Affiliate Marketing, Passive Income, it’s the ultimate way to make money online.

You link to a product, someone buys it and you get paid.  Sounds fantastic, sounds easy.

Well, it’s not easy!  Not without a few pointers anyway ;)

So you probably guessed, I’m here to give you a few Affiliate Marketing Tips and Pointers. Below are ways you can convert more traffic into money, reach more people, make more sales, earn more commissions and get the eff out of this active income crap!

So below, without beating around the bush I have some tips for you on improving your affiliate marketing and making more money. A quick disclosure though, some of the links below are affiliate links I earn a commission from, but you probably knew that!

Let’s start…

Please note: the following links contain affiliate links I earn a commission from upon purchase. These links do not affect your purchase price and I would recommend these products either way!

First is general advice: sell benefits, not features.

People don’t care about bells and whistles, they want to know if a product will do what they want it to. So talk about the benefits of the affiliate products you are promoting so people can see if their problem can be solved by throwing around a little money.

Features can be good to list, but the main tip here is try not to distract, narrow down to the good stuff that’s effective and you’ll keep people moving and hopefully buying.

Cloak your Affiliate links

Quite simply, people respond to neater looking links than long-winded gibberish ones that affiliate marketing links tend to look like. Not only that, some people will see an affiliate link and remove the affiliate portion of it or even replace it with their own identifier (or even removed with an Ad-blocker)- meaning no commission.

You can also use link cloaking to track link clicks and also create easy to pronounce URL’s, perfect for podcasts and YouTube Videos. It’s very easy to do with Pretty Link Lite, simply install the plugin, scroll down the dashboard to Pretty Link and click ‘Add New Link’ on the fly-out, fill out the fields and you’re set!

Some affiliate marketing programs (such as Amazon Associates) don’t approve of cloaking links, so check your programs terms and conditions.

This is one of the most basic and boring tips on the list but one you need to take seriously.

Warm up & pre-sell your referrals

Sending people straight to an offer via your affilaite link will more than likely cause them to bounce. They know nothing about the product and they’ve just landed on a page prompting them to buy.

You need to breed some familiarity with your prospective buyers before sending them to an offer if you can.  The general rule is it takes about 7 interactions before someone is familiar enough with you to make a purchase, whether it’s your product or an affiliate product.

Pre-sell and ‘warm up’ your audience by mentioning the product here and there, discuss the benefits and also, if you can, offer a testimonial on how it worked for you and solved your problem.

This one can be a real game-changer for your Affiliate Marketing income!

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Build trust first.

People don’t trust you.  Neither do I (just kidding, but other people don’t trust you).

This is one tip not to ignore! You need to make sure you are transparent and don’t come across as hiding anything. Otherwise, people may think your scamming them and leave your website not even clicking your beloved Affiliate link!

Make sure your web design is clean (take control of that with the Divi Theme), add your photo in there, be giving of value for free and show that you’re here to help and you’re a real person. This will make your recommendation so much more effective and lead to more affiliate commissions.

Sell higher commission products

This is another one of my top affiliate marketing tips…

I apologize in advance but… maths time!

Let’s say you’re promoting affiliate products and here’s what you’re working with:

• 1000 visitors per day
• 10% click your affiliate link = 100 link clicks
• 10% buy the product = 10 purchases.

Now compare a product with a $7 commission and another with a $50 commission. 

• The $7 product makes you $70 a day. Not bad!
• The $50 product makes you $500 a day.  Even if you only sold half that’s still $250!

Now, some higher commission products may not sell as well but finding the most profitable, high quality product to promote is one way to drastically increase your income.

It may also be more difficult to generate the traffic in a niche with higher commission products due to competition.  Still the $7 product would need a website receiving 7000 visitors to get the same money as the $50 product, which has a website receiving 1000 visitors.

Where possible, use this approach to multiply your affiliate earnings.

Use or try what you sell

This is good practice for a number of reasons.

• You should be offering honest referrals, promoting absolutely anything will come back to bite you!
• You will have intimate knowledge of the product and be able to more convincingly sell it.
• You offer detailed tutorials which will help break down the barrier of mystery, so people better understand the product and are more willing to buy.
• You can promote the results you’ve experienced using the product.

It’s honest and it’s the way affiliate marketing should be done,  People can smell when someone is just shoving a product in your face a seller has no idea about, so avoid the stench of being  full of BS.

