Everyone wants those affiliate marketing hacks which promise to save them time and effort. But the truth about affiliate marketing is that it isn’t easy! In fact many affiliate marketers quit and the affiliate marketing failure rate is very high. But then if you decide never to quit, you can never fail! Endure the struggles and ultimately you’ll come out on top.
When I began my affiliate marketing journey I was shown a number of affiliate marketing hacks. Some promised large profits for little work – if only it were true! Over a number of years I took some of these hacks and made them work. I also found an affiliate coaching program where I learned other affiliate marketing strategies which could be called “hacks” too!
Affiliate Marketing Hacks – #1 – Ranking A Website on Google
My first affiliate marketing hack I learned from a guy called George Brown who ran a course called Google Sniper! It was a fairly cheap course which taught a specific strategy for getting the attention of the search traffic within a specific niche. You can also read about the many other courses I took in my article digital profit course review.
A niche affiliate marketing website is built on specific keywords which offer less competition than most. By finding long tail keywords using Google’s keyword planner, and looking for those which offer the least competition, you can build a site and get free traffic to it from the search engines. Once you’ve built your site (using a keyword domain name), write articles and create content which target other keywords which relate to your main keyword.
This strategy takes some time and effort, but if you find a good keyword and target carefully, you can have free traffic for the longer term.
Affiliate Marketing Hacks – #2 – Target Long Tail Keywords In Your Content
This is a similar concept to building a niche website as in #1, only this can be done through creating written or video content. See also find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. To determine the SEO difficulty of a keyword you can use Google’s keyword tool to look for long tail keywords which are three or more words long.
Then compare them to a general Google search and look for the number at the very top of the screen. This will only show on a laptop or desktop computer though and not on a mobile. The number will give you an idea about the general competitiveness of your chosen keyword.
A high number will denote a lot of competing websites for that particular phrase. A low number will mean there’s less competition. Once you have done that, do the same search for your keyword using quotes around it, i.e. “affiliate marketing hacks”. Again you’ll find a number which you can compare to see its relative competitiveness.
Affiliate Marketing Hack #3 – Use Recurring Income Products
Most affiliates will start out promoting products from Amazon or eBay. These kinds of products tend to pay the smallest commissions in the affiliate marketing industry. With one time commissions you need to continually sell more and more products in order to make money. But with recurring commission affiliate programs you can continue to earn from sales you’ve made previously.
Recurring income programs are usually membership programs or software products. With a good software product and sold to the right customer, you can earn lifetime commissions on your sales. Online business tools and software are good to promote because when an online business become profitable, the tools are essential to the running of the business. So the owner is more likely to keep paying for the membership.
#4 – Use A High Ticket Product “Suite”
With high ticket affiliate marketing products you can earn substantially more from a sale than with most other products. This will often make sales more difficult to close but if you use a high ticket product “suite”, which offers a built in sales team, you can benefit from the team closing sales on your behalf. You can then promote the lower valued product within a sales funnel and the high ticket products are sold later on to your referrals.
With a good product range, up-sells can mean you don’t need as many customers in order to become profitable. One high ticket sale can pay the same as 100 low value products which only offer one time commissions. A good high ticket sales funnel offers subscription products and high ticket products. See SFM Digital Business System for more on this.
A high ticket sales funnel like this can also allow you to use paid marketing more easily. Whereas with low value affiliate products it’s much more difficult to make a profit using paid marketing strategies.
#5 – Using Social Media For Marketing
There’s many ways to sell affiliate marketing products including SEO (search engine optimisation), paid marketing, social media, link building, blogging, niche website building and email marketing. (See 22 ways to promote affiliate products). Social media platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter etc. offer a number of opportunities for promoting your affiliate products without having to pay for marketing.
One such strategy is to use Facebook to find traffic. Set up your Facebook profile and offer a free giveaway of some kind, or a link to your website. Then join Facebook groups where your audience will be likely to hang out. See how to know your target market.
Apply to join the groups which are most suitable for your affiliate products. Then, interact with other members. Do this without spamming your links everywhere if you don’t want to get kicked out of the groups! Over time if you give this some time every day for several months, you should see people finding your profile and clicking on your links. Like with all free marketing strategies this will take some time and dedication to start generating traction.
See unpaid social media marketing for more on this hack.