On the surface, affiliate marketing might appear as an idea for a side hustle. However, a report from Forbes shows that affiliate marketing is a booming business worth billions. The publication put the value of affiliate marketing at $9.7 billion in 2020 and reported almost double the sum ($14 billion) for 2021. However, like all other ventures, there are winners and losers.

Just as big names like Oprah and Kylie Jenner rake in millions from affiliate marketing, some people struggle to make thousands within a year’s marketing cycle. Why is this so? It is because affiliate marketing is a competitive market. The low barrier to entry has made it so populated that there is virtually no niche that doesn’t have a sizable amount of affiliate marketers.

This article will show you how to be successful in the competitive world of affiliate marketing. If you are just starting, you should check our article on affiliate marketing for beginners.

Key Highlights

• Choosing the right niche is essential for affiliate marketing success.
• Affiliate marketing is generally a numbers game. The more people you can attract, the more sales you can get.
• Paid traffic is an excellent tool for beginner and established affiliate marketers to get more people to their affiliate sites quickly.
• Content is an essential ingredient for successful affiliate marketing.
• An email list can increase the odds of your affiliate marketing success.

Choose Your Niche Wisely

Choosing the right niche is essential for success in affiliate marketing. However, you don’t have to limit yourself to a narrow field. Your affiliate marketing niche should be small enough to narrow your competition while broad enough to make it worth your time and effort. The critical factor to consider when choosing a niche is profitability.

Profitability is vital since you are essentially running a business. If you are not earning with affiliate marketing, you will get discouraged and quit the business entirely. Before dabbling in affiliate marketing, other essential factors include your interests, potential income stream, traffic volume, and unique strengths.

• Interests: We recommend focusing only on markets that interest you and are also profitable. So screen the available options for profitability. Then from the profitable ones, choose an affiliate marketing program that aligns with your interests and hobbies. You can leverage your knowledge and passion to create a thriving affiliate marketing business.
• Potential income streams: Some affiliate marketing niches only allow one income stream, while others open a wide door of possibilities. For instance, if you focus on web hosting, you can delve into domain registration, website builders, and email accounts. Furthermore, you can affiliate with many companies simultaneously using this approach. This approach ensures that your business stays afloat if one of the areas becomes unprofitable or one of the companies shuts down your affiliate account.
• Traffic volume: Affiliate marketing is generally a numbers game. The more people you can attract, the more sales you can get. So, choosing a niche that offers a high traffic volume to your affiliate marketing website would be best, as that would increase your conversion rates. This also means you should avoid niches where you will need to work extremely hard to get web traffic to your platform.
• Unique strengths: While profitability is your primary goal as an affiliate marketer, you are more likely to make more income from choosing a niche you understand well. You are better off targeting fellow web developers and other related professions if you are a web developer. This approach will help you build authority fast and make your affiliate marketing website a source of reliable and relatable information.

Choose a Content Platform

Choosing the right content platform is central to the success of your affiliate marketing business. The right content platform is ideally where your target audience interacts when they come online. Popular options include social media platforms, blogs and websites, youtube videos, and email campaigns.

However, there is no hard and fast rule to choosing a content platform for affiliate marketing programs, so you can use two or more platforms. That said, you must stay within bounds, especially when just starting. It is wise to focus on one platform and grow your brand on other media using that platform. Here are some affiliate marketing tips to help you choose the right platform.

• Research your audience: The most crucial consideration is the platform that your audience uses. For instance, the elderly use legacy social media like Facebook, while the young and trendy gravitate towards TikTok. However, setting up a blog or building a LinkedIn profile is a better affiliate marketing strategy if you target professionals.
• Consider your niche: Certain products do well on specific platforms. For instance, social media is your best bet if you sell fashion items, especially Instagram. Affiliate marketing blogs are better for people who want to delve into web hosting or software as a service. Those who want to sell digital products, such as self-help guides, might find that combining social media and email marketing offers the best results.
• Check your competitors: In many cases, success in affiliate marketing means copying the things your competitors are getting right. If your competitors are getting huge success on one content platform, then consider following that line. For instance, web hosting affiliate businesses do better when they offer helpful blog articles on web hosting providers.
• Know your limit: Each affiliate marketing strategy has its requirements. For instance, blogging requires well-researched content and a few graphics to make things interesting. If you have the budget, you can hire a professional to help with the content. If you don’t, focus on a platform where you can create content.

