Affiliate marketing spending is continuously growing year on year. That gives affiliate marketers and influencers many opportunities to make it an important revenue source for their businesses.
If you’re an affiliate marketer looking for a couple of tips to boost your affiliate marketing earnings, you’re in the right place.
Keep reading to learn more details about growing your earning through affiliate websites and programs.
1. Cover your bases with analytics
Having a complete overview of all your platforms’ performances is essential for your affiliate marketing earning. You need to implement analytics tools that’ll help you track your audience’s behavior.
There are three types of tools to consider:
- Behavior analytics
- Traffic analytics
- Link statistics
Let’s examine each of these more closely.
Behavior analytics
As an affiliate marketer, your primary focus should be your audience’s behavior. There’s no better way to examine it than to implement a behavior tracking tool. A good example is Hotjar, but there are also plenty of Hotjar alternatives available.
You can use these tools to create heatmaps of your landing pages where the red areas on the map show places where people click the most. Why is that important? You can optimize your conversion rates, so your referral numbers go up, and you get more profits.
Traffic analytics
There’s another way to measure your audience behavior, and that is by implementing tools such as Google Analytics. You can use it to see:
- Where are your users coming from
- What keywords are pages ranking for
- How long do people stay on your website
- What’s the audience’s age, device type, and location
- Real-time visitor numbers
Having insight into this data will help you improve your keyword research and other SEO optimizations.
Link statistics
When sharing links on social media, start using link shorteners. It’s a great way to see how each of those links is performing. Use the data to discover how effective your marketing channels are and how you can improve them.
2. Keep your links working no matter what
Create a strategy to check whether all your links are always working. Furthermore, if you’re working as an Amazon affiliate, double-check whether the link is going to the item you’re describing.
A helpful approach is to create a database of all your links and check them once every week. That way, you’re ensuring that all the links on your affiliate site are operating as intended. You can get a PHP script created by your developer and run it using google analytics to track the links that are not active anymore. This is the concept used by SEO tools to track your live links and many 6 figure affiliates do it too” – Nicole from Littlelittlesteps
Without performing these checks, you’ll lose on your payouts due to lower conversion rates.
3. Reevaluate your commission rates
You’ll find that there are plenty of affiliate networks available out there. They offer varying commission rates that will significantly affect your profits. But there are many things to consider.
For example, if you’re promoting a $200 product and you’re getting $50 per sale, that means that your 25% commission rate is exceptionally high. You should try and sell as many of these products as possible.
However, a low commission rate does not necessarily mean you’re making less money. Different Amazon sections have different commission rates. If somebody uses your affiliate link to buy a tech product, you’ll only get a 2.5% commission.
But the catch is that whatever user buys from any other section of the site in the following 30 days goes to you as well. The Amazon commission rates for different parts of the site go up to 20%.
Perform monthly audits of your commission profits. You might find that you’re making more money from products with low commissions. Once you know where your earnings are coming from the most, you can optimize your marketing strategy for even better performance.
4. Create multiple traffic streams
Creating an effective digital marketing strategy around your affiliate business will require multiple traffic sources. You need to deploy several online advertising methods to get more traffic to your affiliate website successfully.
The key options to consider are:
- Organic traffic
- PPC affiliate marketing
Building these channels will create a lot of traction on your affiliate links, some of which will become conversions. Here’s how you can benefit from these traffic sources.
Organic traffic
There are multiple ways you can establish organic traffic to your affiliate links. You can rely on social media and blogging.
When it comes to social media, it’s essential to pick ones that are still not saturated. Mature social media networks like Facebook and Instagram will require you to invest money in PPC campaigns.
On the other hand, social media networks like Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok will let you reach out to your audience organically. You can also consider incorporating WhatsApp marketing to directly engage with your audience through personalized messages and updates.
Establishing a YouTube presence is also an effective way of getting traffic to your affiliate website. There are influencers on YouTube and Instagram that make a decent revenue with their affiliate marketing efforts.
A good example is the Linus Tech Tips channel, which periodically shares its revenue sources.
Aside from social media, blogging on your site is another way to get more organic traffic for your business. The key to getting a decent amount of traffic is persistence and delivering high-quality content that your visitors will find useful.
Establish a content creation schedule for your blog and social media, and actively get the count out there. Use the analytics we mentioned to fine-tune your search engine ranking. It’ll result in higher traffic on your website and help get you to several more benefits.
PPC affiliate marketing
Building organic traffic is an effective method of making affiliate commissions. However, PPC affiliate marketing is a faster approach. There’s one crucial thing to consider, though: you’ll need to invest in creating different ad formats for your pay-per-click advertising strategies.
