If you want to generate more revenue from your blog, without spending any time creating products or offering a service, you should turn to affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you mainly share links to products you like on your blog and you get a slice of the revenue when someone makes a purchase after visiting through your link.
Implementing affiliate marketing doesn’t take up too much of your time. But you won’t get the best results by just randomly placing links in your blog post. In order to generate more affiliate revenue from your blog, you need follow a well-planned out strategy. So, here’s a quick guide to help you out…
Write more reviews:
When most people promote affiliate products, they just write blog posts, place a few affiliate links here and there and hope that people will check out the product after clicking on the links and buy them. This technique does work, but it isn’t as effective as a review.
Most people reading blog posts, aren’t in the buyer’s mindset yet. They are mainly looking for a different type of solution they can obtain immediately. Hence, only a small portion of visitors from that post will convert.
If you want to get more sales from your blog posts, you need to be writing reviews. People who read reviews are ready to buy. They only have a small amount of doubt in their mind, so, they go about reading reviews. And if you write a really good review where you discuss the pros and cons in detail, you should be able to drive more sales.
Therefore, make sure you add review type posts into your content marketing mix.
Another tactic that works is writing ‘best of’ posts where you detail the best tools/software/item one can buy. As people who read these posts are in the ‘ready to buy’ mindset too. A good example is this post from WhoIsHostingThis.
Here they detail the best hosting services out there. A page like this will help convert more traffic to affiliate sales as most of the people reading this page, want a hosting service, but are unsure about which one to go with. The reviews on the page will point them in the right direction.
Link to the reviews in your posts:
Once you publish the reviews on your site, you can begin linking to them in your post whenever you mention the tool. You can also include a link to the tool as well. Those who are interested in buying the tool immediately, will click on the direct link to the tool, while those who are on the fence, will read the review and purchase it.
Only recommend the best products:
To generate the initial sale and to get your readers to buy the products you recommend again and again, you need to only recommend the best products. So, make sure you test the products out yourself before you promote them. If you have a bad experience, it is better to avoid it as I’m sure there are scores of better alternatives out there.
This is because if your readers have a bad experience with a product, they will stop trusting you and never buy the products you recommend. Also, as a blogger and authority it is your responsibility to the do the best you can to help your readers.
Incorporate email into your affiliate marketing:
Another medium that can help you boost your affiliate revenue is email. As people prefer consuming content delivered via email over blogging.
So, create an email sequence that promotes some of your best affiliate products and regularly send out emails of reviews.
And work on building your email list. Here are a few ways you can do this…
Optimize your blog with optin forms: Place optin forms all over your website and get people to sign up. These should include popup forms, slider forms, sticky bars, etc.
Use ads: If you have a budget, you can create a lead magnet, place it on a landing page and then run ads that promote the landing page. This can help you build up your list very quickly.
Write guest posts: If you want to use an organic list building technique similar to the above one, but you don’t want to spend money on ads, you can use guest posting. Here you create a landing page and then write a guest post for a website that gets a lot of traffic and you link to the landing page in the body of the post or the bio.
People who like your posts will visit your landing page and download the lead magnet. For best results make sure you write a top-quality post and only promote a highly relevant lead magnet in your article.
You can see an example of this strategy being executed properly in Erin Sanchez’s guest post on Social Media Examiner.
As you can see, she wrote a guest post on blogging and then linked to a landing page where you can download a lead magnet on blog post ideas.
Create video tutorials:
As you can see in the aforementioned graph, people prefer consuming video content the most. So, you should also create a lot of video reviews promoting affiliate products. I know, creating video content can seem like a colossal task, but it is a lot easier now as there several video editors available that simplify things. You can then embed the video in your blog posts.
For an example of a good video review, checkout the above one from WPCrafter. He reviews a plugin in the YouTube video and then links to it in the description with an affiliate link.
Keep track of affiliate links:
You also want to make sure you keep track of your affiliate links to see what types of articles, call to actions, videos, reviews, types of products, etc. are getting you the most sales.
You can use this data to write better posts and promote better products in the future.
Conclusion:
This is how you can generate more affiliate revenue from your blog. So, begin using all of the techniques I have listed above.