Everything You Need to Know About Affiliate Marketing
27-03-2017
If you want a complete guide on affiliate marketing, you’ve come to the right place. Plenty of webmasters have dreamt of the same things you’re dreaming of right now: a consistent passive income, being your own boss, and having enough time left over to pursue life to the fullest. The answer to this big dream lies in running your own successful website through affiliate marketing.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
We’re glad you asked! Affiliate marketing is a popular way to monetise your blog or website by promoting products or services that will benefit your audience. Each time you make a sale, you gain a bit of commission. For bloggers, affiliate links are often sprinkled throughout their blog posts, sidebars, headers and even footers. Sometimes bloggers even create entire posts dedicated to a certain brand and include their affiliate links for monetisation. It’s actually quite common to see entire domains and landing pages dedicated to promoting one unique product or service, which is what our Affiliates create.
The idea sounds simple enough, but how do you go about earning enough traffic to make a substantial income from affiliate marketing? That all boils down to three key attributes: your chosen niche, website content, and promotional strategies.
What is Your Niche?
There are lead generators for seemingly every product or service available. When you’re first starting out, it can be hard to determine the best niche for you. Our suggestion is to first map out your goals. Is your main goal to make a consistent flow of passive income? Is it to produce content that interests you? Figure out your goals first and you will find it much easier to determine your niche.
If your goal is to create a consistent passive income, then we recommend the financial leads niche. As a T.UK Affiliate, you will be driving traffic for our lenders and getting paid a great commission once your leads convert. The financial industry is one of the most lucrative industries to get in, because it fills an ongoing need for loans. Now that the internet is a hotspot for consumers to search for short-term and long-term loans, many brick-and-mortar lenders are turning to Affiliates to help them promote their lending service. Sign up to be a T.UK Affiliate today and one of our expert Account Managers will get you started!
Website Content Optimisation for Affiliate Marketing
Once you figure out your desired niche, it’s on to content optimisation. Each niche has its own target audience, so the design, tone of voice, and marketing strategies are going to be wildly different from one Affiliate website to the next. Fortunately, there are common denominators that you can apply to your own website, regardless of your chosen niche. For one, everything about your website should be intentional: the design, the images, copy, and links should all serve a purpose. The highest converting websites all have a clear sales funnel, directing visitors where to look and what to read next. The mark of a great Affiliate website is that it leads visitors straight towards the main call to action. The call to action should be the most eye-catching website attribute to higher conversion rates. Read our article about the Basics of Design to learn more about how to properly optimise your website!
How to Promote Your Affiliate Site
Alas, we’ve finally made it to the affiliate marketing bit! Affiliate marketers rely heavily on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to drive traffic to their websites. A website’s SEO rankings determine how well the website performs on major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. SEO is an ever-evolving battle between your website, your competitors’ websites, and your search engine’s algorithm. The current Google algorithm is known as the Penguin 4.0, and it prioritises websites that are fast, consumer-focused, full of valuable content, and have plenty of quality backlinks.
When an authoritative website or blog leaves a link to your page, you have just gained a backlink. Backlinks allow search engines to know that your website is trustworthy because people are linking to it. People usually share articles that they can relate to, so many Affiliates create high quality blog posts that give value to their readers. Blogging is a fantastic tool to get backlinks; not to mention, they create a wealth of information you can repurpose and reuse. Backlinks might not be easy to earn when you first start out, but these 8 SEO tools will help you get there faster.
Another great way to promote your content is through social shares. Whether you choose to use a social bookmarking website, such as SocialADR.com, promote on your own platforms, or get influencers to promote for you, social marketing is a powerful way to get your domain name out there.
To give you more details on how to optimise your website for better SEO rankings and higher conversion rates, we’ve created this article for beginner lead generators.
If you haven’t registered as an Affiliate with us yet, sign up now!
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