There’s many different ways to do affiliate marketing. In this article I’m going to explore some of the ways to promote affiliate products. Here’s a quick overview of some of the methods of product promotion:
- PPC – Pay Per Click paid marketing platforms
- Email marketing – collecting subscribers on an email list and sending out regular messages via email
- Blogging – writing content on a website
- Video blogging – creating and uploading video content to YouTube or TikTok
- Unpaid social media marketing – using your social media presence to find customers
- Domain name forwarding – forwarding a domain name to your affiliate link for use in advertising
- Link cloaking – using link cloaking and shortening software
- Email signature – using your affiliate link or website domain in your email signature
- Content syndication – used with blogging or video blogging
- Link building – used with SEO (search engine optimisation) and content marketing
- Landing pages – used to collect subscribers and add them to your email list
- Banner advertising – advertising a product with a banner on a website
- Off line advertising – newspapers, magazines, car stickers, flyers, business cards, banner advertising
See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
Different Ways To Do Affiliate Marketing
One of the most popular methods of affiliate marketing is to send targeted traffic to a landing page and collect emails. Over time, affiliates can build their email lists into the tens of thousands of subscribers. By sending out useful emails on a regular basis, they can build a relationship with their subscribers. Once they have built trust, their subscribers are more likely to buy from them through their affiliate links.
To find targeted traffic is often the most difficult aspect of affiliate marketing. You can either pay for it, or work for it if you’re using a cheaper or free marketing strategy, such as blogging. Paid marketing is by far the easiest because you can simply turn it on by running a campaign. Platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook and YouTube offer the ability to pay for traffic. Once you figure out how to make a profit with a small budget, you can increase it very quickly to increase sales. Simply turn up your daily budget to reach more people.
With blogging, you have a much slower route. You need to create a lot of content in order to get only a modest amount of traffic. How much traffic you get will depend on your content marketing strategy, your niche and the work you put in. This strategy can take months before you see any substantial numbers of visitors.
Different Ways To Do Affiliate Marketing – Tracking
One of the main reasons why affiliate marketing is done mostly online is the ability to track sales from each individual method. Without tracking, (and if you run a number of different strategies side by side), you won’t know which ones are performing the best. As such you can’t decide which ones to keep paying for and which ones to stop running.
Once you have made some successful sales, you’ll want to know which of your advertising campaigns have brought them in. Before this can happen you’ll need to test out a few strategies to see what works for you.
With an offline advertising campaign, this can be more tricky. You can’t get people to click on a flyer, for example. So you can’t track the click. But you can send people to specific websites and have a different website on each advert. But this is a lot of work to keep up with. So by using clickable links, you can track the website url where you send individual customers. You can then determine which ads are performing the best without a lot of trouble.
Whatever methods of advertising you choose as an affiliate, it’s important to track your sales so you can make decisions on which campaigns are working the best.
Most Popular Methods
The most popular methods with affiliates are paid marketing, blogging, v’logging (video blogging), email marketing and social media strategies. There’s many strategies affiliates use on social media. Facebook, for example offers the ability to find potential customers through the various groups on the platforms.
By setting up your profile to showcase your offer, you can find and connect with people with a variety of interests and hobbies. See also unpaid social media marketing.
Most successful affiliate marketers will have an email list of subscribers. An email list puts you in greater control of your traffic. Relying on sending traffic directly to affiliate products means you can spend a lot of time and/or money without recouping your investment.
A list lets you connect with your subscribers over a longer period of time. People can buy from you from your email list months or even years after they sign up to it. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing to get free access to an autoresponder for list building.
Building an email list of subscribers with an autoresponder, is generally considered the best way to do affiliate marketing, whether you do it via paid traffic or organically through blogging or content creation.
Paid marketing is far faster than content marketing, but it can be expensive so you need to have the right affiliate products in order to make it profitable. See also subscription affiliate programs and what is high ticket affiliate marketing.