Here’s my list of 22 ways to promote affiliate products. There’s many ways to promote affiliate products and you need to choose a strategy based on your own personal circumstances. With low value products, it’s difficult to use paid marketing to promote products and still turn a profit. (See affiliate marketing commission rates). So you’ll need to use cheaper or free strategies. With high ticket affiliate marketing, you can more easily use more paid strategies because you’ll recover your advertising expenses more easily – and ideally make a profit!
So, if you’re wanting to escape a corporate career, for example, and you have money but no time, paid marketing is the fastest strategy. If you have time but less disposable income, free marketing might be a better fit.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – Fastest and Most Scalable
With paid marketing you risk losing capital while you’re learning what adverts work and which ones don’t. So you shouldn’t spend money you’re not prepared to lose. Over time as you get better, your adverts should give you a good return on investment. But in the early days, you should expect to lose some money while learning. Ideally, test adverts with a small amount of daily budget. Scale up those which bring a profit and cut off those which don’t!
Once of the best marketing strategies for a high ticket program is using YouTube paid marketing through Adwords. Run a YouTube campaign and drive targeted traffic towards a landing page. Collect your subscriber’s information by giving them something they want. Follow up with an email campaign. Here’s a video I’m currently testing on YouTube.
When someone clicks on the link in my video they land on my website where they can enter their details. They then get offered affiliate products through an automated email marketing campaign.
This took some time to learn and YouTube is expensive. So don’t consider it unless you have a high ticket products range to promote.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – Adwords Search Marketing
Adwords is a great marketing platform which lets you target specific keywords relevant to your business. You only pay when someone clicks on your adverts, so if you’re wise with your targeting, you should only get interested “buyer” traffic clicking on your adverts. Plus, you can also limit your daily budget to amounts you’re comfortable with as you’re learning.
Adwords is particularly good if you have a specific product to offer which is already being searched for. You can use Google keyword planner to find the keywords which are being searched for in your particular niche. Sign up for an Adwords account here to get started. Adwords can be used in a similar way to YouTube to send people to a landing page, or send people directly to your website.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – Bing/Microsoft
Bing, (now Microsoft), has a similar platform to Adwords and it’s a good place to start out if you’ve never used an advertising platform. You can also connect your account from Adwords to your Bing account and transport your data across.
Bing tends to be a little cheaper and less strict with their terms and conditions than Google. So for affiliate marketing Bing can be a good starting place. Again, like Adwords, Bing uses search traffic so you can specify which keywords you want to use on the platform to trigger your adverts.
With all paid marketing you should expect to test and measure your advertising for some time before you find the winning advert/s.
There’s many other social media sites which let you run paid advertising too. Linkedin, Twitter, Pinterest etc. Take your pick. Choose one platform to start out with and learn one strategy first before moving on to another one. That way you don’t spread yourself too thin.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – Shorten Your Affiliate Link
If you’re new to affiliate marketing and have just got your first affiliate link, perhaps you’re looking for some cheaper ways to promote it on the internet? A long, messy affiliate link doesn’t look very good for a passer by! One way to make your affiliate links look more pleasing is to shorten them. There’s various link shortening websites you can use to do this:
- shorturl.at
- Bitly.com
- Cutt.ly
- tiny.cc
- tinyurl.com
A long affiliate link looks like this: https://longcode32362764789247892643789.hop.website.net/123242
The shortened link looks like this: tinyurl.com/qdncoh62
Link shortening helps to make your affiliate links look less messy. This is particularly important if you’re going to use your link on social media to promote products. It’s much better to make your links less messy and can give you more character space for sites like Twitter for example.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products
Link cloaking is a similar thing but while you also shorten your affiliate link you can also brand it with your domain name or website name. This gives your link a more authoritative look while simultaneously hiding potentially sensitive information.
Malware can be used to change affiliate links in order to steal your affiliate commissions too. Cloaking or shortening your links can help to prevent this from happening.