Start an email auto-responder series

This is another of my affiliate marketing tips that will change the game for most marketers starting out.

I mentioned earlier that it takes roughly 7 interactions to get people comfortable with buying.

So what happens when someone lands on your website? They visit once and leave most of the time.

However, if you sign them up to your email list and offer a previously written set of free, helpful emails leading up to the sales message.  You can offer a solution to problem that you break up over 7 emails, mentioning the tool that makes it easier (your affiliate product) in the last email.

Even better, if you don’t make a sale you can continue to offer quality and weave your offers into future emails. So you not only get your first product pitch but the opportunity for more down the track.

This can all be very easily set up with ConvertKit which specializes in auto-responder email series and workflows. Here’s a walk through of how it works.

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Search for recurring affiliate offers

Much like choosing higher commission products, you can compound your efforts with recurring affiliate commissions.

Basically, when you make a sale, you earn an affiliate commission as usual, except that every time another payment is made you continue to receive that commission. So if you sell a product with a monthly fee, you will get a cut every month until that person cancels.

This means that if you customer base stays with the product you promoted, you can build a stable and recurring income by slowly building up your sales.  Nifty, right?

Create walk-through / tutorial videos for your affiliate products

People are quite often very wary of purchasing a product because they truly do not know what to expect.

By filming or screen capturing yourself using a product, solving problems and showing off how it works, you can give them the confidence in the product they need to step over the line and make that purchase. I do this one a lot and it makes up the majority of my affiliate sales.

It’s simple, just start a YouTube channel, create your videos and share/embed them on your site (here’s how).

You can buy a camera for physical products or use screen capture software like Camtasia, which is what i use, to record yourself using software. Pop  your affiliate link on teh page or description and even on screen in the video itself and people will often click through and make the purchase!

Don’t be too aggressive with your marketing pitch

Shoving affiliate links and ads and sending out only sales emails is a good way for people to leave you with a bad taste in their mouth. That’s poor affiliate marketing.

Focus mainly on being helpful and offering value for free and weave your offers in non-aggressively.  The reason people come to you is not because they want to throw money around, they want help for free.  By giving people the free quality they want they learn to trust you and are more willing to take recommendations.

Would you take the recommendation of someone you don’t like, who pushed and got in your face about a product or a friend you respect and brings value to your life?  The friend wins because you like them, you trust them and you know they’re not trying to scam you – they want to help.

Be the marketer who actually helps.

Another tip: Sell tools that are a required part of a process

People go searching for solutions to problems but sometimes there is either no free avenue or the free avenue just plain sucks.

By teaching someone how to achieve something and referring the tools necessary to make it happen, you can become far more convincing with your sales pitch as the solution is simply not available to those who don’t by the tool.

One example would be a starting a website.

You can go and get a free website but it’s a poor solution to creating a professional and trustworthy web presence. You need a domain name and hosting to create a good website so you may as well find a quality provider who has an affiliate program.  I did exactly this with my free ‘Get started’ email course, I sought out the most reliable host and promoted the use of their services through my tutorials.

This could be as simple as selling a drill to someone who wants to build a table or cables for someone wiring up surround sound in their home cinema.

If you wouldn’t buy it, don’t promote it

Seriously, affiliate marketing should be called referral marketing.

When you refer something you’re putting your name next to it.  So if you wouldn’t buy a particular product then don’t try to sell it!

When you sell and inferior quality product or something laden with problems to someone who trusts you, your identity gets linked to those problems because you gave your personal recommendation. So seriously, just don’t!

Keep your affiliate products relevant to your niche

If you run a dog training website, don’t pitch a weight loss product.

People will be confused, they will think the website has gone off base and lose confidence that this is where you they can find expert advice. In all seriousness, you also look as if you’re trying to sell something to make a quick buck or that you’re out of information to provide so you’re switching up the content.

Keep everything relevant to your audience and don’t shake up their comfort by doing something weird and unexpected. Keep them in their comfort zone.

Remove the distractions

Here’s an idea – promote affiliate products on your site but also add paid text links, banner ads and 10 call to actions above the fold so you can make better use of what’s in front of your visitors.

Yeah, that’s very crappy idea. Why?

People go looking for what they want, so give it to them directly in an easy to find manner so when they land they aren’t distracted and can immerse themselves in your content.  Then when the timing is right, make your offer without distraction.

