Affiliate Marketing Mastery

Keyword research, if done properly, is advantageous to affiliate marketers in identifying less competitive but in-demand markets to target. A wealth of free tools exist to support affiliate marketers in the keyword research process.

For instance, Google Ad’s Keyword Planner can be very useful in highlighting the demand for certain keywords and what’s more, is that it is free to use.

With such powerful tools at one’s disposable at zero cost, it’s little wonder that affiliate marketing can be a highly profitable activity.

Similarly, the best affiliate marketers identify some of the products they advertise as ‘pillar products’. Pillar products are considered essential, must-have items. Crucially, they are picked in accordance with the content topics and categories represented by pillar posts.

For instance, a health and fitness blogger may offer several pillar products, including dietary supplements, exercise equipment, and perhaps even memberships to fitness classes or online communities.

These pillar products may feature prominently around pillar posts which could include popular topics such as ‘the best weight loss supplements’.

Knowing your pillar products is key to maximizing profits by displaying the most popular and relevant items with the most popular posts your blog has to offer.

To discover which blog posts attract the highest number of visitors, affiliate marketers become well acquainted with Google Analytics which is another free yet indispensable tool for all website owners, including internet entrepreneurs.

Google Analytics enables website owners to gain insight into their website’s traffic. Insights offered by Google Analytics include the number of new users, how they found the website, and which pages or posts they visit most often.

You could even find out which devices your users use to view your site and the

Obtaining detailed information about website traffic enables affiliate marketers to identify their pillar posts and to optimize these posts to make conversions.

Savvy affiliate marketers use this information to inform their promotion of posts across social media and via email.

For example, if a health and fitness blogger can see a link to ‘dietary supplements’ receives more clicks than a link to ‘heart monitor’, they can take measures to place the more successful link elsewhere on their website.

While not an exact science, link tracking is arguably the best way to determine which affiliate links are the most lucrative and it should be a regular practice of every affiliate marketer.

Obtaining email addresses isn’t enough, however. It is necessary to organize email lists by segmenting them according to member characteristics.

For instance, savvy affiliate marketers will tag members according to their area of interest. In the case of the health and fitness blogger, some members might be tagged under ‘weight loss’ while others may be assigned a tag to indicate an interest in ‘running’.

Organizing or segmenting email lists in this way enables affiliate marketers to target potential buyers and groups of buyers with information and products relevant to them, thus increasing the chances of conversion.

Failing to build an email list is like leaving money on the table, according to the founder of ‘Blogging X’ Akshay Hallur. Make sure that you implement measures to capture email addresses from the get-go.

If you’re a talented wordsmith, you’ll no doubt thrive on the opportunity to experiment with subject lines to get recipients to open your emails.

By incorporating a little psychology and some science, your email marketing could become more than just an example of writing prowess and instead become a money-spinning marketing machine!

For example, the most successful affiliate marketers understand how and when to inject emails with a sense of urgency or when to use cryptic subject lines to pique readers’ curiosity and drive their email open-rates.

Not only will they come to know how and when to employ psychological tactics, but they will also become well-versed in timing the email sends to maximize recipient engagement and the conversion rate.

While the ability to write compelling email copy is important, a scientific approach to testing and investigating the best approaches to email marketing is necessary to achieve the best results.

Offering your website’s visitors incentives to purchase through your affiliate links makes your business more competitive. Think about it – a customer is always going to do business where the deal is sweeter, and the online world is no different.

The beauty of offering incentives is that they need not drive up your costs. For instance, incentives could include a free digital product, such as a PDF guide or an infographic.

Of course, incentives could also include vouchers and discount codes for other products, but offering these could require the agreement of the vendor.

Whatever incentives you decide to offer, you will be on the fast track to affiliate marketing success by sweetening deals strategically to stand out from the fierce competition.

In short, A/B split testing is a process where two variations of a similar resource are deployed to your audience.

For instance, a marketing email could feature two different subject lines or two different calls-to-action with those emails being dispatched to random subscriber groups of equal size.

By changing a single variable each time, much like a scientist, it is possible to determine the reason for the change in outcome.

For example, if your emails resulted in an increased number of opens over the subject line when compared to subject line B, you could reasonably say that subject line A is more effective.

The benefit of A/B testing is that it is a low-cost way to determine the best route to more conversions and a better bottom-line. Experiment with subject lines, call-to-actions, images, send times, link placement, and more to see what achieves the best results.

Be careful, though – only change one variable at a time!

Psychological strategies enable affiliate marketers to build rapport with audiences and to appeal to their subconscious and conscious urges.

Such strategies include branding and imagery to evoke an emotional response from audience members and securing the approval and endorsements of others within a niche, particularly from experts in a field, to bolster people’s trust in you.

The creation of a sense of urgency through countdown timers, for example, can also entice people to take the desired actions when they might otherwise put it off and never return.

Similarly, the use of powerful verbs can compel audiences to click on links and make purchases. For example, stoke the flames of curiosity by incorporating words such as ‘myth’ or ‘secret’ and reinforce trust with phrases such as ‘guaranteed results’.

Ultimately, psychological strategies should be deployed to build trust and rapport between you and your audience but exploit people’s fears of missing out seldom hurts your bottom line!

With vast numbers of companies and organizations all competing for a few seconds of consumers’ time, it is critical that you present pricing and product information in the most impactful and efficient way possible.

Tables offer an efficient way of presenting pricing and product information. Depending on the Content Management System you’re using to organize and present your website content, implementing tables as a visual hook or quick reference point can be a doddle.

WordPress, for instance, offers several plugins to enable websites to display product information tables complete with affiliate links.

In addition to tables, infographics are another great way to show website visitors how a product could benefit them.

Thanks to tools such as the drag-and-drop graphic design tool, Canva.com, it is now easier than ever to create eye-catching infographics with little prior experience. What’s more, is that hyperlinks can be added to images via your CMS thus offering the potential to add a call-to-action to your infographics.