Affiliate Marketing strategy
The strategy of Affiliate Marketing is fairly straightforward. You want to to drive traffic to your offer and create conversions. The more traffic you drive to your offer, the more commissions you can earn. The more conversions you get, the more commissions you can earn. It’s all about traffic and conversions. There are a lot of different tactics to make that happen. Your traffic can be from a combination of organic and paid sources. Organic traffic sources can be on your own website, YouTube or a social media site. You can buy traffic from individuals or from platforms. Your conversions can be automated or high touch and individualized depending on your offer. Knowing the Affiliate Marketing strategy is just the first step.
Tactics
There are various tactics you can use to carry out your strategy. Tactics can change over time as trends changes, new technologies emerge and as markets get oversaturated. The idea is to stay focused on your strategy and be open to using various tactics over time focusing on what is working best right now.
Traffic – Organic vs Paid
The biggest distinction is traffic is Organic vs. Paid. For your business, paid traffic will get you results faster, but it is important to have some Organic traffic or at least your own content to establish your authority in your niche. Organic traffic is a longer term strategy since it takes time to create enough content and optimize it for search engines to be able to draw steady traffic. When you have a big organic following, you can share various offers with little to know ad costs and your audience knows who you are. Organic traffic is an important piece of your Affiliate Marketing strategy.
Paid traffic allows you to get your offer in front of a lot more people in a short time. The downside is that it’s cold traffic. They don’t know who you are. You can use a follow up campaign to help warm them up. And you can share your organic content to help them learn more about what you do. You can buy traffic from individuals through solo ads. The advantage here is that compliance is not as big of an issue. You can also buy traffic from platforms such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. The advantage here is that these platforms have a lot of traffic. The downside is that the cost can be higher and there are greater compliance issues. The truth is that you will want a combination of traffic sources.
Conversions – Automated vs. High Touch
Your conversion strategy will depend somewhat on your offer. Is is a high ticket or low ticket offer? Is is high converting/easy to sell or do you need to walk people through the process? An automated conversion strategy could be a paid ad that collects an email address and shares an inexpensive and attractive offer. Some percentage of people will opt in and buy right away depending on how inexpensive and attractive the offer it. Those that don’t buy right away will receive an automated follow up email campaign with more opportunities to buy.
You could also use a ‘high touch’ more personalized approach to share your offer. Basically, you will reach out to individuals and build rapport with them. You might attract them through ads or organic traffic or maybe create an application funnel. The idea is to make it a more professional and personalized experience for your clients. You may want to have them fill out a questionnaire ahead of time and schedule a call with you or first with your assistant. When you do speak to them directly, you want to ask certain key questions and let them speak most of the time. This approach is best for high ticket offers.
Your Offer – Low Ticket vs High Ticket
When people think about Affiliate Marketing, they often think of low ticket offers. You can review and share offers for items from popular retailers. You might specialize is electronics, fashion or health and fitness. Maybe you are a blogger, you unbox and review items an become an expert in a specific area. The offers are often high converting and if you create enough volume you can create a decent income stream. The benefit here is that you could share almost any product or service. There are a lot of companies that want Affiliate Marketers to promote their products this way. You aren’t really selling products, just sharing your thoughts about them.
The other side of Affiliate Marketing is high ticket offers. These offers can earn big commissions and take a little more work to promote and sell. When you find a good high ticket offer that you want to promote, you can build an entire campaign around that one offer. You will want to unravel the offer over time, just selling the next step in the process. It might start with an ad that leads to an opt in page, collects their email address and sends them an email campaign. You might have a low ticket, ‘irresistible’ offer on the front end just to help cover your ad costs. You may have a virtual assistant that contacts them or you might send them an application to work with you once you have demonstrated you value and authority. The idea is to have fewer offers and fewer clients, but earn higher commissions.
Platforms – Your own website vs. Social Media Sites
Having your own website is one of the best ways to establish authority. It takes a lot of work to set up and maintain a website and there is some cost involved, so not everyone will be willing to do it. The great thing about your own website is that you can customize it and make it your own. You also don’t have to worry so much about getting your account shut down as you do with many social media sites. The downside to your own website is that you have to attract traffic to your site. You do this by creating a ‘critical mass’ of content and using search engine optimization. You will want a key word strategy. The idea is to identify the key words that your ideal client is looking for and create content around those key words. Once you have enough content that is SEO optimized, you begin to attract your ideal client to you.
The quicker and easier option is to use a site like Facebook to build your brand and share your content. Facebook is like a pre-fab website. You just need to customize it and upload your content. The upside of Facebook is that it’s a lot less work to set up and it’s free. It also comes with a ‘traffic store’. You can buy traffic directly from Facebook. Since it’s a social media site, you get an extended organic reach from people who share your content. The downside of Facebook is that there are compliance issues and they can shut you down.
The most important thing
Whatever tactics you choose to promote your Affiliate Marketing strategy, the most important thing is to get started. You can read and do research, but the best way to learn is to take action and try something. The link below will take you to the best training that I have found for getting started in online business. It will walk you through the various options available and help you see what makes the most sense for you. Don’t wait, apply today.
