. This feature is something which elegant Theme affiliate program offers.

Custom Discount coupon code:

Discount coupon codes is one of the best method to promote any product, as it encourages sales. Most of the affiliate programs, especially hosting affiliates, offer discount coupons. However, how about option to create your own brand discount coupon. For example, I created custom coupon codes: VSR30 for Hostgator Hosting which helps me to get about $520/month as an extra affiliate sales. (I have shared the tricks of generating affiliate sales via coupon below). Apart from offering discount, such coupon codes helps in branding. Very few affiliate product offers an option to create custom discount coupon. Such option will be useful for an affiliate marketer like us. Don’t you feel the same?

Email updates:

So now you are a part of one of the top selling product as an affiliate promoter and  they are running a great deal of offer which one can’t refuse. But they don’t send Email updates and being an affiliate, you get to know about this offer when 10 other blogger have already written about it or by the time when offers is coming to an end. Make sure you are subscribed to the product affiliate newsletter or ping the affiliate manager to add you in the email list. Alternatively, you should also subscribe to product updates, FB page, Twitter page or what ever way you can stay updated with latest happening about the product.

A Glossary of Affiliate Marketing Terms

Affiliates: Publisher like you and me who are using affiliate program links to
promote and make the sale.

◉ Affiliate marketplace: There are many marketplaces like ShareASale, CJ (Commission Junction), Clickbank, which works as central database for affiliate programs in different niche.

◉ Affiliate software: Software's used by companies to create an affiliate program for their product. Ex: iDevaffiliate.

◉ Affiliate link: Special tracking link offered by your affiliate program to track the progress of your affiliate promotion.

◉ Affiliate ID: This is Similar to Affiliate link, but, in this case, many affiliate programs offer a unique ID, which you can add to any page of the product site with “XYZ” affiliate ID.

◉ Payment mode: Different affiliate program offers a different method of payment. For ex: Cheque, Wire transfer, PayPal and many more.

◉ Affiliate Manager: Many companies have dedicated affiliate manager to help publishers and make them earn more and give them optimization tips.

◉ Commission percentage/amount: The amount or percentage of sales amount you will be getting after every sale happened via your affiliate link.

◉ 2 Tier affiliate marketing: This is a great way of making money from an affiliate program. In this, you recommend others to join affiliate programs, and you will get a commission out of it, when sub-affiliate make sales. More like MLM (Multi-level) marketing. Also popularly known as Sub-affiliate Commission.

◉ Landing pages: A unique product sales or demo page to increase the sales. Most of the programs that you will be promoting, they have many landing pages, and you can run A/B testing to see which converts more for you.

What is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest form of marketing, where you refer someone to any online product. When a person buys the product based on your recommendation; you will get a commission out of the sale amount. This commission amount varies from $1 to $10000, depending on what product you are promoting and recommending.

The most common question is: How companies track the record of who is sending the traffic and who is making sales. The simple answer is tracking URL, which is a unique link given to you by the affiliate company or the product company. This unique tracking link is used to keep a track of all the traffic and sales you are making via your Website or other promotion techniques.

Tip: Many old fashioned Affiliate programs, let a buyer add the Email or referral details, which is also accounted for affiliate sales, but certainly not the best way to track progress.

So, in simple words:

Many online companies which sales product like Shoes, Webhosting space or any online service offers an affiliate program. You can go ahead and sign up for their affiliate program (It’s free to join) and get your unique tracking link. Now, whenever you are writing about the product, you can simply use special tracking affiliate link to recommend the company’s site, and if your readers buy anything, you will get a commission out of it.
 

Note: I have shared tricks to find these affiliate programs later in this eBook. Every affiliate programs have their set of Terms of Standards (TOS), for example, many of them offer 60 days cookie period, that means, if a visitor uses your special affiliate link to land on sales page of the site and instead of buying today, he buys the product within next 60 days on the same laptop, you will be earning the affiliate commission.
 

Another interesting thing to know is: You will get paid for the other products purchases. For example, if your reader go to Amazon.com using your affiliate link & he purchases some other product which you haven’t recommended, you will still get commission out of it. This is one major reason, that makes affiliate marketing so lucrative & beneficial.

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