So what is the best way to promote affiliate products? There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing:
- Blogging
- List building
- PPC – pay per click marketing
- Social media
- Video marketing
- SEO – search engine optimisation
- etc.
So what’s the best way? Well it really depends on a number of things like your marketing budget, your available time, what you like doing and what products you’re actually promoting. However, all that aside I would say the best way to promote affiliate products is through a combination of email marketing and paid marketing.
What Is The Best Way To Promote Affiliate Products? Paid Marketing
There’s a few reasons why paid marketing offers the best opportunity for affiliates. Paid marketing is faster and more scalable which means you can start generating income more quickly too. But there’s investment involved and paid marketing is not right for everyone nor for every type of affiliate product. Low value physical products, for example, are much harder to profit from when selling them using paid marketing.
It’s far more difficult running paid campaigns and making a profit if your product only pays a measly 5-10% commission, unless of course you’re using high ticket affiliate products.
But paid marketing has another advantage and that’s speed. Within a few days you can determine whether your marketing campaign is working. Whereas with content marketing it can take months before you see the results. So content marketing is much slower and results are less scalable.
What Is The Best Way To Promote Affiliate Products? Paid Marketing Problems
There’s a couple of issues with using paid marketing. It costs you marketing budget for starters and at first you should expect to spend money while learning. This puts many people off because they can’t afford to spend money while learning, or they just get fed up of spending without selling products! So they quit!
The other issue with paid marketing is compliance. Unless you are following some specific training it can be easy to get your account shut down for a minor violation. Having a Google or facebook compliant site is vital to avoid this happening.
Another small issue is sending traffic directly to affiliate links is often a violation of the terms and conditions of many advertising platforms. Make sure you know what’s allowed and what isn’t to avoid any problems. One way around this is to send traffic to a landing page instead of directly to affiliate products.
However if you can sidestep these issues and are happy to spend money learning paid marketing it offers a far quicker outcome with affiliate marketing if you’re prepared to put the work in. Ideally send paid traffic to a landing page and collect subscribers for your email marketing list. Follow up with emails promoting your affiliate products and offering value to your subscribers, while building trust.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is super powerful for affiliates. If you’re selling directly from a website, your visitors only have a small window of opportunity to buy your product/s. Usually website visitors are gone in a matter of minutes, never to return. But if you can encourage them to join your email list, you can communicate with them for days, weeks, months and even years and decades!
Most customers will need at least a few “touch points” of a product in order to make a buying decision. Email marketing gives them this in the form of multiple email follow ups. Providing the affiliate is offering value to the subscriber, and they are trusted, people are much more likely to buy having been given a huge amount of value already.
Reciprocity is a powerful tool for affiliates and if they can give someone a huge value upfront, that person will be more likely to make a buying decision in the future.
Email marketing works and most top affiliates use it.
Best Way To Promote Affiliate Products?
Of course the best way to promote affiliate products is also fairly subjective. The best way really is the way you can make it work. Whether you align more with content generation or paid marketing, good affiliates create value and help people with certain problems. If you can give someone more value than they pay in fees, you’re likely going to be a wealthy affiliate.
Keep this in mind whatever your marketing method. I’ve chosen to focus on paid marketing in conjunction with email marketing for this article. But there are hundreds of other ways which can work really well too.
Ideally use email marketing in conjunction with whatever other marketing strategy you employ. I’m a fan of blogging and love making sales from my blogs without paying for advertising. However, the time it takes to build enough content for this to happen on a regular basis will likely be too much for most people to bare! Paid marketing is a much faster method and you can get traction much more quickly.
Blogging is a long term strategy which can take months before you see any results from it!
Summary
The best way to promote affiliate products (in my humble opinion) is to use a paid marketing platform and send visitors to a landing page where you collect their email address. Then follow up with email marketing.
Of course this strategy will work better with a high ticket offering in your sales funnel and subscription affiliate products which pay out recurring commissions.
You still need to learn about targeting to get the right kinds of people on your list, and your success will depend on the customer’s affiliate marketing journey too. A congruent messaging tactic will work much better than conflicting messaging. Well targeted adverts will work better if you know your target market.
But paid marketing is the fastest way to build an affiliate business and many will quit when approaching content marketing. It can take months or even years to get any traction. Content marketing isn’t as scalable either as paid marketing is. With an email list you can extend the time period of getting to know you from your subscribers point of view.
Emails can help convey the value of your products much better than straight from a website. With an email list you can communicate with thousands of subscribers and a single email can mean multiple sales in a single day!
Still, not everyone has the budget for paid marketing and if you are more time rich than financially rich, another cheaper strategy might suit you much better! Blogging or video marketing are also great strategies if you have the patience! See also unpaid social media marketing and 22 ways to promote affiliate products.