You can display ads in various places. Using Google ads will allow you to serve them on millions of websites globally. It’ll also let you tap into the mobile app market, which counts billions of users.
Additionally, you can also rely on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest ads. Social media PPC campaigns are also very effective as billions of users spend hours using them daily.
When running your PPC strategies, the only important thing is to consider all your advertising expenses and make sure that your commission rates are higher. The overhead is your profit.
Analyze your analytics to see which of the ad networks gives the best results. Over time, you’ll see what the best pay-per-click affiliate programs are.
5. Consider branching out
The more time passes and your website keeps growing, the more you’ll start hitting your profit limits. If you want to continue growing, it might be time to branch out in another niche and see how it works.
Given how familiar you are with affiliate marketing, you can adapt your successful methods to the new niche and watch your numbers grow. Create a strategy that will direct already existing traffic to the new niche and monitor how they behave.
You could notify your subscribers about your plan and run PPC ads to drive more traffic to your new content.
Remember to stay close to your existing niche. Don’t branch out to a niche that’s in no way connected to what you’re already advertising. For example, if you’re a tech blogger writing about mobile devices, you could branch out to apps, wearables, or computers.
While it’s a big jump to another niche, the topic is closely related to your existing content.
6. Establish yourself as a transparent brand
Don’t create just another affiliate WordPress site and hope to get as much traffic as possible. Create a transparent brand right from the start. You can achieve much more in the future as you start getting traction with your audience.
Create a brand voice that instills trust and that delivers what the visitor needs.
No matter what product you’re planning to advertise, you have to become the expert in the niche. Learn everything about it and create content that’ll make you an authority in the subject matter.
People trust brands that are honest, transparent, and consistent. Make meeting these conditions a priority as it will pay off in the long run.
7. Create a community
Creating a community goes hand in hand with establishing yourself as a trustworthy brand. Having returning visitors is the best way to keep the business growing. From the moment you start running an affiliate website, create a strategy for growing your community.
Some of the options to consider are an email list and social media.
Building an email list is a simple yet effective way of creating a community from scratch. All it takes is installing a plugin on your website and creating a simple form that’ll let you collect email addresses interested in hearing updates from you.
Taking this step helps you broaden your advertising network as you have an audience you can reach out to when needed. The result? You can get on-demand traffic to your website, as well as more clicks on your affiliate links.
Besides email lists, you can use social media to connect with your visitors. Create engagement around your brand by answering your visitor comments.
Find ways of rewarding your loyal fans by running giveaways.
8. See what your competitors are doing
One of the best ways to learn more about your niche is to explore your competitors. If your website is doing great and everything is perfect, you should always check Google rankings and analyze what the others are doing.
You can discover some new advertising methods that will get more traffic to your website. Maybe they are ranking for a long-tail keyword that didn’t occur to you? Or you can see that particular button placement might work better for your conversion rates. There’s always something to learn from your competitors.
Perform checks once a month to stay on track of any potential changes in their marketing approach. You can quickly try it out and immediately see the results.
9. Create a new revenue source
While affiliate marketing is an excellent way to make money online, you can explore other options. After finishing the most challenging part – getting traffic – you can try out different ways to make money online.
Many influencers create their merchandise and sell it to their followers. It’s yet another reason why building a community can benefit your business.
Think of a product or a service that the people who’re visiting your website might need. Create your product and try to sell it. With the correct pricing, you’ll see your sales going up in no time.
It’s a great way to use the traffic you already have to create an entirely new revenue source.
10. Consistently test your approaches
The only way to progress is by conducting regular audits for your website. Create a schedule to check your website’s performance. A good idea is to do it quarterly, as that’s a long enough period for you to notice all the changes.
Then, perform an annual analysis and compare your years one to another. You’ll see specific patterns that’ll allow you to better prepare for the following year.
Another vital thing to keep in mind is constantly exploring new options for your affiliate website. That’s the best way to improve your digital marketing efforts.
Try different Facebook and Google AdSense strategies, compare CPCs, CPMs and CPAs, PPC affiliate programs, and commission rates. Run A/B tests to determine which ad formats perform best for your affiliate marketing efforts.
Over time, you will create better PPC campaigns and the most optimal advertising approach with optimal conversion rates.
Concluding thoughts
Growing your affiliate marketing business requires taking a lot of smart steps along the way. The critical element that helps people scale these businesses is persistence. It’s essential to continuously provide value to your visitors and watch as results start appearing.
Following the tips from this article will undoubtedly help you on your path of boosting your affiliate marketing earning. Remember to stay curious and not be afraid of trying new things. That’s the only way to stay ahead of the competition.
