Affiliate Marketing – Best Practices

When it comes to online marketing and monetization venues, it usually pays off to keep the route between product and end-user as short as possible. Affiliate marketing is the shortest one of them, with the notable exception of actually having a product of your own to sell. Most entrepreneurs using this method rarely see a penny however. Salesmanship is an art and most people simply lack the training.

Nonetheless, affiliate marketing is still one of the potentially most lucrative segments available and you will have much better odds of succeeding if you follow the advice below:

Step 1: Do Know What You’re Selling

If the product you pitch is something you just heard about 5 minutes ago, chances are that you won’t exactly make a killing. A product is always about solving needs and offering benefits. To understand one, you must understand the potential customer, what makes him tick and what motivates him. For this reason, it is recommendable to stay away from niches you have nothing in common with and opt instead for something familiar. If you have been a customer yourself, you’ll have an invaluable insight that will put you on the right track.

Step 2: Do Put Your Readers Ahead of the Product

It might sound like a cliché, but honesty is a good business policy. Don’t over-hype and most importantly do not put sub-par products in front of your readers. Of course, you might actually pull a few extra sales if you do, but your reputation will take a huge hit and that’s something you can’t really recover from.

Step 3: Do Use Link Cloaking

Affiliate links are ugly and people are reluctant to click them. By using redirect pages hosted on your own domain you will get more clicks and also obtain the ability to track usage much better. Nobody is quite sure why people hate clicking affiliate links, but test results have confirmed time and time again that redirect pages work better.

Step 4: Do Take the Unbeaten Path

Research is time consuming and costly. That’s a fact. This is no excuse however for picking only popular products. These usually come with some very ugly strings attached and the ugliest of them all is competition. If you sell a product found on thousands of other websites, your readers will most likely choose to click that link from a better established competitor or even worse they could have already bought it. It’s in your best interest to follow the latest trends and offer products that are spanking new and not over-saturated yet by the competition.

Step 5: Do Not Think That the Product Will Sell Itself

This is a critical aspect. No matter how good a product is, packaging matters. You must have a decent website and unique, believable copy to pitch it. Most serious affiliate product providers also offer materials to use. That’s a good thing, but you must also think about Big Brother Google, which doesn’t exactly favor duplicate content. The best path to take is to simply pull the selling points and repackage them in your own honest words.

Step 6: Do Think about User Experience

If your website consists solely of endless product pitches, you won’t get very far. Never forget that your own website is the most important piece of real estate you own. Add fresh, interesting content as often as possible and try to integrate the affiliate products in an organic fashion. You want them to naturally blend in and look like a helpful resource rather than a desperate pitch.

This is a Guest post by Neil Jones, who Specializes in launching ecommerce sites, he is currently plying his trade as head of marketing for eMobileScan. With 18 websites based all around Europe they are on course to be one of Europe’s largest online retailers of Industrial handheld computers and label printers like the Zebra Tlp2844 or Zebra GK420T. Neil has been an online marketer for the past 6 years and in that time he has owned and run a range of sites all built around the ecommerce platform.