Looking for affiliate hacks? While there’s no quick and easy solutions to long term success with affiliate marketing, some little “hacks” can save you some time and effort.
Before I found an online community of mentors and coaches, I struggled with affiliate marketing (access here). I thought that “hacks” could do all the work for me! Sadly hacks can’t build your affiliate business for you. But they can make your life easier. So here’s a few of the hacks I’ve found which I have used to make affiliate marketing that little bit easier.
Affiliate Hacks & Traffic
One of the main problems for affiliate marketers on a budget is getting traffic. When you have money to spend on ads, affiliate marketing can be a whole lot easier. But if you’re trying to do everything on a shoestring budget, it’s a lot more difficult.
When I started learning affiliate marketing I did everything as cheaply as possible. So I learnt a few strategies which helped me to get traffic for free, or very cheaply!
Here’s a little hack which helps me get more traffic out of my blog posts.
The hack is to use a couple of Plugins for a WordPress website which can allow you to automatically syndicate your content when you publish it throughout your social media accounts completely for free. It also lets you syndicate older posts automatically on a timer. It’s called Revive Old Posts and it’s a free plugin. While Revive Old Posts is free, there’s limited usage on the free version. To extend this usage to more social media platforms there’s another little hack you can use.
Affiliate Hacks: If This Then That
IFTTT or If This Then That is a tool which offers social media connectivity. What’s useful about this tool is that you can use it in conjunction with Revive Old Posts to trigger a social share from Twitter.
Since Revive Old Posts has limited functionality with the free version, you can only automate the share of your posts to two social media accounts. But if you use IFTTT as well, you can use many more. Set up Revive Old Posts to send a Tweet to your Twitter account and then set up you IFTTT account to re-share this message and link throughout your other social media accounts. Using this little hack will save you a paid subscription to Revive Old Posts and automate social sharing of your blog posts. You can also share older posts so if you have a lot of older content you can revive it!
Affiliate Hacks & Traffic: A Niche Website
I’m a big fan of niche websites and have built many of them. If you’re not sure what a niche website is, it’s basically a website set up which targets specific keywords with the sole intention to get free traffic from the search engines. Some of my niche websites have been more successful than others, it has to be said. But this is a good strategy if you’re building an affiliate business on a small budget.
A niche website starts with keyword research. I like Google’s free keyword research tool, but there’s lot of others you can use too. To do keyword research for a niche website you need to start with an idea for your site. Ideally pick a topic you like so that you’ll be happy creating lots of content in it. You should also be able to monetise your content somehow, so also choose a topic you can monetise with your affiliate products.
Next type your main “seed” keyword into Google’s keyword planner and look at the results. You want to find a keyword which has a good amount of monthly views, but which isn’t too competitive in the search results. Once you find a good keyword, look to purchase a domain name with your keyword in. You can read more about this strategy in this article: how to build a niche website.
Affiliate Hacks: Subscription Products
This bit of knowledge can shave years of struggle from your affiliate efforts. By finding subscription products to promote as an affiliate, you can earn regular income much more quickly. As a beginner, the main struggle for me was in making that first online sale. When it happened, the success was short lived! Before long, I was back looking for another sale.
But with subscription affiliate products, you can earn ongoing income from each sale. Month after month, commissions keep coming in from previous sales. So even if you have a bad couple of months, the previous sales keep those commissions coming in like clockwork!
If you haven’t found a subscription product to sell, you can sign up on this site and find some through the products I promote on my email list. Another hack to find subscription affiliate products on Clickbank is to use CBEngine.com and look for the tab for recurring commissions on the left hand side. Click on it and it will show you all the products on Clickbank which offer recurring commissions.
Find Long Tail Keywords
Another hack I actively use for getting more SEO traffic to my blog posts is to write targeted articles with the keyword as the title. Before starting on an article, I use Google’s keyword planner in the same way as described above for building a niche website. Type in your main “seed” keyword into the planner. Then look for long tail derivatives of that keyword which offer low SEO difficulty and are easer to rank for.
In the niche of affiliate marketing most keywords are pretty competitive. But there’s thousands of other topics you can create content for if you’re selling affiliate products. In each niche, there will always be long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. You just need to get creative in finding them. When you do, write really good, long posts and out perform the existing content which currently ranks. I use an SEO plugin to help me write my posts (Yoast SEO).
Here’s a quick way to find long tail keywords using Google’s keyword planner. Once you type in your main keyword, you’ll be presented with the most popular searches for keywords within that particular niche. Click on the “Avg. Monthly Searches” box at the top of the column until you see the numbers drop.
This should give you the long tail keywords which have lower competition in the SERPS – search engine results pages. Although there’s far fewer searches for most of these keywords, there’s also a lot less competition. So if you’re going after free traffic this little hack can help a lot. You can also search for things such as pdf, download, cheatsheet, workshop, webinar and other such terms to find those little gold nuggets for which you can rank content for.
High Ticket Products
High ticket products are typically those which offer commissions of $500 and upwards. Before finding out about high ticket products I was frantically trying many methods to sell books from Amazon! Books! What a fool I was!
I still recommend books from Amazon if I think they would be helpful of course, but for the sale of a book I make only pennies/cents! It’s hardly worth the effort. But the sale of a high ticket product can make you thousands – often with the same work involved as with the book from Amazon! See also high ticket affiliate marketing products.
