One of the main advantages of affiliate marketing is that it’s quick and easy to sign up and potentially start earning money. Especially if you already have an audience via your website or social media networks, and there are good schemes offered in your industry.
It’s also extremely low cost, and fairly low risk. You don’t need to invest in any inventory, equipment, or software to get started. And once your first affiliate links are published, they can potentially earn you referral commissions indefinitely without any extra effort. So, it’s possible to find you’re making sales through content you’ve posted months, or even years ago.
Affiliate marketing also allows you to experiment and learn sales and marketing techniques, with many businesses providing useful information and assets to help you improve your efforts. And you could then apply similar techniques to help your own business, or clients running their own affiliate schemes. Along with rewarding you financially for improving your SEO, content marketing or social media efforts.
Another advantage is if you’re looking to build an additional income stream which isn’t related to your main self-employed career. It’s never been quicker or easier to launch websites, social media profiles, or a YouTube channel, which can start sharing affiliate content and links in whatever industry you’re looking to move into.
With enough time and effort, it’s possible to build entire websites focused predominantly on affiliate marketing. And in some cases, these can deliver significant revenues if they become popular enough, or target particularly high commissions. That could enable you to eventually swap client and contract work for running your own properties. Or to sell them in the future for multiples of your current and predicted earnings, which can potentially run into five or six figure sums.
You’ll also be far more likely to notice when you’re reading articles, guides or social media content which includes affiliate links, making you able to decide whether you can trust the advice being offered.
It’s unlikely you’ll see significant results from a website and social media profiles which are only visited by a handful of people each month. For most affiliate marketers, the challenge is to consistently grow both an audience, and increase the number who make a purchase via referral links.
Your exact methods will vary depending on the platforms you’re focusing on, but there are a wide range of ways to market your business. Methods such as search engine optimisation (SEO) will apply to in-depth guides on your website or ensuring your YouTube channel pops up in relevant searches, but aren’t applicable to an email newsletter only visible once someone has signed up to receive it.
Some marketing channels will tend to offer more immediate results, such as paid advertising. But they’ll require an ongoing investment, whereas an article which attracts lots of people through organic (non-paid) search results might only need a one-time investment of time and effort.
Regularly monitoring the products or services which are delivering affiliate sales, and the content leading people to them, will help you understand what resonates most effectively with your existing audience.
You’ll also be able to see anything which isn’t performing as you expected. You may need to fix and improve any issues, such as making stronger recommendations or adding more obvious links. But it might mean that you need to change your tactics and approach for the future to be more successful.
It might be that your niche is too broad or specific, you’re reaching an audience which isn’t receptive or ready to purchase right now, or there are better products and offers available.
Over time, you’ll be able to develop affiliate marketing funnels, which guide a potential purchaser through every stage of the process. You can develop content for each step on the journey, from initial research, in-depth consideration, tips on getting more when they buy the product or service, and how they can use it in the future. This is particularly relevant for anything with a higher price, and which requires more commitment from customers.
By consistently investing time in testing, experimenting, and optimising your affiliate marketing, you should see consistent improvements.
You can also increase the revenue you’re earning by regularly checking for programs which offer better commission rates. And if you’re driving a particularly significant number of sales for a particular product or business, then it can be worth reaching out directly to see if you can negotiate higher fees or other incentives as a result.
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