Whether you’re just starting out as a senior affiliate marketer, or you’ve been struggling to see your commissions take off, there are a few ways you can polish your efforts so that they bring in more money.
The good news is, as a middleman between the consumer and seller, you only have to work on the promotion part – not product creation or anything else. When you understand how to serve the customer what they need in terms of advanced information to make a solid buying decision, you’ll see your income soar.
Some affiliates make the mistake of thinking it’s quantity that increases earnings, but one stellar review of a product (meaning it has all of the components the consumer wants to see) can outperform fifty mediocre ones.
Focus on Creating Peer-to-Peer Reviews
When a prospective customer goes online to consider making a purchase, they often step outside of the sales page bubble and go searching for a real review. They are hesitant to convert into a sale for those who blatantly appear to be affiliates pushing products with no real concern for the buyer.
What they’re hoping to find is an honest, peer-to-peer review. This helps put their mind at ease and they relax and feel as if they can trust what you have to say. Where most affiliates go wrong is that they do nothing but parrot the sales page.
They spit out the facts about the product – features, contents – with no real detailed account of what the buy might be considering. You can create better peer reviews by going heavy with your personalization.
Customers want to know that you “get” them. So if your content helps them build a rapport with you, it will perform better than sterile facts any day. The problem arises when new affiliates take courses teaching them to focus heavily on SEO and keyword usage.
While these are definitely beneficial, they’re only part of the equation. You need to tap into the emotions of the customer. Before you write anything, create a mental snapshot of who will be landing on that review and why.
What problem are they experiencing and where is their mind at that moment? Maybe they’re sad or feeling desperate. It could be that they’re frustrated or embarrassed and they need you to help guide them in their buying decision.
This is true for both digital and tangible products. If you have any personal connection to the product you’re reviewing, such as having also experienced the same problem the buyer is, you can talk about it.
If you haven’t, then you can still paint a picture of the problem so they know you get where they’re coming from. You can discuss the emotions they may be feeling, and they’ll find themselves agreeing and feeling a sense of relief that this review will point them in the right direction.
Know the Difference Between a Promotion and a Review
No one is knocking those who promote products. It’s a viable stream of income to be an affiliate who promotes good items to consumers. But there’s a big difference between the conversion levels of promo-heavy content versus thorough, good reviews.
You’ll likely take one or more courses that instruct you to find products that convert, research the keywords to use, and spout off the features before giving them a snazzy call to action spiel with your affiliate link.
That’s not at all what the customer is looking for. It will work for some. You might see a sale or two and think you’re finally onto something. But truly successful affiliates who become the go to leader in a niche for product recommendations – the ones who see incredible affiliate income – do more than that.
Keep in mind that there are dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of other affiliates doing the bare minimum of rehashing features and specifications to customers that they can read on the sales page or product listing themselves.
They don’t need that from you. As an affiliate, you actually have two audiences – the search bots who will come crawl your site to see what it’s about so they can figure out where to rank you – and the humans who will pay for your insight.
You honestly need to appease both. But where many affiliates go wrong is in thinking that they can’t write a good review and meet the SEO needs of the search bots. You can do both!
Your review can include the keywords and elements search engines need, and also cater to the information cravings of your human visitors. You need to analyze your review from the point of view of both audiences.
Once you have written it, go over it to make sure it does includes the SEO items you need to rank. Then go through and see if it hits the mark by giving an honest, ethical and thorough review of the product so that your visitor sees the value in your insight.
One great way to do this, whenever possible, is to own the product you’re reviews. Now this isn’t always feasible. For example, if you’re reviewing treadmills, you’re not going to buy 15 of them.
But if you’re reviewing survival MREs (meals ready to eat), you might be able to continually purchase samples to review on camera or for a text-based review, either one.
Sometimes, you can gather enough information in a store or through the consumer reviews and product specs to make an informed decision and recommendation to your audience that they can trust.
If it’s a digital product, you can often buy it or get a review copy from the vendor to go through it and then report the results of your experience. These types of reviews take long, but they’re far more reliable than those that simply restate facts about a product.
Protect Your Readers’ Finances in Order to Earn More
People who don’t make knee-jerk buying decisions are often protective over their money. They don’t want to waste their hard-earned dollars on the wrong item. They also don’t want to go through the hassle of having to return anything.
One way you can help build a loyal following of buyers is to always prove that you’re protective over their money. Most affiliates aren’t. They want the consumer to spend as much money as possible to increase their earnings.
