This Post was brought to you by Sarah Williams, you can follow along on Twitter at @bizwinners:
Affiliate marketing is a unique form of online promotion in which businesses pay webmasters a small wager in exchange for driving leads and sales to their online entity through efforts of their own. This practice is a win-win for both the business and webmaster as the profit potential is huge for both. However, affiliate marketing can be a tricky sector to master as there is a thin line between naturally suggesting products/services and spamming your subscribers and visitors. When people visit your website or open your newsletter, they do it expecting to be educated and entertained. The last thing they want is to be invaded with obtrusive requests to click or annoyed by substandard link filled content. In order to succeed in affiliate marketing you have to build trusting relationships with the right niche of people, and you have to offer out quality content with relevant links. Check out these 5 strategies to build affiliate marketing assets.
5 Amazing Content Strategies:
Build your List with Paid Traffic
The more people who subscribe to your newsletter equals a greater likelihood of you building continual assets from your affiliate marketing techniques, so it’s important to build a generous list of subscribers. While there are various ways to build your list such as running giveaways and individual requests, the fastest method is through paid traffic. Paid for ad campaigns direct and encourage potential subscribers to opt-in to your mailing list usually with a sample of your quality content or with a quality freebee. Once you start recruiting subscribers, you need to build a long and trusting relationship with them by always offering valuable content filled with naturally placed affiliate links that they cannot resist clicking on.
Outbrain is a great tool to use if you are intending to drive more traffic and get higher click through rates.
Build Authority Sites
An authoritative website is one that offers high quality content that people enjoy and continuously visit and interact with. When you focus on building your brand in the form of creating an authoritative website then you allow yourself to reap the rewards of high traffic, popularity and continual revenue from affiliate marketing. The quality content you offer your audience should be relevant to your niche and on-going; you need to dedicate the time to post new content frequently to keep the interest of your visitors and strengthen your presence and ranking. The content you post should be varied in forms of textual posts, infographic’s, videos and interviews with other authorities. Although textual posts are important for successful marketers, statistics show that people enjoy the visual appeal of graphics and tend to share them more eagerly, so offering a healthy balance of informative infographics and written posts is important for build authority sites.
VirtualHosting.com is an excellent example of an authoritative website which offers high quality content. The content is relative to the targeted audience of the website and therefore this maintains interest for viewers. It is best to remember that content is always King.
SEO Link Building
Link building is a valued method of SEO that refers to the links on other websites that point to your website. This form of search engine optimization is essential for building assets as quality links can improve your rank in search engine, strengthen your brand authority and inspire a continual increase of direct traffic. The link that points back to your site can be in the form of guest posting, reviews or interviews. To link build you will have to find quality prospects to link to your website. Finding sites within your space to link to your site is easy once you know how to find them. You can find quality websites through community forums, search engines and tools that are developed to help you find strong prospects.
Here is a great resource by Eric Ward that is really worth checking out
Review and Endorse
There is a lot of value in reviews and endorsements; when you endorse a product or a service, you are ultimately giving your trusting audience the seal of approval on your suggestion. Reviewing and endorsing the products and services you are affiliated with will encourage your subscribers and visitors to check it out which can inspire them to take an action that can lead to revenue. To review you can either purchase the product that you are promoting yourself or you can contact the maker of the product/service and ask them to sponsor your review. If you have been supplied with a review copy, you need to disclose it, either way, it is important to research the product that you are endorsing before recommending it. Reviews should be honest, non bias and forthcoming to build trust and loyalty.
There are many websites out on the internet which give really good, honest reviews about absolutely anything. For example, Which? Reviews anything from Cars to Stream irons, it focuses on what people are talking about and communicates with consumer experts.
Tutorials and Video Demonstrations
Tutorials and video demonstration goes in line with content that teaches and graphics that entertain. Demonstrating how the product or service that you are suggesting works will spark an interest and inspire those viewing to naturally click on your links. Honest “real people” tutorials and demonstration makes the product seem more organic and less salesy. These methods have the extreme ability to go viral especially if you integrate social sharing. Once your demonstrations reach popularity the potential for abundant revenue increases.
There are loads of great tutorials out on the web; Whiteboard Friday’s by The Moz Blog are great teaching devices, just like this one by Rand Fishkin.
Successful affiliate marketing is less about trying to trick your subscribers and visitors to click on links and more about building strong, likable content that visitors enjoy interacting with. Once you have mastered the art of building an authoritative website and brand, continual revenue will come naturally. It is also important to only recommend products and services that intertwine with your core audience. If you start off recommending links that add no value to your niche then you will be labelled as untrustworthy and spammy. Your subscribers and visitors are your fans; they value you as a provider of quality content, so you must continue to reward them with quality content so you can strengthen your webmaster/subscriber relationship and reap affiliate marketing assets for years to come.
Author Bio: Sarah is passionate about helping local businesses. She spends many hours blogging, creating informative content and developing websites.
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