Chapter 2: Advanced Affiliate Marketing Tips and Strategies

If you’ve read Chapter 1 of our Guide to Conquering Affiliate Marketing, you have learned the basics about how it works and how to position your online business for success.

In this chapter of Conquering Affiliate Marketing, we’re going to discuss advanced affiliate marketing tips and strategies you can implement to grow your affiliate earnings and boost your online business.

Without further ado, let’s get started by exploring the different affiliate marketing promotional types.

6 Affiliate Marketing Promotional Types

Conquering affiliate marketing starts with finding the best promotional avenues to pursue. Looking for new ways to promote affiliate products? Here are six promotional methods you might now have considered.

Post About It

Conquering affiliate marketing requires that you post about the products you want to promote. This shouldn’t be your everyday blog post. Make this a quality piece of long-form content. Take this opportunity to dive deep into the product you are promoting. Provide how-tos, answer frequently asked questions, share best practices and/or provide some troubleshooting.

In-depth product reviews like this not only help move customers further along the buyer journey, but also help you rank for key terms on search engines like Google. Make sure to include key terms that your audience would search when researching the product. You can get keyword suggestions from free tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner.

Make sure to include images in your post to break up content and help your audience visualize what the product looks like in real life. You can also optimize your images to further increase your chances of ranking organically.

Don’t forget to sprinkle your unique affiliate link throughout the piece, providing your audience with multiple opportunities to click through and convert. If you are selling leads directly, be sure to link to your lead generation page, so visitors have ample opportunities to complete the form.

YouTube About It

You can create your own YouTube channel where you share your unique perspective including product reviews. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, just behind Google. You can generate a lot of traffic to your affiliate link by adding it to your YouTube videos.

YouTube videos can rank on Google as well, and often rank higher on the search results page than organic results.

Shooting multiple videos on a product creates SEO opportunities. Include your affiliate link at the beginning of your video descriptions. If you put the link too far down in the description, viewers need to click on “show more” to see it, and not many do.

Remember to embed your videos on your site, especially in your long-form post about the product. Share the video on your social media network pages as well.

What should you cover in these videos? You can cover any part of or the entire process of purchasing and using the product.

If you aren’t promoting a product, but selling leads instead, you can walk prospects through the process of applying for a loan. This will help them understand just how quick and easy it is.

Host a Webinar About It

Webinars have become extremely popular, especially among software companies. Webinars can be more personable than YouTube or social media videos, because they are live.

Treat your webinar like an event. Promote it on your website with a countdown clock. Post about it on your social media pages and get the word out about your event.

People expect more out of a webinar than a YouTube video. Be ready to go in-depth about the product or service and be prepared for some tough questions.

Sponsor a Giveaway

Bonuses or giveaways can increase your conversions. You can offer a special prize to one or a few lucky people who make a purchase through your affiliate link during a specified period of time. You can set the terms of your giveaway, including how many people will qualify, how many winners there will be, what the prize will be and how long the promotion will run.

Promotions and giveaways are a great way to draw attention to your site or your social media page. People love free stuff, so it’s only natural you’d see a spike in activity when you promote giving something away for free.

Bonuses can help you stand out among your competitors. Chances are, you won’t be the only person promoting the product. Consumers may need a reason to buy from you instead of someone else.

Do the math before you announce a giveaway or bonus. The idea is to make money, so the prize should never be greater than the potential revenue you could generate from conversions.

Be sure to read the terms of your affiliate agreement. Some networks won’t accept “incentivized” traffic. ArrowShade for example, doesn’t accept incentivized leads. All consumers who apply for a loan, must have done so on their own without any incentives.

conquer affiliate marketing by posting promotions on social media

Post on Social Media About It

While your website is your biggest source of affiliate traffic, conquering affiliate marketing is easier with social media traffic. If you’re going to promote affiliate products on social media, you’ll need to be smart about it. Most people don’t want to be sold to on social media, so be mindful of what you post.

Instead of directly posting your affiliate link and asking for sales, link to your content. You can share your product videos, blog posts or webinar. All these pieces of content contain your affiliate link, but you’re providing useful information as well.

Email Your List About It

Email marketing works. It’s one of the best ways to generate sales, but you’ll want to avoid spam traps. Too many affiliate promotion emails can land you in spam purgatory.

Just like with social media, indirect promotion is the way to go. You can promote blog posts, videos and so forth. Some affiliate programs won’t allow you to place their links in email.

If you are selling short-term loan leads directly for ArrowShade, you can promote the product via email. This is one of the best ways to generate short-term loan leads. Make sure to link your email content back to your landing page where consumers can complete the form and request a loan.

3 Advanced Affiliate Marketing Tips for Direct Lead Sellers

Understand the Target Audience

It’s very important to understand who the target audience is to be able to drive conversions. If it’s your first-time generating leads for a product, ask the product owner or your affiliate manager if they have a buyer persona.

Any information they can provide you can help you get into the minds of the target customer, what questions they have, their needs, how to gain their trust and how to move them along the buyer journey.

