Affiliate marketing is the most lucrative way to make money as an internet marketer. If you analyze the income sources of any top blogger or a successful internet marketer, their main reason for online success is the magic of affiliate marketing.

Are you one of the bloggers who publish affiliate posts, and keep refreshing their affiliate dashboards to see cash flow in?

Do you think that simply by churning out some posts around potential products you can make a living online?

That simply won’t work that way.

Successful affiliate marketing takes a large of toll of smart work and learning.

Here in this post, I’ll present you some of the advanced affiliate marketing tactics that boost your income.

What you’ll learn in this post?

  • How to build trust?
  • Properly  leveraging your posts for boosting sales.
  • Email marketing strategies.
  • Offering incentives.
  • A/B testing simplified.
  • All types of affiliate posts.
  • Product launch jacking with example.

How to build trust?

Trust

Long gone are the days where you sprinkle some affiliate links to  your site and expect sales coming in. People are smart. This is generation X. They think twice before clicking any link.

Trust is the only thing that works in affiliate marketing today.

If you want people you buy products from you, you need to win their hearts. So how to build trust?

Below are some of the tips.

  • Be transparent. It is the key for building trust. For example, people tend to trust bloggers who publish their income and traffic reports on monthly basis. Again it all depends on your personal interest. Personally, I am not publishing my income reports openly.
  • Be honest.
  • Reply to every comment your readers make.
  • Your avatar image should be such that it resonates with your audience.
  • Fill in your sidebar and some posts with your photos.
  • Use a premium theme on your blog.
  • Create content that helps people so much, that they mail or message you saying thank you.
  • Create a Facebook group.
  • Add a disclaimer that you are using affiliate links in your post.

Building trust is not an overnight business. It requires serious dedication. You need to take network marketing seriously and build networks with your prospect audience. You need to constantly crave to better yourself in marketing and trust building.

Don’t ever fall into the trap of quick money at the cost of trust. It’s damn way easy to lose trust, and but it takes ages to build the same.

This is one of the effective tactics that I came across later in my blogging career.

You need to just head over to Google Analytics, and list out all the pages that are driving a  great deal of traffic to your blog. Now, just think and research whether there are any products that can be promoted using the popularity of your posts.

If you find any affiliate product related to a popular post on your blog, just head over to that post, update the post and include an affiliate link in your post.

Include the affiliate link naturally in your popular posts, and introduce them with some added information.

Do this only if the product you are promoting is highly relevant to your popular post.

You can also include a sidebar widget on your blog, to promote the popular posts back in the homepage. With this, you can funnel some of your direct visitors to your popular posts.

Email marketing strategies

One of the main reasons to blog is list building. If you are not building your list, you are leaving heaps of money on the table.

Build an email list and pitch them products – this is a basic affiliate marketing strategy. I’m presenting you some of the advanced strategies for affiliate marketing via email lists.

Always build multiple lists. This is the most powerful advice.

You know that?

Your niche has sub-niches. For example, if you take blogging as a niche, there are many interested people below it:

  • People interested in traffic generation.
  • People interested in link building.
  • People interested in WordPress.
  • So on…

You need to build lists around those people. Like, you need to build lists around those specific interests.

With this, you gain trust  and also increase the CTR on your emails and newsletters. Then you need to promote products to those people accordingly. When you render right products to the people interested, you increase your income.

Is’nt it simple?

It is important to keep in touch with email subscribers regularly. By feeding them with valuable content and interacting with them, you develop trust with your subscribers.

Occasionally ask your subscribers what they are struggling with. It exposes the common problems they face in their niche. It helps you a deal when pitching the right product to them and tap into their problems.

Offer affiliate incentives

Offering your audience some personal incentives for opting your product is a great idea to increase your affiliate conversion rate.

This is the most effective way to standout of your competitors who are promoting the same product, as effective as you are doing. With this you can easily hit up the charts.

It simply works, because of the psychology that people love to get free stuff while buying any product. The bonuses you give may be a cheat sheet on leveraging the product they are buying or any PDFs related the niche of the product. It may also be tightly related to the likes of people who are buying the product.

If the product you are promoting has any drawbacks, create bonuses that address those drawbacks in an optimistic way.

Mention your bonuses in review posts, banner ads and also your promotional email newsletters. Did I just open your eye?

Stuart Walker from Niche Hacks did this well.

Stuart walker bonuses

Make your bonuses so tempting that, your bonuses should be one of the reasons why your readers opt for your product.

A/B test your sidebar affiliate ads

Don’t be scared!

This is just a way to check which of the banner ads on your site attracts more clicks. This is similar to A/B testing in email marketing (determining what email subject line works well). It is also called split testing.

It’s a fact that colors affect conversions.

Depending upon your blog design, it’s very difficult for you to determine what colors work well for banner ads or for in general promotion of a product.

The best way is to conduct split-testing on your site with various banner ads, and keep the best performing one. Seems simple right?

The best free plugin to conduct these split testing on banner ads is Ad Injection plugin. You can determine the best performing variant of your banner ads.

A/B testing your banner ads have the potential to increase your conversions by up to 200% or even more.

Sony, while promoting Vaio notebooks, conducted A/B testing on its banner ads. After reconsidering the banner ad, they saw a 6% increase in banner CTR and led to a 21.3% increase in visitors that reached the shopping cart. – Optimizely.

Also read: How to combat banner blindness?

Types of affiliate blog posts

Many newbie bloggers think that publishing reviews is the only  way to promote affiliate products. No! That’s not true. There are dozens of ways in which you can promote a product. Some of the content formats for promoting affiliate offers are listed below.

  • Review posts
  • Comparison posts
  • Coupon posts
  • Alternatives to a product
  • Tutorial posts
  • How to make use of a product
  • Case study of a product
  • Best products for accomplishing something
  • Best products under $$$ for {}

Along with this, as I mentioned earlier in my post, you can also make use of your popular blog posts to promote your affiliate products. This skill needs some creativity and practice.

You should not include affiliate links to all of your blog posts, blindly. You should only add links to your high-performing and blog posts that have the potential to offer conversions.

Product launch jacking

This is nothing but making sales, using the initial buzz that a new product creates when it is launched.

Some of the product owners offer launch offers for the new products when they are released for the first week or  two. Offers may be in the form of bonuses, or discount.

Now, your job is to try out the product, and tease your readers and subscribers with the launch offer, deadline time, and the importance of the product. You can also offer incentives, to increase conversions.

Urgency

Again, I got this mail from Stuart Walker 2 days ago. The sense of urgency he created would have easily increased his conversions by at least 150%.

For this, you need to keep an eye on new product releases and their conversion potential. Now you need to assess whether the newly launched product benefits your audience and promote at the right time in a right way.

Over to you

These are some of the most effective strategies for boosting your affiliate sales. If you are in search of some of the good beginner post, refer this article on affiliate marketing for dummies. It’s a good article.

The main things here are to build trust and pitch the right products to the right people by understanding your audience. That’s the whole game of affiliate marketing. If you are not pro-actively building your email list, start building it.

Hope you found these advanced affiliate marketing techniques helpful.

Let me know your views.