Affiliate content marketing refers to an affiliate marketing strategy using content as the source. Content marketers use all sorts of content to bring their message to consumers and lead them to their affiliate products.
Blogging, Video blogging (v’logging), infographics, webinars, online reports, pdf downloads and ebooks are all kinds of content which affiliates use to draw customers to their products and services and increase their authority within a certain topic.
Affiliate content marketing is a good way to find customers if you’re on a budget. While paid marketing is a much faster method to build an affiliate business, content marketing is much cheaper. With paid marketing, you can get a lot of traffic quite quickly. But with content marketing it tends to be much slower.
Affiliate Content Marketing: Blogging
Blogging, for example, is a popular method of building content to attract an audience in order to sell affiliate products. With blogging, you can attract an audience from the search engines for free. But this can take some time and considerable effort, and a high ranking on Google isn’t guaranteed.
Bloggers often work hard at promoting their content as well as creating it. Without promoting your content as a content marketer, you’re relying very heavily on your content being indexed in the SERPS (search engine results pages) for traffic. This is a very precarious decision because there may be a huge volume of other bloggers within the same topic as yours.
To help boost traffic bloggers also share their content on social media and build connections with other bloggers through back linking to their content. Over time and with persistence, bloggers can eventually earn a passive income from promoting affiliate products through their content.
Affiliate Content Marketing: YouTube
Many affiliate marketers use YouTube to promote their affiliate products through content building. YouTube is the second most popular search engine on the internet after Google (who also owns YouTube). So it’s a good source for traffic if you’re an affiliate marketer.
To get a lot of traffic from YouTube through content marketing alone, you’ll need to build a lot of valuable content by uploading videos on a regular basis for a long period of time. If you do this for long enough, YouTube will reward you with more traffic which can be monetised with either affiliate marketing or through using Adsense.
To get a lot of traffic organically is much more difficult than paying for it of course. So content creators will often have to spend several months creating content on a regular basis to even have a chance of regular traffic.
Online Webinars
Webinars are a good way for affiliate marketers to create content which is useful and which can lead people to their affiliate products. You can also automate webinars and have them working for you without actually showing up in person to each one you do.
Training & Educational Videos
Videos are good also for offering value through content. They can be delivered via email marketing or directly from a website. While offering value in your content, you are also raising your perceived authority within a specific area of expertise.
Videos are often much better than written content because you can deliver a lot more information with a video. By giving huge value you are building trust with your visitors. Trust is a rare commodity online and research has shown that most consumers need several touch points before they make a buying decision. So selling something directly from a website can be tough.
By delivering content via email marketing, you can more easily overcome this barrier as an affiliate. With email marketing, you can deliver content which is useful while building trust to multiple subscribers simultaneously.
Summary
Affiliate content marketing is typically done through videos or blogging. But there’s many ways affiliates can create value through their content to gain attention of potential customers for their affiliate products. Webinars, videos, blog posts, infographics, ebooks, digital downloads and pdf’s are just a few examples of affiliate content marketing.
Just creating content is only half of the equation though and content marketers need to actively promote their content to get more eyes on it. This is done through many methods including back linking, guest posting, social media sharing, SEO (search engine optimisation), paid marketing and email marketing to name just a few.