Affiliate link: https://longcode32362764789247892643789.hop.website.net/123242
Cloaked Link: yourwebsite.com/product-name
One simple way of doing this is to download a plugin called “page links to“. Then create a page on your website and point the url to your affiliate link.
Domain Name Forwarding
Another quick way to make your messy affiliate links look more professional is to use domain name forwarding.
Purchase a domain name which is a good match for your affiliate products. The less words the better. Try and find a domain name which summarises your product. For example one I used was affiliate-marketing-mentorship.com which I forwarded to a pre-made landing page.
If you’re going to promote your affiliate link on social media accounts, for example, what looks better, a messy long link which means nothing, or a specific domain name which encapsulates the product in a couple of words? Of course you still have to promote your domain name, but more on this later.
Once you’ve purchased a cheap domain name, you can go to your dashboard in namecheap.com and click on manage domain. Then you can use the domain forwarding feature to forward the domain name to your affiliate link.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – A Niche Website
Many new affiliates look for ways to avoid building their own website. But this is a massive mistake. A website is a fundamental building block in your online presence. Why waste such a great opportunity to build an audience and generate free traffic?
One of my favourite tactics is niche website building. See how to build a niche website and get free traffic. Start by using Google’s free keyword planner to find a keyword in your particular niche. Purchase a domain name with your chosen keyword in it. Look for something (keywords) which has traffic already but less competition than most keywords.
Once you have a website, create content to attract the right audience for your products and services. See also how to rank an affiliate website.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – Blogging
Blogging is one of my favourite ways to promote affiliate products. With a blog post, you can create content around your products, (or lead magnets) in order to draw your audience from: social media, your email list, search engines, other websites and many other areas.
Once you have some content, you can use that content and share it around as much as possible. If that content is well targeted to vibe with your target audience, they are more likely to sign up to your email list and become a long term fan! Once on your email list, you can build a relationship through your emails and promote your affiliate products.
22 Ways To Promote Your Affiliate Products – Email Marketing
Yes of course this list wouldn’t be complete without a mention of one of the most (if not THE most) powerful marketing tactics available – email marketing. The power of email marketing should never be underestimated if you’re an affiliate. With a blog, or a website, a visitor has only a few minutes to purchase your product. But once on your list, this time period is extended by weeks, months and even years and decades.
The key to email marketing is to build trust and offer value. When your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they are more likely to open your emails and purchase your recommended products and services.
There’s load of information available on getting better at email marketing. Over time with practice you’ll get better if you keep working at it. Here’s a tool I found recently which helps increase your email open rates: sendcheckit.com/email-subject-line-tester
22 Ways To Promote Your Affiliate Products – Free Marketing Strategies
Here’s one of my favourite techniques but it requires you to have already built a blog and created a few posts.
You can then use software to churn out your posts on all your social media accounts. Post planner and Revive Old Posts are two I use. With both, you can connect your blogs to your social media accounts. Post planner has a number of plans according to your needs and Revive Old Posts has a free version with the ability to upgrade for more functionality.
Social Media Share Plugin
If you have a blog or a website, it’s also worth getting a social media share plugin to make sharing of your posts easier for your visitors. There’s many of these plugins available for a WordPress website. Just click on “Add Plugin” in your dashboard and look for social media share buttons.
It’s a one time job to do and will help grow your online presence organically once you’ve done it.
Ways To Promote Your Affiliate Products – Free Marketing Strategy On Facebook
Here’s a great little strategy I found using your Facebook profile. Start by cleaning up your profile and posts. You want to create a clean platform look which attracts people to your online brand. Change your profile picture to a professional looking one of you and link to your domain name in your bio.
You can also use a profile to link to your websites, ebooks, landing pages etc.
Once you’ve done this, your profile should have a clear call to action in it which lets people quickly see what you are offering. Here’s my profile:
Once you’ve done this you need to connect with people who you think are suitable for your affiliate product.
If your product is in the health and fitness niche, look for groups to join where these people hang out. Join those groups and start connecting and chatting with those people. Don’t spam your links, but genuinely connect with people and build relationships. As they come to your profile to check you out, they’ll see your link and what you’re about.