Choose the Right Affiliate Program

Affiliate marketing programs come in different forms, and each has its conditions and features. So you must ensure you choose the right affiliate network for your needs and customer base. Aside from those two, here are other key considerations that would influence your choice:

• Quality: While the end goal is profitability, you won’t earn long-term profits if you sacrifice quality for gain. So ignore the higher incentives for promotion junk and focus on programs that will boost your credibility.
• Online products: Generally speaking, promoting online products offer the best affiliate marketing ROI since they have a high conversion rate, and the customers get the profits immediately. For instance, if you market for a web hosting platform, the customer receives the hosting service immediately after they make payment.
• Target subscriptions: Affiliate programs that offer recurring commissions are the best long-term options since you can keep earning from one referral. However, you can also combine this with programs that provide single commissions to ensure you keep earning from all bases.

Create Great Content

Content is an essential ingredient for affiliate marketing success. The content draws traffic to your platform and makes web visitors click on your affiliate ads. And you want to focus exclusively on content that does those two things. Your content needs to align with the interests of your target audience and the keywords related to your niche.

Here are some affiliate marketing tips to help you create great content that converts online users into visitors and visitors into purchasers:

• Evergreen content: Evergreen content is always valuable to your target audience. These include explainers, how-to guides, and case studies. Of course, you can always create content based on trending issues, but most of your content should be timeless.
• Product specific: Your content ideas should center around your affiliate products or services. While doing that, ensure that your content still provides valuable and actionable information regardless of whether your audience purchases your promoted products.

Direct Potential Traffic to Your Affiliate Site

Creating great content is only one part of the task. The other aspect is to get people to read it. From there, they will click on your affiliate links, and you will earn from their actions.

Here are three affiliate marketing tips to help you attract traffic to your affiliate site.

1. Paid Traffic

Paid traffic is an excellent tool for beginner and established affiliate marketers to get more people to their affiliate sites quickly. Buying paid traffic works because you can set your ads to be shown only to the most engaged, interested audiences.

All paid ad platforms allow you to select your audience based on key demographics such as age, gender, occupation, education, location, and income level. Establishing your affiliate marketing campaigns solely on these specific demographics of customers will produce more ROI on your ad spending.

When done well, affiliate campaigns fueled by paid traffic will provide far more profit than their initial cost. However, this approach has its risks. For instance, bots can mess up your engagement metrics, driving up costs with nothing to show at the end of the campaign.

Here are the best-paid traffic sources for affiliate marketers:

Pay-per-click (PPC)

PPC advertising refers to buying ad slots on search engine pages. These ads can appear on the regular search results or by the side. This type of paid traffic gets the immediate attention of people searching for keywords that relate to your business. Google Ads is the most rewarding platform for PPC advertising.

The key benefit of PPC is that you can reach millions of target customers with a single ad. You must successfully bid on the top searched keywords and have fully SEO-optimized content to back it up. The downside is that PPC can get very competitive, especially for high-demand keywords.

Furthermore, you must ensure your ads adhere to the criteria set by the ad space provider.

Link and Banner Ads

You can place link and banner ads on websites that discuss issues relating to your niche. These ads come in various sizes, shapes, and placements. When a reader clicks on a banner ad, they get directed to a landing page where they get more info on the advertised products or services.

Link and banner ads can effectively reach your target audience and show what you offer. The downside is that they are ineffective since many users use ad-blocking software on their browsers. Furthermore, many web users have become “blind to banners”, meaning they scroll past banner ads without paying attention to them.

Social Media Ads

Social media ads are ads on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Most social media platforms offer in-feed ad spots where your ads show like regular content in your audience feed. You can even include call-to-action buttons to allow users to buy the advertised product from the app or website.

By using social media for advertisement, affiliate marketers can reach target audiences already interested in what they offer. For instance, Facebook Ads provide a very effective way of targeting audiences based on predefined criteria. This way, you can ensure that the people seeing your ads will make purchases. You must ensure that your ad provides value and aligns with the language and feel of regular feed content.

Native Advertising

Native advertising is a discreet way of putting ads on other websites. The ads are signed to match the language and feel of the surrounding content so the readers cannot immediately tell that they are viewing an ad. Affiliate marketers can use native advertising on personal websites, social media, and search engines. The goal is to make the ads match the form and function of their surrounding content so it fits seamlessly into the user experience.

