3 Ways People are Making Affiliate Sales (That Work!)
This is a guest post contributed by Glen Allsopp who writes the PluginID blog which is a wonderful read about personal development. If you are interested in contributing a guest post here, please see these guidelines. Over to Glen…
When Caroline offered her readers the chance to do a guest post, I had to jump at the opportunity. Caroline specifically suggested that she would like some posts on Affiliate Marketing so I have a nice treat instore for you guys. The main aim here is to inspire you and open your mind to the many ways people are making money online; there are literally hundreds of them.
Before I start, I would like to note that although I run a couple of ‘whitehat’ blogs, I do dabble in the affiliate marketing space and I’m actually starting to earn quite a nice chunk of change. I might be p*ssing off a few affiliate marketers with this post but if they rely on these tactics 100% for their income then they need to realise the flaw in their strategy in the first place.
Without further ado…
1. Building a Trustworthy Blog
Being trustworthy is definitely one of the keys to success with affiliate marketing. Being trustworthy means that people value and believe in the fact you are giving your honest opinion on a recommendation, rather than just doing it for the sake of a few extra dollars.
Picture this, you stumble upon a blog which appears to do nothing but reviews of a certain industries’ products and constantly links out to them with affiliate links. How trustworthy is that site going to appear? The same goes for a recommendation on someone who isn’t doing what they say this product or service can do for you, some examples of this include:
- Someone promoting a quick method to become an A-list blogger when they only have 30 subscribers
- Someone promoting a productivity ebook when their last blog post said they are bad at organisation
- Someone promoting a hosting company that they don’t even use (there are some exceptions to this)
These are just a few examples but there are so many out there of people who are clearly untrustworthy. Before you see $ signs in your eyes, think about how you will affect your readerbase if you promote something you clearly don’t believe in or you haven’t used.
However, you are much more likely to sign-up for an affiliate program through John Chow because he has proof of making tens of thousands of dollars with them on a monthly basis. You would be much more likely to buy a book from Problogger (Darren Rowse) on blogging because he is doing it and succeeding, and does actually have a book.
Whatever it is you promote:
- Don’t overly push it on your audience
- Don’t just pick the best paying products, pick what works
- Don’t just do it for the money, because your visitors will quickly lose faith
Do the opposite, and the next time you recommend a product, you’ll actually see some sales based on your recommendation. Otherwise, you are clearly just someone trying to make a quick buck.
2. Bum Marketing
If you haven’t heard of bum marketing by now, you’ve probably had your head in another industry for the last few years. Essentially, bum marketing (created by Travis Sago) is about generating backlinks and sales through article marketing. For example, Ezine Articles is an article directory that tends to rank very highly in Google and allows you to write on pretty much any subject that you want.
So the simple step process for this is:
- Find a product you want to promote on Clickbank or somewhere similar
- Create a targeted landing page on your own domain
- Do keyword research around the niche to see what people are searching for
- Create articles around those topics and build some links to them
- In the author box of ezine articles link to your landing page
So essentially ezine articles should be used as your funnel to catch the searches that are relevant to the product you have to offer, and then you send them off to the link in the author’s box where they can buy a relevant product. This takes a bit of work but once you have your articles ranking it can be a great source of constant income.
This still works well because there are always new products coming out that you can rank for. For example if there is a new product that is causing some buzz called ‘Middlebrook Mastermind’ then you can create articles around:
- Middlebrook Mastermind Scam
- Middlebrook Mastermind Review
And similar keywords, the idea here is that quite a large percentage of people will want to read a review of something before they give over their hard earned cash. Once you have the targeted visitor convinced that buying Middlebrook Mastermind is a good idea, simply sending back over to the product page with your affiliate link, and collect your commission.
3. Yahoo Answers
Yahoo Answers is basically a questions and answer service where people sign-up to get advice on anything and everything. You do need a Yahoo account so once you have that simply login over here. So once again, the similar principle applies: pick a product that you would like to promote from Clickbank or any other affiliate company. I personally use YepRevenue (mobile offers) and MotiveInteractive (email / zip submits) for my other campaigns as well. Those aren’t affiliate links, just my recommendations.
Now then, the key here is to search for questions that people are asking which are relevant to your product, and you can recommend something to them with the answer to their question. For example if someone is looking for where they can find a free credit report then you simply direct them to a credit report offer (available within motive) with your affiliate link.
Acai Berry is huge right now after being featured on Rachael Ray & Oprah
There are a few things you might want to make sure you do if you use this tactic:
- Create a redirected URL so it does not look like an affiliate link in YA. If you’re lazy, you can simply use a URL shortening service like TinyURL.
- Don’t just answer questions to promote your link, answer some other genuine questions in the niche as well to build up your profile. If all your answers simply promote one site then you are going to get banned.
- Make sure you provide a lot of content with your answer and come across as a genuine person who has used the product / service
- Please actually send people to something they are looking for, keep this ethical
That’s all for now, but hopefully this gives you some ideas that you can begin to work with right away. I have lots more ideas in this area so if you would like to see a follow-up with a few more tactics then say that in the comments.
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Glen Allsopp writes on the subject of Personal Development at PluginID. Help him help you by subscribing to his feed, here.
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Glen Allsopp
January 9, 2009
Thanks for the opportunity of the guest post Caroline! I hope your readers enjoy it
Glen Allsopps last blog post..One Simple Action to Improve at Anything