Last updated on February 1st, 2023 at 10:19 am
Every affiliate marketer wants that secret sauce that is going to help them increase their commissions. Well, there is no secret sauce that I can share. But these tips will help you increase your affiliate income without a lot of extra work.
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Affiliate Marketing for Beginners
One of the best ways for beginning bloggers to earn an income is to start with affiliate marketing. You don’t have to worry about creating your own products, dealing with customers.
Although I do believe that every blogger should have their own ebook, it’s a great way to earn money by sharing your knowledge.
All you have to do is join the best affiliate marketing programs in your niche and drive traffic to them. If the sales page has good sales copy, your conversion rates will increase.
Now you can’t always control whether someone will actually buy through your link or not. It all depends on what level of the buying stage they are in.
However, what if I told you that there are some things that you can do on your end that may increase your conversions.
Would you actually take the time to implement these tips? Well, I’m going to share 15 things that can do today to get ready to make more sales.
15 Tips to Increase Your Affiliate Income
#1 Provide Value and Stop Selling
I know you want to make sales and you work hard on growing your blog. But your job as an affiliate marketer is to educate NOT sell. People don’t come to your blog with the intention to buy, well, they might be depending on which blog post they are landing on.
A majority of Internet surfers land on a blog post because they are looking for information that can help them solve a problem. If your blog provides valuable content that helps them, then they may sign up to your email list.
They may even bookmark your blog post and start coming back on a regular basis. However, most people don’t buy from you on their first interaction.
Remember the Rule of 7 when it comes to getting people to buy from you. No matter how much you want it, you need to build trust with your audience before they will pull out their wallet.
#2 Create A Landing Page For Your Most Popular Affiliate Programs
This method works really good if you’re running Facebook Ads, although you can use it for your blog as well.
Your goal is to convert your visitors into sales. One of the best ways to do this is to create a funnel that helps you make sales without you having to do a lot.
You’ve probably seen other successful bloggers talk about the importance of sales funnels. This is because a sales funnel does all the work for you, once you get people to opt-in.
Most beginners to affiliate marketing put off creating a sales funnel that can help them earn passive income. It took me a while before I realized how important it was to implement this technique.
It’s still a work in progress, but then most things in blogging are.
Purpose of Your Funnel
Create Awareness: When someone visits your blog, they should know right away what it’s about based on the content that you provide. If your blog is brand new, it may be challenging to know what type of content or products you sell.
Your goal is to continue writing content based around the products and services you provide. This means that you’ll be providing educational content to help you readers solve their problems in your niche.
Recommend Products: It’s easy to think that it’s our job to sell our affiliate offers. Most new bloggers spam their blog posts with tons of affiliate links and banners.
Their belief is the more links they add, their chances increase to make commissions. The truth is that shoving your links on people will not increase your earnings.
In fact, it can do the opposite. People are most likely to leave your blog and find your competitors content because they’re just educating NOT selling.
Make Sales: The more value you provide through content marketing, eventually, people will start to trust you. With trust and time, the sales will start to come.
Rinse and repeat the process for all the different affiliate programs you want to promote. Don’t rush it, and before you know it, you’ll start to make sales.
#3 “What’s In It For Them?” Show Them How The Product Can Help Them
Think about your buying process. You only buy products or services that benefit you in some way. Your audience thinks the same way.
They are only going to pay for products and services that can help them accomplish something. One of the best ways to increase your income is to make sure that you’re promoting products or opportunities that are closely related to your niche.
If you have a dog blog you don’t want to promote products for cats. We’ve all heard how important it is to stay on topic with our blogs.
Well, increasing your affiliate commissions is no different. Promote opportunities that help your readers.
#4 Promote A Few Products At A Time
One of the biggest mistakes most affiliate marketers make is trying to promote anything and everything. I’ve done it, where I promote everything that I can get approved for.
But the truth is that you should only be promoting a few products at a time. If you give people too many choices, it is only going to confuse them and they won’t take any action.
I’m not saying that you can’t join more than one affiliate network and test out different products. After all, you need to know what type of products actually convert on your blog.
Once you find out what type of products people are willing to spend money on, you’ll have a better understanding of what people are looking for.
#5 Focus on Increasing Your Conversion Rates
It’s so easy to add affiliate links to products that you think will sell. But the truth is that you need to take the time to see what your readers are willing to pay for.
The best way to test this out is to work on increasing your blog traffic. I know most people say that you don’t need a lot of traffic to make affiliate sales.
Related: How Much Traffic Do You Need to Make Money
Well, you don’t once you have an understanding of what your audience is willing to pay for. If you’re a brand new blogger you need traffic.