Since native ads do not disrupt the user experience, consumers will likely click on them. As such, they are a choice form of paid traffic source for brands that want to connect the readers of established websites into customers. Depending on the website format, you can place these ads on the top, side, middle, or bottom of articles.

2. Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is optimizing your website content to rank higher in search engine result pages. The higher the rank, the more customers you can attract to your website. Although SEO is an entirely different discipline from affiliate marketing, it is an essential factor for anyone who wants to develop a solid affiliate marketing strategy.

You should know how your website currently fares on SEO best practices. You can use online tools such as Seobility and SEOptimer to get a detailed SEO report on your website. Even if the report gives you a high score, there are still areas where you can improve. Here are some key areas you can work on to increase your website SEO.

• Keywords placement: Search engine optimization is all about understanding the keywords that apply to your products and leveraging them to get more visitors. To get this right, consider the keywords your target audience uses when searching for solutions your products can offer. You can also use keyword research tools to find the relevant keywords to work on. You can then tailor your content around these keywords and include them in your product descriptions.
• Helpful content: While targeting keywords is vital, you should also focus on making your content readable and beneficial to humans. If you attract visitors using keywords but do not have content that helps them, they will leave your website before you can say “SEO.” When too many visitors leave your website as quickly as they arrive, it can increase your bounce rate, hurting your SEO. So ensure your content is interesting and informative and gives your audiences what they expect to find.
• Label correctly: While using the right keywords and creating high-value content are essential, how you label your content is just as important. For instance, you should include headings and subheadings as search bots use your headings and subheadings to determine the most critical parts of your content. Other areas to optimize are your domain name (before you set up your website) and meta descriptions. Meta descriptions are essential, especially for non-content pages, and should contain relevant keywords.
• Consistent publishing: Creating and publishing new content on your affiliate marketing website offer two benefits. First, it draws new customers to your website, especially when to link your new content with existing ones. Secondly, it also shows search engines that your site is active. Aside from creating new content, you can also update your existing content to keep them in line with new data and insights.
• Site maintenance: How your website operates can also affect your SEO. For instance, if your website takes too long to load, most visitors will click out instead of waiting. This would increase your bounce rate and reduce your search engine ranking. As such, you want to ensure your website loads in under a second, two at most, and there are no glitches or broken links.
• Backlinks: Backlinks are a way to show search engines that you are an expert in your niche. However, it only works when other expert websites link back to your website because if a disreputable site links to your pages, it can damage your SEO. You can use any of the free backlink checkers to review the sources linking to your sites and remove the unreputable ones. You can build backlinks by creating content other websites will want to link to.
• Conversions optimization: You need to optimize your website to convert visitors into purchasers. That is the end goal of using SEO for affiliate marketing. Some of the tips to help out here include:
  • Using solid and viable calls to action
  • Crafting attention-grabbing headlines and subtitles
  • Including keywords and critical information in your product descriptions
  • Adding attention-grabbing visuals such as images, videos, or GIFs to your content
  • Removing any element that distracts viewers from your offer
  • Offering incentives such as discounts, coupons or promo codes

3. Email List

Having an email list can increase the odds of your affiliate marketing success. With email marketing, you can reach a wide range of audiences, build long-term relationships with customers and increase your conversion rate.

The main challenge with an email list is building one. However, it typically gets easier once you have gotten your first hundred subscribers.

Here are some tips to help you build an email list as an affiliate marketer:

• Use an email provider: An email service provider makes things easy. You can automate the signup process, schedule emails and even segment your audience. Furthermore, you can set the email provider to request subscribers to confirm they want to join your email list. This approach ensures that you only have engaged audiences on your email list.
• Use signup forms: The quickest way to grow your email list is to convert your subscribers. To do so, integrate signup popups and widgets on your website. Make sure the form is visible and straightforward. In most cases, you should only ask for their name and email address.
• Automate your emails: If you use an email service provider, you can create an automated email flow. This flow ensures that new subscribers get all required emails at predetermined times. This way, you can keep your new audiences engaged without manually sending emails each time you have a new subscriber.
• Work on your content: Your content gives your email marketing campaigns value. You need to produce content that informs and entertains your audience regularly. This requires you to stay updated on recent developments in your niche and address your audience’s issues. It would help if you focused on providing value before recommending your affiliate products.
• Audience Engagement: You should find ways through which audiences can engage with your email. Examples include social sharing buttons and ‘share email’ buttons that your subscribers can use to share your emails with friends and acquaintances. Remember to include a subscribe button in the emails so others can subscribe to your list.
• Offer exclusive email content: You can make some of your content only available to email subscribers. This acts as an incentive for people to join your email list. This exclusive content could be special discounts, key insights, or case studies. The idea is to offer some of your best content that one cannot find anywhere else.
• Personalization: Address each recipient with their first name. It would be best if you also tried to keep the tone of your email friendly and informal. You can also make personalized product recommendations based on their online habits. Lastly, you can celebrate special events such as national holidays or birthdays and offer your subscribers incentives to shop on those days.
• Space your emails: Limiting your emails to once or twice a week is generally advisable. You should also stick to your schedule and inform your audience if you change it.
• Adhere to the guidelines of your affiliate program: Some affiliate programs allow email marketing, while others don’t. Check the fine print to see if they allow email marketing and what rules they require you to follow.