This takes a little patience and persistence. But if you dedicate some time to it each day over several weeks and months, you should see people coming to your profile and clicking on your affiliate link.
Using Quora For Traffic
Once you’ve built a blog and have some content, Quora is a great resource for generating traffic. With Quora, you can’t directly link to affiliate products. You’re likely to get your answers collapsed if you go spamming on the site. So instead, you need to give value first and Quora will reward you by allowing you to link to resources which help answer the questions – that is, your content!
Make sure you make a big effort to answer questions on the site and give real value. A short line answer with a link will get you flagged eventually. This is a long term strategy and one single link isn’t going to make your affiliate business. But if you make a daily habit out of answering questions which are relevant to your affiliate niche, and linking to your website content, you’ll see people clicking to your website. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.
Snip.ly – Social Media “Sniping”
Snip.ly is an awesome free tool which lets you take content and drop your link onto it. You can then share hot buzzing content (which isn’t your own) on social media. If you pick the right topics which both resonate with your customer avatar/perfect audience, you’ll get other people sharing your content – and your link!
I use Sniply to get people to my website or a landing page. It can be used in combination with trending articles or even videos. Pick a viral article or video which relates closely to your niche. I use sites like TheOnion.com, Dailymash.com and ThePoke.com – they are news satire websites. But I’ve also use other sites such as Buzzsumo.com to find trending articles within my niche.
Drop your link in it and share away! As more people share it, you get more people to link to your site. Of course the lick rate is often quite low, but if you stick with this strategy and become a master of it, you’ll see some business growth over time.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation deserves a mention here too. If you’re a blogger, you should optimise your content as you write it. You can do this by using an SEO plugin which helps you write content with your keyword in mind. It will help you get the keyword in your titles, image alt tags and throughout your content.
If you pick long tail keywords which have far lower competition than the others, you also have more chance of ranking your content. (See find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty). I use a plugin called Yoast SEO which helps me write seo friendly content. There’s many ranking factors used by Google and other search engines (Google being the market leader):
- Content – without great content you won’t get links, shares and attention organically, so it’s the most important factor
- Backlinks. -you can build backlinks through guest posting, social media marketing, blog commenting, forum posting and many other strategies. Backlinks are important for SEO and where they come from is as important as how many you have. One strong back link is better than many spammy ones.
- Create more content and link to it using deep linking – deep links tell search engines what to rank your content for and come from your own content.
- Visitor interactions on your content – Google sees how people interact with your content. So make it with your visitor in mind, not just the search “bots”
- Plus many more
Ebooks – Build A List
Building an email list has already been mentioned. But what hasn’t is the ebook lead magnet. Some affiliate programs give you something you can use to build an email list. Checkout the free video series I use here.
But if you don’t have a ready made lead magnet, you might want to create your own. Ebooks are probably one of the best ways to build your email list. Start by defining who your perfect customer is, keeping your affiliate product in mind.
Your ebook should be a good match for them, and lead them nicely towards your affiliate product. For example, I have a few ebooks. Some of them work better for making sales than others because they are more aligned with the products I promote.
Niche Blogging For Profit, doesn’t do as well for sales as Affiliate Marketing For Beginners. The reason is that the latter is more aligned with the needs of my target audience. Of course I found this out much later after having created both books! Save yourself some time and spend some time learning who your perfect customer is. Then create an awesome ebook to offer as a lead magnet.
Link Building – For SEO
Link building has always been my nemesis! It’s a boring and mundane task and I hate it! But links are a massive SEO factor and the more quality links you have, the more likely Google is to rank your site for your main keywords.
I’ve done some link building but not everything I should have done! Link building can be done through creating content on free article posting sites like ezinearticles.com, hubpages.com and Blogger.com etc. Link to existing content to build authority and traffic. Reach out to other bloggers in your niche area and offer to write guest posts in exchange for back links. You can also post blog comments. This does give you back links although the authority of these links is under some debate.
