6 Affiliate Marketing Strategies from Top-Earning Affiliates

Three top earners offer some exceptional ideas that can kick your commissions up a notch or two. I’ll guide you through the ones I think are most worth your time.

NOTE: Here’s the thing about affiliate marketing strategies. A lot of them just aren’t super sexy. They deal with planning, researching, updating, and other humdrum tasks. But these are all necessary to get the most out of your affiliate campaigns. Plus, the affiliates who do the humdrum tasks are usually the ones who earn more. 😉

Neil Patel On Affiliate Marketing Strategies

Neil Patel offers a few advanced affiliate marketing strategies that I think are must-haves.

1. Put affiliate links on pages that have the most traffic. In order to know which of your site pages get the most traffic, you have to use Google Analytics or some other analytics tool to find out. That requires a little bit of research.

Once you know which pages attract high levels of traffic, you review the list of affiliate products / services that you promote and match the best ones with the high-traffic pages.

Because your affiliate links will now have more views, they will also begin to get more clicks and (hopefully) more sales. That depends greatly on the quality and conversion rate of the affiliate sales page.

2. Know your data! I know, I know. Data is boring. Well, not really. But a lot of affiliates think it is. In truth, data is your path to more sales.

By checking the insights on Facebook or Instagram, for example, you can determine what was clicked or watched versus what posts were liked. What the reach of the post was. Whether posts with photos, videos, or plain text did better, and a LOT more!

For Facebook, look for Manage Page > Insights > People.

For Instagram, follow the steps in this article.

Pat Flynn on Affiliate Marketing Ideas

As the founder of Smart Passive Income, Pat Flynn is heavy into affiliate marketing. Here are a couple of tips from this blog post.

3. Interview the Product Creator – I make this offer to all my affiliates, too. They can email me 5 to 10 questions and I’ll email them my answers so they can create an article, blog post, or email that promotes one of my products.

The questions should center on who the product would be best for, features / benefits specific to your audience, examples of what the product will do, and anything else your audience might need to know to make a buying decision.

4. Create a Product Demo – Something else I highly recommend. Here’s one example of a demo / review I created. This can also be done in blog post format. If you aren’t sure how to create a review blog post, the “Reviews” 3-pack of my Blog Post Shortcuts will be a great help.

Karon Thackston on Affiliate Marketing Strategies

Yep! I’m jumping in on this, too.

5. Use Your Data – I mentioned that Neil Patel had “know your data” as a tip on his blog. But knowing it isn’t the same as using it. After you’ve gone through Google Analytics, Facebook, or any other type of data, take time to jot some notes about how you can use that data.

For example, let’s say you use Active Campaign (my favorite!). When I look into the stats for one of my campaigns or automations, I find several useful datapoints.

The obvious ones include open rate, click rate, and bounce rate. The often overlooked datapoints are things like:

• Geographic Location – With this, I can see where in the world my readers are.

What difference does location make? A LOT!

If the majority of my readers were in Australia instead of the United States, I’d need to adjust my mailing times, for one thing. I’d also want to adjust my English to accommodate those down under.

Even if I see that most of my U.S.-based subscribers are in a different time zone than me, I might want to experiment with various send dates/times to find the best-performing ones.

• Unsubscribe Rate – Check the unsub rate for each email? Well, not every one, but I do spot-check regularly. If I see a lot of unsubscribes and they are all from emails of the same topic, that clues me in to the fact that my list doesn’t care for that. Which means I need to stop mailing about it.
• Hourly Open Trend – This also plays to which times my emails are sent. I suggest doing a 24-hour test, where you send various emails at each hour of the day. Send one email at 12 a.m. midnight. Send the next at 1 a.m.. Another one at 2 a.m., etc., until you have sent emails (over a period of time) at every hour of the day. Then you can look to see which hour consistently has the best open and click rates.

6. Run Campaigns, Not Single Emails – This is extremely important and, in my opinion, something that a lot of affiliates fail to do. The thinking is usually that they don’t want to annoy their subscribers.

Your subscribers signed up with you because they are interested in what you have to say about certain topics. As long as you appropriately segment your mailings so that information about affiliate marketing (for example) goes to those on your list who are interested in affiliate marketing, all should be well.

Sending multiple mailings about the different aspects of a product or service you’re promoting informs, teaches, and enlightens your subscribers. And it gives you a significantly better chance at conversions.

Email copywriting for affiliate promotions is a powerful tool, provided you understand how to dissect a product and present it in various ways that will entice your readers.

If you’ve been using the same affiliate marketing ideas and wishing you could have better success, now’s the time to try some (or all) of these suggestions. With a little extra effort, you can boost your commissions to new heights!

Have questions about affiliate marketing strategies? Talk to me below!

Recommended Learning & Tools

Affiliate Success Secrets: How To Multiply Your Commissions In 30 Days

Affiliate Advantage: Success Secrets For Making More Commissions

Email Advantage: How To Write Promotional Emails That Convert

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