How To Get Affiliate Link Clicks

An affiliate link is a unique link from the brand or company whose products you are advertising. It allows them to reward you for any successful sale correctly. The more clicks you get on your affiliate link, the more commission you are likely to make. As such, getting clicks on your affiliate links is essential for success in affiliate marketing.

However, getting clicks is part science, part art. It would help if you shared your affiliate links in ways that will grab your audience’s attention, appeal to their goals, and motivate them to click on the link. Here are some tips to help you get more clicks:

Use Catchy Headlines and Attractive Visuals

People are likely to click on an interesting headline or a visually appealing image. Note that content headlines are not the same as the sales copy. Headlines stand alone and draw people’s attention. The ultimate purpose of a headline is to get a click and keep the customer’s attention on the offer. Suppose you want to create a catchy headline. In that case, you should:

• Use language that your ideal customer uses
• Introducing numbers into your headings
• Begin with “how to” where possible
• Show the result the reader can expect
• Use subheadings to break up your content

When it comes to visuals, you want to get it right. The right visual can inspire your audience to click on your affiliate link at once. Here are a few tips to help you create better visuals:

• Keep it simple: While you might be tempted to introduce complex infographics, keeping your visuals – videos, gifs, and images – simple is the best approach. Make it easy for anyone to understand in a short time.
• Focus on the key points: Don’t try to include all your content in your visuals. Instead, introduce only the key attributes. In most cases, visuals showing the result of using your advertised product will do the trick.
• Show, don’t tell: Using text in your visuals is fine. But you should make your visuals more of “showing” and less of “telling.”

Offer Discounts and Promotions

Offering discounts and promotions can be a great way to incentivize people to click on your affiliate links. Many affiliate marketers use promo codes and discounts to increase affiliate marketing success rates. Many consumers have become so used to promotions that they actively look for ways to buy products at discounted prices.

However, you want to offer discounts the right way. You don’t want to seem desperate for sales or give consumers the impression that the advertised products are worth less than the full price. Here are some tips to help:

• Timing: Unending promotions can hurt your affiliate business, so only use them when necessary. The two great times to integrate promotions in your affiliate marketing strategy are when you are advertising a product for the first time or dealing with a first-time audience.
• Purpose: You should know why you are offering promotions. Are you looking to expand your customer base, produce cash flow in a low sales season, or get attention for your affiliate marketing website?
• Simplicity: You should keep your discounts and promotions as simple as possible. Refrain from using language to confuse your audience into doing what they usually don’t do. Also, ensure that your audience understands the terms and conditions.
• Scarcity: If you run a promotion for too long, people will delay taking advantage of it until it is too late or they get an alternative. As such, you should make it limited. You can do this by either using a time limit or making it only available for a fixed number of purchases or on purchases that exceed a minimum set value.
• Measurement: Track your promotions to see which performed the most. This data will help you plan future promotions for the best ROI.

