Are you wondering what affiliate marketing promotion methods you should be doing? When I started out doing affiliate marketing I jumped from one strategy to another. As a result, I didn’t really generate any traction with anything! The top affiliates tend to use paid marketing of course.
Paid marketing works well because you can start and stop and advert very quickly. You can also learn what works and what doesn’t very quickly too and of course scale up when you have a profitable advert. But paid ads aren’t for everyone.
What if you don’t have the funds to test and measure adverts which could potentially make zero sales and bomb? And what if your products don’t support using paid ads? With high ticket items and recurring commission affiliate programs it’s much more viable to do this. But with low value affiliate products it’s out of the question. You’ll lose money every time unless you know your ROI (return on investment) and average value of a customer.
Affiliate Marketing Promotion Methods – Niche Websites
So if you can’t do paid advertising for your affiliate marketing promotions, that leaves free strategies like blogging and YouTube’ing! These are slow and steady strategies which can work wonders over time. But you need to put in the work upfront and you’ll need a strong work ethic and belief in what you are doing.
One of my first affiliate marketing promotion methods was building niche websites to get free traffic from Google’s search engines. This is a tough method and if you’re going to approach it you’ll need to do your homework. Here’s an article on how to build a niche website and get free traffic.
My first few outings in this strategy were pretty unimpressive. I build several niche websites and linked them to affiliate products. Most of them didn’t even make it on to Google since I was just spamming my links which must have been a huge red flag for Google. You need to create a useful resource with sites like these. Using keyword targeted domains can still help you gain some traction though, even with a small amount of work. Here’s a site I built around a specific keyword to get some free traffic.
Affiliate Marketing Promotion Methods – Blogging
Blogging is one of my favourite methods of getting eyes on my affiliate products. It’s slow and can take months or years before you see any traction. But if you stick at it and keep sharing your content and creating new content, you should, over time, see your traffic grow.
There’s various strategies for blogging but the main thing should always be to create valuable content which is sharable. If you write crap nobody will share it, Google definitely won’t rank it and you’ll be giving zero value to anyone. When I first started blogging, it was to sell affiliate products.
I wanted maximum exposure from minimum output. But that was a flawed strategy for a couple of reasons. Firstly Google knows when your content is thin and your affiliate links are plentiful. It’s just too clever to throw up some thin content and loads of affiliate links. You just won’t get anywhere! Instead, aim to provide value and help people instead of having the end goal as financial reward.
A few blogging tips:
- Put quality first – Write a minimum of 1000 words for an article
- Share your content – Use an automated social share plugin
- Use an SEO plugin – I use Yoast SEO
- Put social share buttons on your site
- Aim to write every week or day if you can
- Learn about SEO and never stop learning and improving
Social Media Marketing
There’s a few social media marketing platforms you can use too. Facebook is one I’ve used with some success. Paid marketing is best of course because you can reach a larger number of people more quickly with it. But it’s costly and it can burn cash like nobodies business if you’re not careful.
But social media platforms can be used for free too. Facebook for example can be used to generate leads and sales by joining groups and connecting with people who might find your products useful. Tweak your profile so people can see your offer on it and create an enticing picture which leads them to a landing page, where you can collect their email. More on this in this article: promote clickbank products for free.
Affiliate marketing on Quora is an option for marketing too. Quora is a question and answer website but you can answer questions and lead people to your content; either through links in your answers or through you bio.
Belief and Affiliate Marketing
At first when you start out as an affiliate, you’ll probably fall into the trap of jumping from one strategy to another. There’s many affiliate marketing promotion methods to choose from and the danger is to get lost finding one which suits you. For years I was stressed, frustrated and procrastinating while jumping around without direction to apply myself to affiliate marketing.
The best advice is to pick a strategy which suits you and stick with it until you have mastered it. But this can be very difficult; especially if you don’t fully believe in what you’re doing. If you’ve been blogging for months and have nothing to show for it, you can easily lose hope. But keep going because once you start seeing results from any given strategy, you can hone in on it. Or try another strategy if you’ve given it a good amount of time – several months of consistent work.
Expect blogging to be a lengthy process though, and if you don’t have the patience for it, start with another strategy.
Pareto’s Principle Applies
Pareto’s principle states that 80% of effects come from 20% of the causes. This is very true for affiliate marketers. In the first instance you will likely find you are doing a lot of work with no results. But once you find the one activity which makes the largest difference to your affiliate business, you can focus in on it. As you progress, you’ll find that you are doing less and less but still keep making money through affiliate commissions.
Ask yourself important questions about your actions and your outcomes. You are always the cause of your effects. So if you have a bad outcome, it’s because your actions aren’t creating those outcomes. How can you change your behaviour to create the outcomes you want in life? Clue, it starts with your thinking and taking responsibility for your outcomes.
Once you start earning from affiliate marketing, and know which affiliate marketing promotion methods are bringing your the result, you can focus on it with more belief and more confidence that you’re doing the right work. Until that point you need to keep learning and “failing forwards“.
If you’re struggling with your affiliate marketing business or are interested in starting one from scratch, join an online business community and get the help you need. Access a webinar by clicking the image below and meet one of my mentors Stuart who will share his huge experience of earning online.