But if you approach your business in a way that shows you have their back, they’ll be more likely to buy from you, and the volume of sales will offset the loss of scamming people into making a bigger buy.
When consumers go online looking for reviews, they look for many different elements to a review. One is value – is it worth the money? They want to know if whatever they’re asked to spend is a wise investment.
Sometimes, you’ll discover that a product is on sale – and notifying your customers about this will help push them over the edge if they were on the fence. You need to stay abreast of discounts or deals that can help them save money.
There may be times when there’s a launch discount that helps them save significantly. Or a product is bundled up with other items to give the customer more value. If it’s a digital product, you can even work on the customers’ behalf to secure a deal no one else got.
It might be a flat discount of a certain dollar amount, or a percentage of what they spend on someone’s online store. You can even get vendors to package up certain products and offer them on sale as a group special for your audience.
If you ever encounter a situation where there’s no discount and no way to help them save money, then think of how you can add value to the purchase. You can do this with both physical and digital products.
For example, if someone buys a crockpot through your link, you might give them a digital cookbook of 100 crockpot recipes. Or, if they purchase a course on affiliate marketing, maybe you provide them with a PDF of the hottest 10 niches to tap into to earn more money!
Keep in mind that affiliate programs for tangibles (like those on Amazon) will have sections where you can find current promotions and deals. Most people don’t know about these.
Even digital products and tools have specials, like $1 for the first month or something else similar to that. You can inform your audience about this kind of special promotion and help them save in the beginning.
Pull Traffic in and Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate Reviews
One area where many senior affiliates stall out is in the concept of traffic. They want a flood of prospective customers visiting their product reviews, but they struggle to find any traction whatsoever.
Start with a healthy blog to pull in traffic. This is content you want to be found and crawled by search engines and then presented to interested parties. You’ll want to keep a clean, organized blog that’s not burdened with too many useless plugins.
Learn how to wield the power of SEO to your advantage. That means keywords and length, tags and more. You never want to ignore any of this. But you also want to work on creating really hearty reviews that detail everything the customer wants or needs to know.
Once you’ve done this, and you’re churning out content consistently to build a formidable review site, you’ll want to step outside of your blog bubble and start driving traffic to your domain.
You don’t have to pay for traffic, as some people will mislead you to believe. You simply need to tap into the world of social networking sites and apps. There are so many of them and some you probably wouldn’t even think to use for your niche.
For example, when someone mentions Tik Tok, you might think it’s for tweens and teens doing silly dance routines. But there are all kinds of niche leader there – for example, gardeners who share tips and advice for growing vegetables.
You want to use Pinterest to capture the attention of a visual audience. These posts will lead back to your blog entries where they can get buying advice in your niche. Instagram is a similar tools for a visual audience.
Use Facebook to create groups or pages where you share insight and advice on the niche, and then also sprinkle it with links to your product reviews. This doesn’t cost you a penny, but it’s highly effective for a variety of niches.
And of course, YouTube is a dominant social network that is second only to Google in terms of being the search engine people turn to when they need information. Your video reviews can send traffic to you from each video that you upload.
You never want to ignore either traffic pushing or pulling to your site. They work in conjunction to help you rise to the top of the affiliate niche circles. You need both of them to thrive.
Switch Up the Kinds of Reviews That You Create
Some senior affiliates take each product and write a review about it. And there’s nothing inherently wrong about that. It can perform just fine. But if you want to see your income really take off, switch things up periodically.
You can have a schedule in your editorial calendar for reviews where 5 of the seven days, you review individual products. But then once a week, you create a product comparison review and once a week you do a top 10 (or 3 or 5) list.
Product comparisons are great because consumers usually have a top two that they’re torn between. When you show up and pit the features and performance against each other, it helps solidify their decision.
Of course, top numbered lists also go over well. People just like to see things ranked and beating out others, so when you detail the top 10 items, you’ll have an opportunity to earn from each one.
It’s not just the #1 item that will convert. When a product earns a spot on the top 10 list, especially if you’ve covered the benefits of each one, it gives you 10 opportunities to convert the sale.
You can talk about how one beats another in terms of price, or how one product has more features than the others. Each consumer will have a different set of priorities that are important to them, so these lists will allow them to choose based on what they need.
Becoming a senior affiliate marketer is easy. Writing reviews is not difficult and can be very enjoyable. But you want your income to grow exponentially as you create more content. You don’t want to see sales sit stagnant because you’re not approaching it strategically.