One strategy for link building I found is to use BuzzSumo.com to find influencers in your field. Contact them with content similar to what they already share and try to connect. I’ve recently bought a link building service from a company called thehoth.com which comes highly recommended. They have a variety of packages which are affordable for most affiliates.
Webinars
Webinars are a great way to promote affiliate products. Offer a free webinar to your email list and promote your affiliate products at the end for a discount to your attendees. Again, some affiliate programs offer webinars you can use as an affiliate. Or create your own webinars and advertise it through your email list or via one of the other methods listed here. Here’s a free webinar from Stuart, one of my personal mentors. (Click image to register).
PDF’s – Create PDF files and put them on your website
Pdf’s can be a good way to generate free traffic to a website or blog. I’ve created quite a few pdfs over the years and some of them are still bringing me free traffic and leads. You can use pdf’s as a traffic generation strategy, and try and get people to opt into your email list once they land on your site.
Here’s an example pdf I’ve created which still generates traffic even years later:
Obviously you also want to find pdf’s which are a good match for your target audience. Here’s a simple way to find what’s already being searched for to your niche. Just type in “your niche pdf” into Google and you’ll see some results.
Using YouTube
YouTube has already had a mention here. But YouTube can also be used to generate traffic organically, link to your blog and target specific keywords in your niche. The more obscure the keyword, the more likelihood of you ranking for that particular keyword.
Go to YouTube and type in search terms into the search bar. You should see search suggestions linked to your “seed” keyword. Find keywords which relate to your niche and create videos for them. Link back to blog content for extra traffic and an SEO link. Here’s an old video I created sharing the Snipl.y strategy I shared above. I still get leads from this even years after having put it on YouTube.
Watch the video by clicking on the image below.
YouTube Commenting
Yes YouTube commenting! One mentor who’s course I purchased years ago taught me this strategy. Create a YouTube account and link it to your affiliate product somehow. Ideally use the domain name forwarding strategy at least, if you don’t use your own website. Build your channel out with your link somewhere easy to see.
Take some time to make it look professional and use images which relate to your product or your own picture to make it personal. Then find videos which are hugely popular and have over a million views. Comment on the videos and join the discussion. Make a habit out of this and over time people will click on your name (in the comment) and this takes them through to your channel. Here, they see your link and can click through to see what you’re promoting.
This is similar to the Facebook and Snip.ly strategies in that it is something which requires persistence. Make a habit out of it and over time you’ll reap the rewards. Get involved in the discussion and contribute rather than just saying something generic and innocuous. Aim at 20 comments a day for a couple of months at least to give it a chance.
Google Places / Google My Business
Google My Business is a free listing for locally placed businesses. It’s really meant for physical businesses. However, if you are in a particular niche and you can add a locally placed business to your home address, you can potentially make some sales here!
Create a service, attach it to your address and build a niche website around it. This is a useful strategy if you already have an existing business too. You can attach affiliate products to your website. Then promote your website locally with Google My Business. It’s worth spending some time using Google’s keywords planner if you’re going to try this strategy. Have a look and see if you can tie your affiliate business to a local search in your area.
Do this by putting your local city or town into the location option in the keyword planner. Then search for your main keywords in the keyword planner. Build a fictional business around your main keywords, and link your free listing to an affiliate website!
This isn’t a scalable strategy but it only takes an hour to set up and then you should get free traffic for life!
Summary
There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing as you can see. If you want more time and less hassle, choose a high ticket program and learn paid marketing. If you can’t afford this option, make habits out of doing the cheaper strategies. Build them into your daily routine and keep going. Focus on the activity and not the results. Ideally you should use recurring commission affiliate products in your product inventory. With recurring commissions, your income will build up more quickly and your efforts will compound over time.
Have you any more strategies which I’ve missed? ! Please comment below with your ideas and add to this article. I’m sure I’m just scratching the surface with the endless social media possibilities. Still, it’s better to get good at one thing than to be a master of none! Don’t spread yourself too thin! Thanks for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this article please share it!
