What’s the best strategy for affiliate marketing? There’s countless affiliate marketing strategies you can use to sell affiliate products. Here’s just a short list of some of the most popular methods:
- PPC – Pay per click direct marketing. Paid advertising is fast and scalable, but expensive. You need to know your business model and whether you can actually profit while using this strategy. See affiliate marketing business models.
- List building – most affiliates build a list of email subscribers. This is worth doing whatever your traffic generation methods are. List building puts you in control of your audience.
- Content marketing – bloggers and v’loggers spend years creating content to draw the attention of Google, Bing and other search engines. If they are successful, they can get free traffic. But this takes time and a lot of commitment usually and a good understanding of SEO – (search engine optimisation). See also find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
- Social media – you can attract an audience with several social media tactics. Here’s one I share in the article: unpaid social media marketing. You can also use paid marketing on many social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube etc.
Best Strategy For Affiliate Marketing
So what’s the best strategy for affiliate marketing? This of course is massively subjective. What might be the best strategy from someone escaping a corporate career, definitely won’t be the same strategy from someone who has nothing to invest. Some strategies are cheaper than others, some take much longer than others. Generally speaking the long term slow strategies which take more time to do are cheaper than the ones which can work super fast. See fastest legit way to make money online.
But speed might not be appropriate if you aren’t desperate to escape a well paid job. If your in the “I hate my job but are pays well” camp, paid marketing is definitely the way to go. But to use paid marketing you’re best off with a high ticket affiliate program which offers recurring commissions. To purchase a sales funnel which contains high ticket programs isn’t cheap, so you’ll need to invest if you’re going down this route.
Alternatively, if you’re prepared to work harder for longer, creating content, you won’t have to spend as much on your affiliate business. But results can take time to show if you go the content marketing route. See also get traffic to your website free.
Best Strategy For Affiliate Marketing – Cheaper & Free Routes
To do affiliate marketing for free can be a long term affair. It’s tough, even if you can invest some money on the software which will make your life easier:
- Your own domain name and website – hosting provider (less than $5 a month) and domain name shouldn’t cost more than $10.
- An autoresponder is probably the best investment you’ll make if you’re serious about starting an affiliate business. See the power of email marketing. An autoresponder is around $10 a month and this rises as you get more subscribers.
With your own website and an autoresponder, you can build an affiliate business by picking an affiliate niche and building content. You can use YouTube to create video content for free, if you have a smart phone or recording device. Use your website to start blogging.
You can also write reviews using free blog sites such as hubpages.com. Free blog sites let you write on them even without owning your own website However, search engines are less likely to rank your content and so getting views can be more of a challenge. See affiliate marketing without investment.
Fastest Strategy Using High Ticket & Paid Marketing
Some will definitely consider this to be the best strategy for affiliate marketing. And if you can afford to put yourself at the highest commissions levels and devote several months to learning how to market your business, I would agree! Start here. With paid marketing you can scale up a business much more quickly. So by devoting time and energy to a scalable method of doing affiliate marketing, you give yourself the best chance of building a large income business – even if you’re starting from scratch.
A high ticket commission product range plus recurring commissions (from memberships) and multi-tier commissions can give you the best opportunity for making money with affiliate marketing. See SFM Digital Business System for more on this.
The Best Strategy Is One Which Works!
Whatever your strategy with affiliate marketing is, you need it to work for you. So whether you are trying to escape a job, or just looking for another source of income, you need to find a strategy you can pursue which fits with your work style, financial position and timescale. If you want to be making money from affiliate marketing quickly, the paid route is much faster. But if you have more time spare but less money, you might want to choose a path which requires less investment.
Generally speaking the cheaper routes are slower than the paid ones. For more strategies and tactics see my article 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Choose just one strategy and become an expert at it. Don’t jump all over the different strategies looking for a quick win.
At first affiliate marketing can be difficult. But if you choose subscription affiliate programs (which pay recurring commissions) and use a high ticket sales funnel, your efforts can go much further than if you use low value affiliate products which pay only small commissions. See affiliate marketing commission rates.
Keep going and never quit if you want to be successful with affiliate marketing. Whether you succeed or not with affiliate marketing is as much to do with your attitude and ability to learn from the journey as it is from choosing a strategy. I’ve failed hundreds of times with affiliate marketing. But learned from every one of these “failures”. Don’t see them as failures, just stepping stones to success. The more you fail, the more you’re moving forwards. “Fail forwards” and eventually success will be yours!
The best strategy for affiliate marketing is to bring this “die hard” mentality into your affiliate business. Whatever the journey throws at you, see it as an opportunity for self discovery and for learning. With this attitude, you can never fail.