Improve Link Placement

How you place your affiliate link can make or break your affiliate marketing campaigns. That’s why you want to ensure including your affiliate links in strategic locations so your potential customers can see and click on them. Here are some tips for effective link placement:

• Use links in recommendations: The best way to get people to click on your affiliate links is to use them as a logical extension to a useful personal recommendation. When the context around the link provides value to your readers, they will naturally look for a link to make a purchase or learn more information.
• Distribute links evenly: You mustn’t put too many or not enough links. Using too many links can look like spam. On the other hand, your audience might only pay attention if you include the links enough. Furthermore, you should ensure the links are well distributed. Don’t use too many links in one section and leave other areas without links.
• Include a lineup of your links: If you have several affiliate links, sharing them as one block at the end of the post is a good idea. This way, your readers can click on the ones they are interested in without having to look for them in the article.
• Highlight links: Generally, hyperlinking a text takes on a bold font or bright colors. However, not all website themes support this. So go through your web content to ensure your affiliate links stand out from regular content.
• Leverage CTA buttons: You can encourage your readers to click on your links by including attention-grabbing CTAs in your content. These CTAs can be in the form of texts, images, buttons, or a combination of those for the best results. You should also ensure that the links direct the reader to that specific offer and not the homepage of the product company.

Use Context Links

Context is essential when it comes to link placement. You want to ensure that your affiliate links are placed in the proper context to make sense and are relevant to the content. This is where contextual links come in. Contextual links are so called because they are embedded in the main body of text, as opposed to links in a button or an image.

Contextual links blend naturally with the content and, as such, don’t look suspicious. Anyone interested in the content will naturally click the link to learn more. Furthermore, contextual links can also improve your SEO ranking and drive more traffic to your website. Here are some way ways to ensure your links are always in line with your content:

• Use anchor-text best practices
• Link to texts that describe the products you are advertising
• Don’t force a link into content if it doesn’t fit the context
• Refrain from spamming your content with excessive text links

Callouts

Callouts are a great way to draw attention to your affiliate links. You can use callouts like buttons, tables, and boxes to highlight important information, making the post more skimmable or showing unique offers related to your affiliate products. You should strategically place callouts to stand out and grab the reader’s attention.

Convert Affiliated Clicks to Sales

Your affiliate marketing strategy relies on converting clicks to sales since you only get paid when a visitor makes a purchase. There are two things you can do to ensure your affiliate marketing success: using affiliate programs that convert well and ensuring your web visitors click the links. The first part happens while searching for an affiliate program.

Here are some tips to help visitors click your link:

Create Compelling Offers

This can be a great way to encourage potential customers to purchase your affiliate products. Make sure that your offers are attractive and are valuable to the customer. Here is a brief rundown on creating a compelling and irresistible offer.

• Clarity: Use accurate descriptions to describe your offer. You can also use numbers, dates, and other specifics relevant to your audience, so your audience has the needed information to take up your offer.
• Value: Ensure that you have something valuable to back your promotions. Ensure that what you offer is helpful to the customer and not some marketing gimmick to make sales. Marketing gimmicks might work initially, but they can easily hurt your business. On the other hand, great offers can spread like wildfire and invite others to your site.
• Bonuses: People love extras, especially when the extra product complements the products they buy.
• Urgency: Encourage your audience to respond immediately to your offers. You can do this by making the offer expire quickly or only offering a limited number.
• Call-to-action: Use firm and visible CTAs. We recommend including more than one CTA in your copy. Some customers might click the CTA before reading the entire content, while others prefer to get the complete information. Your CTAs should be bold and come in vibrant colors.

Public Income Reports

Sometimes, people only want to buy a product if it is in demand. If you show that a product has sold a sizable amount, many people will become interested. Why? Because they will naturally assume that the product sells well due to its effectiveness.

If the product you are advertising relates to earning income from a skill or business, you can share how much you have made from the product with your customers. These reports will show the potential of your affiliate products and encourage people to click on your links.

Ask Questions

Questions are a great way to engage customers and show them you understand their needs.

Typically, the top question you must answer for any product you are advertising is what, who, and why. However, don’t give in to the temptation of writing long essays. Keep your answers short and relevant. If you have research data or long reports, post them in another article and link to them.

Use Your Intuition

Using intuition is integral to affiliate marketing success. You need to read the market and understand what potential customers are looking for. Doing so will help you create content that resonates with them and encourage them to click on your affiliate links.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online. However, it takes time and effort to be a successful affiliate marketer. Following the tips for affiliate marketing success outlined in this article can increase your chances of success in affiliate marketing.

Want more? Check out these six tips for affiliate marketing.

Next Steps

Ready to begin?

• Research your Affiliate Niche
• Learn How To Build An Affiliate Marketing Website in 8 Steps
• Get the best web hosting for affiliate marketing

Useful Resources

• What is affiliate marketing?
• What is e-commerce?
• Best affiliate programs for beginners without a website
• Find the best web builders for affiliate marketing
• Best WordPress Themes for Affiliate Marketing