We’ve all watched a video on a streaming service and heard the content maker say, “don’t forget guys, this video was made with the support of [company]”. This is called affiliate marketing. It is a fantastic way for content creators to earn money by promoting a product, and it can work just as well with blogging.
In fact, affiliate marketing is one of the most effective ways to ensure that your blog is consistently and reliably profitable—no matter the size of the viewership. There are, however, three interplaying factors to consider that will make affiliate marketing very effective for your blog if followed.
Finding the Right Product or Service for Your Readers
The first step is to choose the right niche, the second step is to choose the right product within that niche. Before you get right to the affiliate marketing, you need to make sure that you have a feel for:
- Who your audience is
- What you expect to be your audience in the future
- If the product or service is something that will resonate
This will ensure that whatever niche (then whatever product) you choose to market for will be most profitable for you. This can be a bit tricky, and there isn’t all the room in the world to feel things out for a while.
Luckily, there are some services online that you can use to dig deeper. These will find what has been the top niche for affiliates. They can even discover what has been garnering the most pay for affiliates within a particular niche.
Luckily, there are some services online that you can use to dig deeper. These will find what has been the top niche for affiliates. They can even discover what has been garnering the most pay for affiliates within a particular niche.
Spyfu
Spyfu is a great tool to start with because it helps you find a profitable niche to look for more companies within a particular topic. It will tell you how much advertisers are paying in a particular industry. Once you have ideas for a few markets that your blog’s audience would respond to and find helpful, this can help you narrow down your ideas to just one niche to search further.
Impact Radius
Once you have an industry narrowed down, you need to see which companies pay affiliates the most for their work. Impact Radius is a service that collects data about way more than just simple affiliate earnings, it’s a powerful tool to aggregate your affiliate data and drive efficient growth. It does have a really neat feature though that allows you to look at what various companies pay affiliates for every one hundred clicks in a particular niche. This is super helpful for determining a list of companies that would be most profitable to work with.
When it comes down to it, there will be no analytics tool that’s more helpful than your brain (and of course some googling). You most of all know your blog’s viewership the best, so it’s best that if you need to make the right call and it doesn’t exactly match up with analytics, you may want to consider going with your gut.
Once You Know Your Niche, How Do You Find a Product?
Once you have a specific industry in mind, there are a few important things to consider when narrowing down the product list. First off, what do you see a lot of in your field? People are pretty universally familiar with the company “Audible”. That’s largely because of their broad affiliate marketing strategy.
Content creators on video streaming services often market for Audible because of what they give to affiliates, and simply for having heard of it. Nobody would be doing it if it were a bad deal. Look to what you see peers in your blogging “genre” doing for inspiration. However, there is value in being unique. The popularity of the product should not be the be all end all of your decision on which to approach.
Online is Easier than Physical for Affiliate Marketing
Continuing with the same example as above, another reason that Audible is so popular is that it’s an online service. It’s easier on both the affiliate end and the customer end. The ease comes in for the affiliate to simply plug in the link and describe what the product does, and why their viewers should consider purchasing the product.
It’s a brand that was tailored online, in the same space in which the product is being offered. On the viewer’s end, it’s much easier to purchase online products or services. If the product must be purchased physically in a store, no matter how intrigued it makes your viewers, a significant portion of potential buyers will be lost due to simply forgetting about it.
With online products and services, the potential buyer can easily navigate from the affiliate page, such as a blog or video, and straight to the product itself. With this convenience, the chance that they will purchase something is much greater.
Demand is Crucial When Affiliate Marketing
A third thing to consider is the demand for the product. Although it may be attractive to do affiliate marketing with a very cool and young product, it will probably be safer and more profitable to make sure the product already has a high demand. This can be checked using services such as SEMRush or Ahrefs to analyze the past and present demand trends for a specific product.
Lastly, try to promote a product that you have personally used in the past. It’s the best way to gauge how your readers will experience a product because you have done so yourself. It’s important to be confident in the quality of what you’re selling, otherwise, you may lose the trust that you have developed with your readers. They may think of you as “selling out” for poor quality products.
Remaining Unique Amidst Many Competitors
The internet has more than substantially lowered the difficulty of putting out content, but as a result, it’s a pretty vast place. Let’s face it: there is probably more than one other person doing roughly the same thing you are.