Work hard on getting traffic and pay attention to your Google Analytics. You’ll be able to see which blog posts are the most popular.
See if you can find an affiliate product that matches the topics of your most popular blog posts. I’d also recommend writing more blog posts on the topics that have been proven to be popular.
#6 Increase Your Affiliate Sales By Improving Your SEO
I am a huge fan of SEO because once you start getting traffic from Google, things can take off for you. The downside is that it takes time to actually start seeing organic traffic.
It took me well over a year to start seeing traffic from Google, I made a ton of mistakes. If you do proper keyword research with SEMRush or KWFinder, you should be able to see faster results than I’ve seen.
Focus on keywords that have low competition and people are actually searching for. Then sit down and write a long-form blog post that is filled with tons of value for your audience.
Make sure that you’re adding LSI semantic keywords to your posts. If you’re completely new to SEO, make sure that you read everything you can about it.
Here are two blogs that you can start learning SEO for free.
- SEO Made Simple A Step-by-Step Guide
- Launching A New Website: Your SEO Checklist – Whiteboard Friday
Note: SEO takes time to work, so if you start writing blog posts today, don’t expect Google to send you tons of traffic next week. It can take up to 6 months to start seeing organic traffic.
#7 Build Trust With Your Readers
How many times have you purchased something online from a website that you don’t know or trust? Chances are NEVER.
No one wants to buy from people that we don’t know or trust. There are a lot of affiliate marketing sites out on the web that doesn’t use Gravatars because they want to blog anonymously.
Yes, you can blog under a pen name if you choose. However, you need to find a way to build trust with your readers. One of the best ways to do this is to add a Gravatar and share some of your personal stories with your readers.
You don’t have to share everything that is going on with your life. But share little snippets and stories that will allow readers get to know you a little bit about you.
If you look at successful affiliate marketers you’ll notice how they use storytelling to help them make sales.
You don’t have to do it in every blog post you write. But you’ll have a much more successful blog if you are willing to let your readers get to know you.
#8 Join More Than One Affiliate Network
Don’t overlook joining affiliate programs like ShareASale, FlexOffers, and Awin (Affiliate Window). These networks have tons of programs regardless of what niche you’re in.
Most new bloggers get started with Amazon because they don’t know which networks they should get started with.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t promote Amazon products. But there are other programs that offer higher commissions.
#9 Monetize Your Most Popular Blog Posts
Google Analytics is going to be your best friend when it comes to making sales and monetizing your traffic. Once you start getting visitors, you’ll want to find your most popular posts.
How to Check Your Most Popular Posts from Pinterest
If you’re like most new bloggers, there’s a good chance that you’ll be using Pinterest to get quick traffic. You can see which blog posts people are landing on from Pinterest.
Go to Acquisition >> Social >> Network Referrals >> Pinterest
You can then use this information to make sure that those posts are properly monetized with affiliate links.
Which Posts People Are Landing On
This method will show you which blog posts people are landing on your blog. This could be from referral traffic, organic traffic or other methods.
Go to Behavior >> Site Content >> Landing Pages
Your most popular posts will change from time to time. This is why it’s important to check your Analytics every 30 days to make sure that you’re most popular posts are monetized properly.
#10 Build An Email List
The most important thing you can do to help you increase your affiliate commissions is to work on building your email list.
Yes, you can make sales on your blog. But you’ll make more sales down the road if you take the time to build an email list with loyal fans.
Remember, most people don’t buy from websites that they don’t trust or know. When you take the time to build an email list and nurture your email list, you’ll have a much better chance to make sales down the road.
Set up a lead magnet or resource library to help you build your email list. Your email list helps you drive targetted traffic to your blog, or sell your own products.
Note: Your subscribers are people too, and they don’t want to be sold to on a regular basis. You don’t want to annoy your subscribers by shoving promotions down their throat. If you can provide value and help them solve their problems, you’ll have a subscriber for life.
#11 Focus on Content Marketing to Make Sales
I’m a huge fan of content marketing because I love writing. In fact, I’d rather sit down and write a blog post than do anything else.
I know that using content marketing is one of the slowest ways to make money online. You write the content today and can’t expect to see results till months down the road.
However, if you’re writing quality content that is targeting the right keywords, you can see income coming in from content you wrote months or years ago.
If you’re going to use content marketing to increase your sales, you need to publish new posts on a regular basis. Choose a blog schedule that you can live with and make sure you stick with it.
One reason that most people fail with this form of marketing, is because they get tired of writing content and NOT seeing results right away.
