9 Ways To Boost Your Affiliate Marketing

Passive income.

That’s the dream, right?

Make money while you sleep.

For 99% of people, affiliate marketing is how they get started.

The idea behind it is that you promote other people’s products, often through an affiliate market earning a commission if people actually end up buying thanks to your marketing.

It’s based on revenue sharing. If you have a product and want to sell more, you can offer promoters a financial incentive through an affiliate program. If you have no product and want to make money, then you can promote a product that you feel has value and earn an income from it as an affiliate marketer.

Do you want to learn how to make money with affiliate marketing, but you’re not sure where to get started?

Affiliate marketing is all about generating tons of profits without any effort, right? At least that’s what a quick Google search would have you believe, but as usual, the truth is a little more complex than that.

Yes, you can make money through affiliate marketing. Good money. And, yes, you can even make money while you sleep.

In this post, we’re going to teach you how to generate passive income with successful affiliate marketing.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is an arrangement between a company and an influencer where the influencer gets a commission for referring sales or website traffic.

An influencer is just someone who has an audience that knows, likes and trusts them.

Who is an Affiliate Marketer?

An affiliate marketer is an influencer who shares products and companies that they enjoy with their audience in exchange for a commission when someone buys.  

Affiliate marketers do not work for a company. They are completely independent, and may choose to work with whatever companies they wish.

Here are 8 ways you can boost your affiliate marketing:

1. Create Quality Content

There is also a correlation between word count and backlinks to an article. Web pages that rank in Google’s top 10 have an average word count of 2,000 or higher (source QuickSprout).

Quality content with a generous amount of words is therefore important for ranking and bringing potential referrals to your page.  One idea is to find product-related questions. Discuss these in an extensive product tutorial. Your best chance to convert your audience into paying customers is to bring real value and address their concerns.

2. Be dedicated to your promotion

One of the most important affiliate marketing secrets is that more quality content makes you appear as an expert on the topic. 

Once your audience notices the value you bring by addressing their questions, chances are they might come back for more information. Stay in the picture and keep bringing value to them, you might be there when they’re ready to buy a product.

3. Promoting Affiliate Links on Facebook

Another place to distribute your affiliate links is on Facebook via your personal profile or a Business page. Make sure you’re not spamming your followers’ Facebook feeds with affiliate link posts. Your goal is to convince someone to click on your affiliate links and make a purchase. Do so by posting entertaining, educational, and intriguing content that includes affiliate links. 

4. Instagram Affiliate Links

Much like promoting affiliate links on Facebook, you can also generate affiliate traffic from your Instagram posts. However, Instagram has one major exception: Instagram posts are not clickable.

Instead, you must drive fans to your bio to click on a link.

A workaround to this problem is to include links in Instagram Stories. Once you gain more than 10k followers, you can add links to your Instagram Stories content.

If selling on Instagram is a priority, make it a point to first build a loyal audience. These loyal followers will be more likely to click on your affiliate links, whether in the bio or Instagram Stories and engage with your content.

5. Engage your visitors

Most successful affiliate marketers talk to their visitors. If you have a blog, allow comments. This will provide you with the opportunity to have a conversation with your visitors. Yes, you will need to filter out the spam, but if you reply to most of your commenters and start dialogues, they will return to continue the conversation.

Ask questions at the end of a blog post. “What other factors should be included?” “Would you like more information on this topic?” “Tell us your opinion!” These calls to action will help foster community interaction. When replying, use the commenters name wherever possible.

The more your visitors come to see your site as a community of like-minded people, the more they will return and increase your conversions.

6. Provide information and help, rather than sell.

Blatant sales and self-promotion sites never gain traction. You need to help your visitors and provide quality information they find useful so that they keep coming back. If you look at the sites that rank well for the various terms used in your niche, you will find that useful information wins out. Do your research and provide more details or updated information.

 7. Track your affiliate marketing success

Ongoing success needs insights as to what has worked in the past. While you do not want to set it and forget it - knowing how visitors engage with your site is important. Obviously, search ranking will have an impact, as will social sharing, etc.

You need to use your visitor analytics to learn more about your visitors. What percentage are new versus returning visitors? What pages get the majority of your traffic? What links in your navigation bar and other places on each page get clicked? All these questions will provide answers that you can use to improve and add actions.

Where is your converting traffic coming from? What pages are visited most before a conversion? Use your analytics to get answers you can use to determine what new content is needed or even where to place certain links on existing pages. Use your data!

8. Set proper expectations

You are not going to make a million dollars in a month. You need to set realistic expectations. Many affiliates spend a set amount of time to build out their original sites then commit to a smaller amount to keep adding content while starting a new site. Whether you have a single site with concentrated ongoing development or a number of initially smaller sites, set goals and work towards accomplishing them.