Affiliate marketing is a great way to make passive income online, and it can be your biggest earner if you’re a blogger. By 2020, it is expected to have attained an annual growth rate of 10 percent.
However, mastering the art of creating great content is part of affiliate marketing 101: it’s not just about reviewing a product or including links in your content.
Read on to learn everything about building good content for affiliate marketing.
Types of Content for Affiliate Marketing
First, you’ll need to be creative about the ways you serve up your affiliate links. If you keep doing the same thing, your readers will get bored and move on.
Create meaningful and engaging posts, allowing your readers to relate with the products. Most people are put off by in-your-face advertising. There are six kinds of content you can create:
1. Seasonal Blog Posts
Seasonal blog posts can be time-based or event-based. Time-based posts target the four seasons while event-based posts target holidays e.g. Christmas, Easter, Halloween, etc. Other kinds of events depend on your niche.
2. Evergreen Blog Posts
This is content that doesn’t go out of date – it is based on facts and features information the target audience understands and needs perpetually
3. Roundup Posts
Roundups compile lists of the best products for different types of clientele. Such posts allow you to naturally add lots of affiliate links, increasing your earning potential.
4. Mini-Courses
Email courses offer content that adds value to your target audience. A series of auto-generated emails delivers lessons to subscribers’ inboxes over several weeks. This information is related to your target products and services
5. “Best of” Posts
These are summaries of posts in your blog, usually published at the end of a year or quarter depending on your audience. You can use these to redirect readers to old articles or bring back useful information you had already given in the past.
6. Product Reviews
Product reviews are always searched for. Be sure to create honest, concise and tailored reviews. To extend your posts, you may choose to do comparison reviews of items users are likely to be conflicted about. Creating an infographic that summarizes important details will have your customers lingering on your page a bit longer.
Basic Steps to Building Good Content
Regardless of the type of content you wish to publish, you need to establish the basic steps to rope in your audience. Taking affiliate marketing programs for beginners can help you learn some of the secretes seasoned affiliate marketers use.
1. Choose Your Niche
It’s much easier to become an affiliate marketer if you’re blogging already; because then you have a niche. Within this niche, you already like and use very many products. So all you need to do is publicize them and why you like them.
2. Choose a Product
Start with any product: do you like books: review some books. Do you like cooking? Review things you can’t do without in your kitchen.
Comparison reviews can work great, and if you look it up, you’ll find lots of content covering brand comparisons.
The thing with affiliate marketing is to remember that your biggest client is your readers, not the merchants paying your commission. Therefore, you need to actually help your readers with your links. If your information/reviews aren’t genuinely helpful, you lose credibility with your readers.
3. Leverage Visuals
Images, infographics, and videos can help you relay important information about products and services in certain niches. They are also great for breaking down long content or emphasizing a point.
However, remember to only add images or video if they add value to your overall message. Remember that they can be heavy/cause your page to load a little slower. However, used properly, they are great for increasing engagement with your audience.
Live feeds and webinars are also great for gadgets and appliances. Seeing you use certain products brings them to life in a way words never could. You can use your blog and social media to promote your webinar and even send it to your email subscribers.
4. Create an Email List
Building an email list can help you serve future content to interested subscribers with ease.
If you’re blogging, you probably have a way for users to subscribe to your site. Free offerings like e-books, webinars and white papers are great ways to grow your mailing list. You can send your best-of posts, roundups, and mini-courses to emails, as well as other tailored content, for subscribers to act on.
Because you chose your niche and products, subscribers are highly targeted, so you don’t need thousands to make your efforts worthwhile.
Ideally, send weekly content to keep them engaged with your blog/products. Every so often, include calls-to-action to buy certain products.
If you change your mind or find new products that you like better, you can update your audience and also tell them why they should make the switch.
Tips to Improve Engagement and Offer Value
Creating content that appeals to your audience is important. Here are tips you can use:
1. Be Truthful
However, you choose to present your affiliate links, ensure that you’re being honest with your readers. If you’re reviewing a product that many other people have liked but you haven’t, say it. If you can, talk about products and services you have used yourself – these are so many – and not just those that will bring you more sales.
It’s very hard to create engaging content for products you haven’t tried. Your audience trusts you, and they’ll see through any feeble attempt to pitch products you haven’t tried.
It helps, sometimes, to mention that you may earn a commission through some of the products you’re talking about. You won’t lose your audience; if anything, most readers will love this forthrightness.
2. Personalize Your Products
Explain why certain products resonate with you in a special way – how you personally benefitted instead of just the features available everywhere.
Why do you love it? What’s so special about it for you?
You can even tell a story about your journey to finding it and using it. Don’t forget your readers, and how they might benefit from it or why they should invest in it.
Anyone can write a review anywhere – How you present your marketing content can have a lifelong impact on the value readers attach to your opinion. And your opinion means everything in affiliate marketing.
3. Tell Your Stories Naturally
Finally, the best way to do affiliate marketing is to never make it feel like affiliate marketing. Try to incorporate your product mentions and links into your natural blog stories.
Your recommendations should sound like they’re coming from a friend to a friend. This will make your content more exciting and appealing for your readers.
Also, remember to just offer the good non-marketing content your audience came to you for. Don’t make them feel like you’ve turned into a shop, out to make money off them.
Affiliate Marketing 101 – Conclusion
Well, there you have it, everything on Affiliate Marketing 101. You have learned the best ways to leverage your readership to make some passive income.
In conclusion, it helps to mention that affiliate marketing is a long game: you won’t see thousands in your bank account overnight. Too much too soon can actually be counter-productive.
Instead, focus on what you want over the longer term, and work on giving your readers value on your way there.
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