You need to develop patience and the persistence to keep going even when you’re NOT seeing results right away. If you want to see faster results, you might want to consider increasing your content output.
Trust me, it works. I’ve been publishing 4-5 posts every week for a few months and I’ve noticed a huge increase in my traffic.
Just don’t forget to promote all that content that you write.
#12 Reach Out to The Affiliate Manager for Tips
Most reputable affiliate companies offer an affiliate manager you can reach out to for tips and advice. Most newbies never reach out, and I’m not sure why.
It took me forever to reach out to the SiteGround affiliate manager to ask them for some tips that I could implement to improve my conversions.
At first, I was a little skeptical and embarrassed because at the time, I hadn’t really made any sales. But after implementing the tips they suggested, I’ve been able to make several sales from the SiteGround affiliate program.
If you’re having trouble making any sales from a specific program. Don’t hesitate to reach out to your dedicated affiliate manager.
Chances are they know what works and what doesn’t work. Especially, after working with several top marketers.
They want to help you make more sales. After all, if you make more sales, they make money too.
#13 Promote On Those Special Days and Seasonal Events
Quarter four seems to be a very popular time for a lot of bloggers. This is when buyers are more willing to pull out their credit cards because they know they can get some special deals or coupons.
Most programs offer coupons and discounts during special occasions and seasons. Think Black Friday, it’s a popular time for bloggers because they know they can get huge discounts on products and services they need to run their blog.
Make sure that you’re promoting during these special occasions.
Note: Sign up for emails from the programs and products you promote. This will help you stay informed whenever they are running some type of special or discount on their products.
#14 Use Pinterest to Promote Affiliate Links
Pinterest can be a great way to make money with affiliate marketing. They allow marketers to promote their links directly to Pinterest.
This means that you can create a pin and link it to your affiliate link and bypass your website/blog. While I’ve done this in the past, I don’t spend a lot of time promoting my links this way.
I’d rather build an asset that is mine (my blog) and working on growing that. But it’s definitely okay to test out products and see if they have a good sales page by throwing some Pinterest traffic at it.
If it gets thousands of clicks and NO sales, then maybe it’s not worth your time linking to your blog? This is why it’s so important to spend time doing some A/B testing to see which products convert or not.
#15 Invest In Your Education
It’s so easy to think that you can figure everything out on your own. Yes, there is a ton of free information that you can use to help you learn how to start affiliate marketing.
But the truth is that it can take you several months or years to figure out how to do it correctly. If you’ve been blogging for a while now and still not making any money.
Then maybe it’s time to invest in your blog. I know it’s hard to spend money on something that isn’t making you anything in return.
But imagine investing in the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing program and learning how Michelle was able to grow her blog to over 100k in less than 6 years.
Would you spend money on that course just to see what she did? I did and I can tell you that I learned how to implement some things that I never knew about until Michelle shared them.
I personally love investing in my blog business and learning new strategies from different people. I’m not scared to invest in my blog, because I know that it’s going to pay off big.
Note: When you buy a course, make sure that you actually take the time to implement what is taught. So many people buy tons of courses and then complain that they didn’t see any results.
Give It Time
One of the most important things that I need to stress is that it takes time to actually earn money with affiliate marketing. You can’t expect to start your blog today and start earning commissions in the next week.
If you’re using content marketing to help you build your business (like I am), it takes time to start seeing results. The content you write today is going to work for you months down the road.
If you can stick it out and wait through the slow times, you’ll look back 3 years from today and realize all the opportunities that you have created for yourself.
Final Take Away
Affiliate marketing is NOT as easy as spamming your readers with links. You need to have a strategy in place and continually be testing new methods.
Don’t worry if it takes you time to figure it out. The learning curve is huge, especially if you’ve never used affiliate marketing before. If you want to cut your learning curve in half, I highly recommend investing in the best training program to cut your learning curve in half.
Hand Picked Articles for You
- Best Affiliate Marketing Programs for Beginners What You Need to Know
- How Fast Can You Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
- FlexOffers Review How to Join and Start Making Money
- Can You Live Off Blogging Income?
Making money online is NOT as easy and quick as some of those blog income reports floating around online. Yes, it’s totally possible to create residual income through your blog.
You just need to give it time and keep testing and tweaking until you are able to figure out what actually increases your conversions.
Hi Susan!
Thanks a ton for sharing such a nice and informative content for raising the earning through one’s blog in no time. I immensely feel that these guidelines will help in start getting some income from my blogging website.
Keep up the good work.
Hi Bhupesh,
I am glad that you found the tips helpful.
Good luck with your blog.
Have a great day 🙂
Susan