That doesn’t diminish what you’re passionate about in the slightest, but it does mean that in order to stay on top of the affiliate marketing game in your blogging area, you’re going to have to set yourself apart from the rest of the pack a bit. There are a few things you can do to make sure you’re rising above potential competitors for your blog’s marketing space.
Establishing Yourself as a Leader
One of the number one things that you can do is to actually know what you’re talking about. Becoming a knowledgeable leader in the realm of blogging is a surefire way to distance yourself from most competition. A large part of being a leader is certainly expanding your presence. This can be done online, by posting on other blogs related to yours, leading readers of other related blogs back to your content.
This can also be done by interacting face to face with others in your local or regional blogging circles. It’s truly really amazing the sheer amount that you can learn just from chatting with another blogger for a while. They may have insight into what has been working with their blog, even if they write about a totally different topic than you do.
Deliver Truly Unique Content
A fresh perspective on something in a particular field could be considered unique content that would draw somebody to a blog, but truly unique content is a great way to build a trusting and impressed viewer base while drawing new viewers in with quality content. How does one achieve truly new content? Research.
Maybe you want to compare and contrast a few different services that nobody has before. Maybe you want to pose as a customer for a certain product, or come up with your own unique and effective method for doing something that your viewers would be interested in. It’s all about gathering new data, instead of writing your own take on older news. How does one even begin with such a task though? There are a couple of things to consider.
What has been already covered?
This one is easy enough. Once you’ve thought about a potential project or topic to cover, you’ll want to make sure that nobody’s done it before. Take care to put in both broad and specific search engine queries to ensure that what you’re doing is completely original.
How can I make something my own?
Use your personality and the type of things you enjoy to not only tailor a potential topic to your audience, but to be both original and true to yourself. Maybe you can tie together two topics that nobody has before because you’ve thought about a potentially unseen connection between the two.
Be Early in Identifying What Works
The internet has drastically changed the way that both advertisers and consumers interact with each other. Gone are the days of broad advertisements intended for an age range encompassing a generation and a half. These days targeted advertising is no joke, and the margin of error is pretty thin. It’s recommended that you use some type of analysis software to track a few things, like where your traffic is coming from, the composition of said traffic, and the keywords that have been leading traffic to your site. Most of these functions can be done in Google Analytics (or Facebook if you have been using it to advertise as well).
What else should a blog owner consider in determining what works? Primarily content, affiliate products, and traffic.
Determining What Works for You
As a blogger, you always want to make sure that your blog has quality content just out of the merit of it, but some posts just do better than others. For the best advertising potential, you’ll need to figure out which of your posts do the best. This can be done with all sorts of analytics software of your choosing, but Google Analytics will most definitely suffice.
You’ll want to consider a few variables regarding the “best” post though, because simply having the most views does not necessarily make for the best content with which to advertise.
- Do people spend a long time on the page or do they simply click in and click out?
- Do they interact with anything on these pages?
Once you have truly narrowed down your top performing posts, try to figure out what made those posts work exactly? What did you do differently about this post as opposed to others?
Only Utilize the Best Products
Just as you want the best content, you also want the best affiliate products on your blog. It may be necessary to drop low performing ones; you’re running a business as well, and you don’t want to sacrifice or sour the relationship you have with your readers to push for a product that none of them particularly want.
This can be done by seeing which is paying you the most so far, as that usually corresponds to the amount of that your users are interacting with the affiliate product. Consider what it is about that product in particular that makes it so popular with your blog’s viewers.
It may be a good idea to try to structure some content around the product that is most popular. That way you are putting out content that you know that your readers will interact with, and you’re potentially adding to the pool of readers who interact with the affiliate product. Everybody wins!
Get to the Root of Your Traffic Sources
Lastly, you need to find out where your traffic is coming from. What is sending readers to your blog, and does that potentially change your affiliate marketing strategy? Does that change your content strategy? If a blog on a particular topic sends many readers to your blog, maybe you want to put out more content related to that topic, or have that blog owner write a piece for yours.
Affiliate Marketing is one of the best and easiest ways to turn your blog into a real income. But, it doesn’t come without work. However, to see it done successfully on a blog of your own is well worth the trouble!
