The most effective affiliate marketing strategy is always one which works for you. Depending on your marketing budget, available time and choice of products, a variety of different approaches might be appropriate. You should definitely diversify in your products.
If a particular product disappears, you’re going to be pretty annoyed if you’ve created a tonne of content promoting only that one product. You should definitely own your relationship with your audience. Spending a fortune sending traffic straight to a product puts the product owner in the driving seat. If terms of the affiliate program change, you can find yourself out of pocket and trapped.
Building an email list ticks many of these boxes. It lets you control your traffic, build a long term relationship with your audience and diversify the products you choose to promote.
Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategy – Paid Marketing
There’s several ways you can build an email list and the bigger your list (in general) the more people you can serve with your content and products. Since we’re talking about the most effective affiliate marketing strategy here, I’m going to say this is with paid marketing. While content marketing is great once the work is done, and gives you free traffic (if successful), it’s slow and unreliable.
Paid marketing is fast and scalable. It’s instant too and you’ll know almost immediately whether a campaign is working or not. With content, it can take months to gain traction and much of your work (and time) is wasted.
The downside of using paid marketing is that you’ll need to spend money while you’re figuring out what works. Many of your campaigns are likely to not hit the mark. This can feel like throwing money away. But so long as you are learning from each advert you run by tracking your data, you’ll eventually find one which produces a profit.
One of the best ways to build an email list is to send paid traffic directly to a landing page. With a landing page software you can cross test your campaigns to find the most efficient one.
Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategy – Video Marketing
While contextual advertising does work, video often offers a better level of communication. This is particularly relevant if you’re selling something less tangible such as a digital product of some kind. Physical products are pretty self evident. But some digital products such as business training courses, for example, will require a more in-depth approach.
This is where video advertising comes into its own. A short video can relay a lot more information to a potential customer than a line of text. You can also build a greater level of trust through video if you communicate in a deliberate way to connect with your customer avatar.
Selling digital products which solve large problems (such as building an online business) can be more difficult unless you build rapport with your potential customers. This can be done by talking in a deliberate way and relating to their pain points or difficulties.
Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategy – Products & Alignment
Whatever strategy you decide to use as an affiliate, you also need to be well aligned with your product/s. The better you know your product/s the more you will understand the needs of your customers. This might mean choosing products which you find highly valuable and useful to you personally. If you don’t care about (or understand) your product/s as an affiliate, it’s going to be more difficult building your business around them, promoting them and talking about them.
Ultimately if you’re passionate about your affiliate products you’re going to be a much more heart aligned advocate for them. If you genuinely care about what you’re doing, it’s going to show in your marketing efforts. Video in particular is a very difficult medium to be fake in. Non-verbal communication is said to amount to as much as 60-70 of communication.
Affiliates are in effect “middle-men” for the sale of products and services online. But being aligned with what you’re doing always comes across better than simply selling something only because you want the outcome (the affiliate commission).
Subscription Products & High Ticket
With a well chosen product you can earn considerably more than with even the greatest products you can find online. Some products pay much more than others. For example, Amazon products pay as little as 1% commission. So even if you manage to sell a lot of them, you can still end up out of pocket, particularly if you’re using paid marketing for their promotion. Digital products pay a lot more than physical product, in general. The standard affiliate commission of a digital product is around 30%-40%. With physical product it is 1%-10%.
So with certain products you can earn more even if you sell fewer items. This is particularly true of subscription items which pay out recurring commissions and high ticket items which pay the most one-off commissions. Checkout my post on high ticket recurring income products.
Don’t Quit!
While your individual strategy will depend on your own personal circumstances, choice of products and marketing budget, it’s also a good idea not to quit! Not quitting is definitely the best strategy for success as an affiliate marketer. Since 95% of affiliates do quit, that leaves only 5% of people who start doing affiliate marketing who actually carry on a make an income out of it.
So this seems like the simplest advice to finish off this article with! Don’t quit. You’ll probably want to quit at some point or another. This is the time to take stock of what you have learned, not to make a judgement. Affiliate marketing does work and you can make a living out of it (if you believe you can). But you’ll need to keep at it for longer than most others.
To succeed you’re going to need to fail a few times first, which is only natural for anything you want to learn. Checkout my recent post on failing forwards in affiliate marketing.
Get help and support and start here.
Summary
Some affiliates build content and others run advertising. Some use video and others run contextual ads. Not every method of advertising will suit everyone and your best results will come by aligning yourself to products you love and a suitable strategy which you can sustain over the longer term. It’s important to choose a path you can enjoy and this might mean trying out one or two strategies to see what works best for you.
If you’re in a full time employment (and have little available time), you’re probably better off using paid advertising. If you’re short on funds, but are more time free, content marketing might be more suitable. It’s difficult to say which is the most effective affiliate marketing strategy across the board because everyone’s circumstances are different. Not everyone will have the patience for content marketing, and not everyone will have the budget to run paid ads.
Your product choice has something to say in terms of what is affordable too, as is your choice of niche. In a top niche, your ads are going to be more expensive, so you’ll need high ticket and recurring income products to be able to compete with those other ads.