5 Important Tips to Assure Affiliate Success

Trying to run a profitable affiliate-marketing campaign involves a lot of considerations. You’ve got to understand the niche you’re marketing to; you’ve got to know all about the product(s) you’re promoting, (especially what they offer and what they don’t offer to consumers); you’ve got to be willing to work hard at standing out from your competitors, (or work equally hard to find a niche with fewer competitors); and you’ve got to be able to keep up with the internet-environment you’re trying to reach your prospects in.

The following 5 points will help a great deal in making sure that whatever campaign you’re running will be a success:

• Keep Your Websites/Pages Separate

  Trying to put too much content over multiple topics together in a single page or even on a single website is bad for business. Unless your page focuses on compiling information on a variety of topics, having too many different topics covered is confusing to your visitors – and this is especially true for an affiliate-marketer’s website.

  You’re trying to inform your website’s visitors about the benefits of a particular product, given their specific needs. If visitors show up on a page that is stuffed with all kinds of different promotions, then even if they stick around and explore the site for a while, you’ve lost their focused attention and will probably not close a single sale.

• Continue to Make Contact with your Prospects

  It’s a simple fact – by simply having a website and attracting visitors to it, all you can do is close a sale right then and there, or watch your visitors leave, usually never to return. You’ve got to find ways of continuously making contact with your prospects if you want to maximize the benefit of each visitor.

  Opt-in forms for valuable newsletters, e-courses and the like are a great way to keep in touch with prospects, as are RSS feeds and membership services.

  The important thing to keep in mind when trying to stay in touch with your visitors is the consistent delivery of quality and value. Your website’s content has to make people want to hear more from you later. If you want your visitors to become members of your site, then your member’s area has to offer them something significantly more than they’ll find before joining.

  Emails and RSS updates must also continue to provide value if they’re going to be effective in closing a sale. Newsletters are a great way to continue providing fresh and up-to-date information that serves to keep your subscribers engaged and grateful to you as a provider of relevant content. Simply blasting promotional emails to a list is a sure way to alienate your prospects and have them unsubscribe.

• Drive Targeted-Traffic

  It’s incredibly important that the visitors who end up looking at your pages are the ones you’re likely to appeal to with your content. You want the people who really stand to benefit from your product(s) to show up, and you want them to find material of interest to them when they do.

  Simply getting thousands of page-views a day won’t do you any good if those visitors are just glancing at your site and deciding to look elsewhere for what they want. Make sure that links to your site are relevant and properly contextualized. Use the right keywords in the anchor-text of those links to strengthen your site’s relevance to those keywords (making sure, of course, that the keywords really are relevant to your content!).

• Respect Your Website’s Guests

  Focusing solely on getting traffic to your site and trying to convert visitors into customers without considering them as individuals will likely destroy your chances of connecting with them and making a sale. Your prospects have got to trust your authority in your niche, and they’ll only trust you if you respect them: their intelligence, their needs/concerns, and their feelings!

  When you’re promoting a product to someone, it’s easy to alienate them when you make it look like all you’re interested in is making a sale. However, if you genuinely focus your efforts on informing potential customers about what a product offers and what it doesn’t, then you gain credibility. You want to convince them that what you’re trying to do with your affiliate-campaign is to help them – and the best was to do that is to make sure that it’s true!

• Approach your Prospects on a Relatable Level

  You’re trying to let your prospects know that you understand their consumer needs and can offer solutions for them. For this to really work, you’ve got to communicate with them about those needs and about what solutions you can provide in ways that keep them engaged, and that build trust.

  If, for example, you’re marketing an e-book describing the best ways to start and run a catering business, then you’ve got to design your content to appeal to people who are: a) interested in becoming caterers, and b) inexperienced and curious about how the business works. They’ll be searching for relevant keywords like “how to start a catering business” or “running a successful catering business” or the like. The point is: you’ve got to know what your product delivers and promote it to people who’ll stand to benefit from the product. If you try promoting an instructional e-book about starting such a business to experienced caterers, you’re not going to make a dime.

  Similarly, if the product you’re promoting is more advanced, say “expanding your catering business to a multinational franchise” or something, then promoting such a product to complete beginners is also a waste of time.

These 5 tips will help you avoid making unnecessary mistakes as you go along, and keep your affiliate-marketing efforts effective on a long-term basis. Remember, the affiliate-marketing industry relies on customer-satisfaction – so keep the needs and desires of your prospects always in mind!