As we discuss at length, affiliate marketing is an exceptionally powerful way for entrepreneurs and small businesses to generate revenue – as primary or passive income, and grow their online presence and following. However, simply joining an affiliate program is not enough – you need a well-crafted content marketing strategy to drive traffic, build trust and ultimately, convert leads into sales.
Understanding the Affiliate Marketing Landscape
If you’re new here; “Welcome! We sincerely hope you find information that’s useful to your journey.”, but if you’re not, you already know the following;
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based income model where you earn commissions by promoting other people or companies’ products or services on your website, social media, or other digital channels.
As an affiliate marketer, your role is to create valuable content that educates, informs, and ultimately persuades your audience to make a purchase through your unique affiliate links.
You may not be aware, but the affiliate marketing industry has actually experienced significant growth in recent years, with global spending on affiliate marketing expected to reach $8.2 billion by 2022! Among other reasons, this growth is believed to be driven by the increasing popularity of e-commerce, the rise of influencer marketing, and the ability for small businesses and individuals to earn passive income through affiliate partnerships.
As we’ve said, though, content plays a crucial role in the success of affiliate marketing, right? So by creating high-quality, informative, and engaging content, you can attract and retain a loyal audience, build trust, and drive conversions through your affiliate links. Let’s take a closer look at how.
Developing a Targeted Affiliate Content Strategy
If you’re setting out to create an effective affiliate content strategy for your entrepreneurial pursuit(s), I’d highly suggest you’ll want to start by identifying your target audience. Some of you will already know what this involves (and if you want a more detailed outline, check out The Remote Entrepreneur’s Playbook), and for those of you who are not yet familiar;
Who are the people most likely to be interested in the products or services you’re promoting? What are their pain points, interests, and buying behaviours?
Once you’ve started to define your target audience, you can consider setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) content creation and marketing goals. Your goals might include launching your site, crafting content that gets indexed, increasing website traffic or lead generation, growing your email list – or starting a list (if you’ve not already, using ConvertKit as a creator), or driving a certain number of affiliate sales per specific period of time, or a lifetime of a particular campaign you’d like to be involved in.
Make sense? Next, you’ll want to decide on the types of content to create.
This could include blog posts, product reviews, how-to guides, videos, podcasts, and social media posts.
The key within these is to create authentic, helpful and.or actionable content that provides genuine value to your audience and naturally integrates your affiliate links.
A ‘Pro Tip’ to all of this;
To stay organized and consistent, I’d strongly suggest you develop a content calendar that outlines your publishing schedule, topics, and distribution channels. You may not have a combined ADHD/OCD diagnosis like I do, but I can assure you this will help you manage your time and ensure that you’re creating content on a regular basis.
Creating a few articles or posts is a fantastic start, but consistency in message and in delivering developing content over time is going to be key in building out your following, and ultimately your business.
Optimizing Content for SEO and Affiliate Sales
If you want your audience, community, or followers to feel a trust in you as you build and promote, you’re going to be building out content, yes (or you’d not be here, also ‘yes’)? There are a few things you’ll want to know in ensuring your content is optimized, and here are two key areas in which I’d suggest you focus:
Keywords:
You’ve undoubtedly heard the term ‘keyword’ somewhere out there before, right? Well, what others may or may not have told you is just how essential keyword research is for affiliate marketing success.
Look, if you were wanting to sell your used lawn tractor to a group of your friends one night at a party, would you begin the conversation with any mention whatsoever of the lawn tractor? Or would you simply and randomly chatter away about a device you have that could help them, maybe save them some time, does a really great job, etc., but not mention what it actually was? Would you then follow up in asking who wanted ‘first dibs’ at purchasing it?
Sure, there are some ‘tactics’ out there that employ such a hook…but if you’re wanting to speak to your audience in the way you do your friends, and if you wanted to have your audience trust you in the way that your friends do, would you not be telling them what it is that you’re selling?
Consider this similar to reaching out to NEW friends (new members of your growing online community), in that you want to be attracting those who are interested in what it is you’re doing, being, or promoting, yes? And so you want to be showing up in their searches, their feeds, etc.