At ArrowShade, we specialize in financial products, specifically short-term loans. Our customers are facing temporary financial hardship and are looking for cash to cover emergency expenses. Those expenses can range from medical bills to everyday purchases. The loans often range between $100 and $1,000.

The customer either doesn’t have a credit card, has maxed out their credit or may not have good credit. A short-term loan is their only option for securing the funding they need for their immediate expenses.

The loan terms are short, and the customer is typically expected to repay the loan with their next paycheck.

By understanding the customer, the product and how it fulfills a specific need, you can generate the right types of promotional content and drive conversions.

Learn What Qualifies as a “High Quality” Lead

There are two ways to get paid for leads. You could get paid a flat payout, or you could get paid on a revenue share model. The revenue share model has become popular with affiliate networks that utilize ping trees.

With a revenue share model, you get paid a percentage based on how much the lead sells for. Lead prices for short-term leads can range between $2 (for low quality) and $120 (for high quality). Revenue share model percentages can vary, but a popular breakdown is 80/20. The lead seller gets 80 percent of what the lead sold for, and the lead buyer gets 20 percent.

If you are paid on a revenue share model, you will want to generate the highest quality leads possible to earn more. Conquering affiliate marketing is simpler if you ask the lead buyer or affiliate network what constitutes a high-quality lead in order to target the right consumers.

Optimize Your Landing Page

Conquering affiliate marketing has a lot to do with your landing page. It can have a lot to do with your success. The more fields your lead generation form has, the less likely a visitor is to complete it.

While shorter forms are preferred from a conversion standpoint, there is certain information the lead buyer needs in order to close the deal. Check with the lead buyer or affiliate network to ensure your forms capture all necessary information.

Put your form at the top of the page above the scroll for easy access. You can add useful information below, but always prioritize the lead generation form.

You may need to test multiple landing page designs before you come to the best one. There are various ways to test landing pages, including Heat Maps. With a heat map, you can see where your visitors are clicking, where they’re spending and time, and what portions of your page are being ignored.

Your landing page should answer important questions. You can use SEO tools like SEMRush to discover popular questions. You can also discover top questions by typing in the keyword into the Google search bar. Google will give you additional suggestions, which can reveal frequently used queries. Answer these queries in your landing page to help covert visitors into leads.

How to Avoid Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

Unless you are an SEM guru, affiliate marketing involves building an audience. Even email marketing relies on a strong email list that has to come from somewhere. Buying lists rarely works.

There are four common mistakes many affiliate marketers make:

  • Choosing the wrong product to promote
  • Not providing a quality experience
  • Lying about a product or being dishonest about a promotion
  • Earning all your income from affiliate marketing

Let’s discuss these four mistakes and see if we can’t learn from them.

Choosing the Wrong Product for Your Audience

One of the most common affiliate marketing mistakes is choosing a product that isn’t right for their audience. Conquering affiliate marketing isn’t easy with the wrong product. You might have been scrolling through the affiliate network looking for some high payouts. You pulled affiliate links for those high paying affiliate offers, regardless of how well they fit in with your audience’s needs.

If you are an SEO mastermind, you might be able to work backwards. Those with the skills, can pick a high paying industry with top paying affiliate offers, then build a website and audience around it.

The majority of affiliate marketers already have a site and an audience. For them, it’s important to find offers that fit their audience.

Not Providing a Quality Experience

When you first get started with affiliate marketing you might be hungry for leads and commission. That can cloud your judgment.

It’s easy to let promotions get out of hand, especially if you’re not seeing the conversion numbers you expected and want to earn more money.

Conquering affiliate marketing is challenging if you bombard your audience. Don’t get so carried away with banners, pop-ups and text links that you start losing your hard-earned audience.

Remember, your readers don’t want to be bombarded with ads. That’s not why they came to your site. Too many ads can cause them to turn on their ad blocker or stop visiting your site altogether.

Keep it classy and put user experience first to keep your audience coming back for more.

Lying About Products or Promotions

Being dishonest with your audience is one of the best ways to fail at affiliate marketing. Never over promise on a product or promise something it can’t deliver. Your audience won’t blame the company, they’ll blame you for recommending it.

Conquering affiliate marketing requires you to do research and be up front and honest about the products you promote. In some cases, you might want to include the pros and cons of the product.

People make mistakes, and there may have been aspects of a product you didn’t understand before promoting it. Maybe you left something out, that an audience member would have found useful before making their purchase or completing the form.

When that occurs, it’s important to take ownership of your mistake. Be the first to apologize, and your audience will forgive you most of the time. Just don’t let it happen repeatedly.

Earning All Your Income from Affiliate Marketing

Many people have found success with affiliate marketing, and some even use it as their only source of income. However, affiliate marketing revenue isn’t always under your control.

The lead buyers can stop buying for any reason. The company whose offer you are promoting can decide to end their affiliate agreement or stop providing promotions. If you generate all your income from SEO, and Google releases a new algorithm update, you could lose a majority of your traffic over night.

For many people, affiliate marketing is a great source of passive or secondary income. It provides a great additional revenue stream when done properly.

Join the ArrowShade network today to start conquering affiliate marketing and earning as a lead seller or contact us to learn more about our program.