Here at ShoutMeLoud, I keep sharing various ways, which you can use to earn money from your blog. One of the most effective way is Affiliate marketing. In Affiliate marketing, you pick a related product to your blog niche,create product awareness, and when somebody buys product using your affiliate link, you get a referral commission out of it. In case if you are complete newbie to affiliate marketing, here are articles that will give you all the information’s you need to get started.
If you already referred to above articles, let’s get on with some promotion tips for affiliate program you have joined. Do remember, there are other ways of promotions like PPC marketing, Email marketing. But, In this article I will be sharing tips that I use on my blog, which helps me to improve my affiliate conversion. I will also be sharing one mistake at the end, which most of the affiliate marketers are making.
Affiliate marketing tips to promote Affiliate products:
Review post:
Nothing beats better than a killer review post about the product. A review article introduce 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 which 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 review in personal tone, as people look for 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 to 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.
Blog post promotion:
Another way is by using affiliate links within your blog post. For this, you should always write targeted-post. For example, when you are writing about How to select best hosting for WordPress blog, you can add a line at the end saying: I recommend Particular hosting for WordPress blog. (your Affiliate link).
How-to articles:
A DIY kind of articles always work great for affiliate product promotion. If your product is technical, or need instructions to use it, you can write a tutorial guide for the same. Here are few examples, for better understanding:
- How to use EasyWPSEO WordPress plugin
- How to add additional domain to your Hostgator hosting
Such tutorials are not only handy, but it will also help you to improve your search engine ranking. “How To” articles always perform really great in search engines.
Use Coupon Codes:
Believe it or not, money-saving is always the biggest marketing gimmick. They are almost same as “Free”. When ever a customer is buying a product, and he sees a coupon box, he searches for “Product Name + coupon”, and , with coupon code, you can always get a good commission for the sale. Do remember, your goal as an affiliate marketer is just not to share the coupon, but to make the customer click your affiliate link, else the sale will not be counted yours. ( There are exception for certain Affiliate programs, where coupons are considered as sale). You can consider writing a monthly blog post for coupon codes (Ex: Web hosting coupon codes for September 2013), and so on.
If you will notice on various coupon sites, they will always ask you to “Click to view coupon”, “Click to go on merchant site” and so on. The reason for this is to drop the cookie. Here is an image for the reference:
Use Featured post :
Be it a review post or be it a coupon code post, your goal is to get more views on these posts. Apart from On-page SEO, you should give more visibility to such post by placing it as a featured post. This is a handy feature of WordPress, where you can stick any blog post on your blog homepage. Here is how you can do it:
In the edit post section, click on Visibility and put a check mark on “Stick this post to the front page”. I have tried this with few pillar posts at ShoutMeLoud, and it helped me a lot to jump my reader base.
Use Banners on the sidebar
When you are getting targeted organic traffic to your blog, banner advertisements work great. For me, a great part of conversion comes from Banner clicks. A prominent banner placement is a great idea. One of the mistake which we usually do is, add too many banners, and it confuses the reader. Just follow one thumb of the rule:
Never place similar products banner on your sidebar : Banner ads work as a recommended product, and with multiple similar product, you are confusing your readers to decide which product to buy. A good idea is to place different related products to a niche. For example, a WordPress tips blog can place banner ad for : Themes, Plugins, Hosting, Services and so on.
If your blog is in multi-niche, you should consider using Adrotate plugin for your ad management. This plugin will help you to show ads based on category, geographical location, and you can run A/B testing of different banners.
Bonus Tip: Link out to website directly, instead of your review post : One of the biggest mistake most of affiliate marketers are making is, they try to link to their review post, or internal post. This is wrong because, a product landing page is always optimized for higher conversion, and needless to say it will be better than your own review post. From last one year, I started linking out directly to product landing page, instead of my review post, and this sky-rocket the conversions.
Do let me know if you follow any other tip on your blog to improve Affiliate conversions? If you enjoy this article, don’t forget to share it on Facebook & Google plus.
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