For that, you’ll want to be familiar with the keywords and phrases that will get you there (as we do with Jaaxy, inside Wealthy Affiliate).
So by identifying the keywords and phrases that your target audience is searching for, you can create authentic content that is more likely to rank in search engines and attract the right kind of traffic for your offering or interests.
Affiliate Links:
If you’re signed up as an affiliate, you’re almost beyond composure at the thought of an alert letting you know you’ve generated a sale, right? Well, you’ll be waiting quite some time if you’re not actually providing a link that your prospective purchaser can click on or follow. You’ll need to create links.
When incorporating affiliate links into your content, I’d suggest it’s important to do so as organically as is possible, and in a way that provides value to your audience.
I’ve actually chosen to NOT include certain affiliate links or opportunities within an article – even if that link, opportunity or campaign was the original idea behind the article. If I got into the body of the content I was creating, and ultimately didn’t feel the link felt authentic or genuine once place, I’ve pulled it (and will again, and continued on with that great piece of content). At times I’ve found other links that felt more organic, and in others I’ve simply not included any at all, but still delivered helpful, actionable content for my followers. – Joe
This means you’ll not only want to ensure it’s genuine or pertinent to the article, but I should mention that it also means you’ll absolutely want to avoid excessive or intrusive affiliate links. Jamming an article completely up with links is not only a turn-off your readers and negatively impact your credibility, but you may be penalized by the search engines, as well.
There are other ways to ensure ‘reach’.
On-page SEO best practices, such as optimizing your page titles, meta descriptions, and image alt text, can also help improve the visibility and performance of your affiliate content.
Finally, don’t forget to focus on user experience and conversion optimization. Make sure your content is easy to read, visually appealing, and encourages your audience to click on your affiliate links in a way that feels relevant, and natural to them.
Leveraging Multiple Platforms for Content Distribution
Those who are considered to be the more successful affiliate marketers understand the importance of cross-channel content distribution (and given all that I am in my neuro work at Abundant Mind and Plasticityportal.com, please let me be clear that I consider ‘success’ to be in the eye of the individual to measure).
That said, by sharing your content across multiple platforms, such as your website, social media, and email, you can reach a wider audience, and you can increase your chances in having your affiliate links being seen and clicked.
Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube can be particularly effective for affiliate marketing, as they allow you to showcase your products or services in a visually engaging way and leverage the power of influencer marketing.
Email marketing is another powerful tool for affiliate marketers. By building an email list of engaged subscribers, you can regularly share your content, promote your affiliate offers, and nurture your audience towards making a purchase.
Then, still, the social media platforms we’d not specifically covered aren’t to be left on the bench. If you use them frequently or regularly, have a following or community that you speak directly do and engage with, and they’re on a different platform, then consider how you can tweak your messaging in order to authentically engage.
Measuring Success and Tweaking Your Strategy
Let’s start to wrap this short guide up for you in covering the one piece of the long-term strategy puzzle so many neglect (or simply aren’t aware of);
The Measure:
If you’re in this entrepreneurial endeavour of yours ‘for the long haul’, you have to be in the loop on what’s working, what’s not, and HOW it is or is not working, don’t you? This means tracking how well the articles are doing. Who is reading them, how are they finding your articles, how long as they staying on them, etc.
To track the performance of your affiliate content, you’ll need to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenue generated from affiliate sales.
There are a variety of tools available to help you track and analyze your affiliate content performance, such as Google Analytics, affiliate network dashboards like provided by Wealthy Affiliate, and specialized marketing analytics platforms.
Regularly reviewing your data, running A/B testing different approaches to similar content, etc., can help you identify what’s working and what needs to be improved. Thing is, you can’t be afraid to measure, and you can’t be afraid to pivot your strategy based on the insights you gather from your analytics.
By implementing these content marketing strategies, you can unlock the full potential of your affiliate marketing business, drive more traffic, build trust with your audience, and ultimately increase your commissions and revenue.