By laying one easy to follow path, people don’t get bamboozled and leave.

Statistically, when presented with too many options people are more likely to leave without making a choice.  When you try to put a tonne of distracting elements on a page to, and I quote “maximize you ruse of space”, you in fact minimize the results.

Again, another of my most basic but overlooked affiliate marketing tips

Know your audience and sell what they want

Here’s a tip: It’s not about you, it’s about your audience.

People visit your website to get what they want, not what you want to discuss. So you need to find the best way to give your website visitors what they came for and lead them into your offer. Everything should be aimed at making them happy because it will increase sales and make you happy.

You can do this by monitoring your Google Analytics, seeing which pages perform best and noticing a pattern.  Also, you can simply ask!  Put  apost out on Facebook or send an email to your list asking what they need.  Many marketers do this as their first email so they know what people came to them for – they then go and deliver that information.

Be ethical

There are some spammy, misleading and just downright dodgy people out there trying to make money with Affiliate marketing.

Don’t be a dodgy marketer, here’s a tip I highly recommend you follow.

Don’t spam your audience or be misleading with them, instead shoot for honesty transparency and a genuine approach to giving them what they want. People notice whenyou’re being a genuine perosn online and when you’re trying to scam them.

So being ethical isn’t just about being able to sleep at night, it yields far superior results and more money in your pocket.

Disclose your links

This is less a tip more the law of affiliate marketing.

Before you promote any affiliate offers you need to disclose, on your page, that some of your links are affiliate links that earn you a commission from upon purchase.

Here’s a few reasons why:

• First of all, you need to disclose your links by law in most countries.
• Even if you legally need to, many affiliate programs ask you to disclose your links in their terms of service. So you could lose your affiliation if you don’t.
• It’s good business, people will trust you if you’re upfront and honest

It’s simple, I simply add a line during the introduction of my post.  You can see it at the beginning of this post if you take a look! You may think it will scare people away by telling them you have affiliate links on your site, but honestly, most people don;t care and will happily send you a commission as a way of thanking you for your valuable information.

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Give value first, be generous

I’ll say it again.  Statistically, it takes seven interaction for people to become comfortable enough with you to buy or take your recommendation.

Remember, people don’t go onto the internet looking to spend money, they want stuff for free.

So give them what they want, be very generous and if you get them on your email list focus on giving first. People begin to trust and really appreciate you after you give first. Promote your affiliate offer later to a warmed up friend instead of a cold visitor and you’ll make more sales.

Try paid ads

Once you’ve fine tuned your funnel, pay for people to sent to it.

One approach I link is taking a look at the sales of your list and working out an average of how much each subscriber is worth to you. Here’s a few numbers

• You have grown by 1000 subscribers in the past 6 months
• You have made $4000 from your list in that time.
• So $4000 divided by 1000 subscribers is an average of $4 per subscriber.
• If you can get you subscribers $2 or less via paid ads, you’ve doubled your money.

This is a bit of of an advanced area as you run the risk of just spending a heap of money, but it’s worth considering and doing some research on when the time is right.

Track which affiliate links perform best

If you sell a particular product, many affiliate companies allow you to add tracking or campaign ID’s to your links.

If you have several key areas you promote from, have a different link / ID for each (or you can test various areas of each page) so you can see which on converts the best. You can then put more effort into promoting the pages with the highest conversions per visitor. You can also adjust the other pages to duplicate the approach more similarly if you think it can improve their conversion.

Be analytical and trust the numbers!

Add your own bonus

Someimes you get a lot of competition for one product, and people everywhere do a lot of research and are presented an affiliate links from several different people. So here’s a handy tip for you.

How do you compete with other affiliates? Offer more than they do.

If they choose to buy through your link, ask them to send you a receipt and in return, give them a valuable bonus so they choose you over the competition. Sometimes the bonus can just be a nice extra that encourages them to buy more effectively, even without the extra competition.

Find problems and offer your affiliate product as the solution

The health & fitness industry are really good at this. You identify a problem people face and find a product which solves it.

Here’s a few examples:

• Need to gain muscle? Buy our protein.
• Get to below 10% body fat? Sign up for my program!
• Need to reach more people fast?  Try our new ad service!
• Struggling to get 8 hours sleep? Here’s five tips that can help.

You get the idea.  When people have a problem and don’t know the solution they go searching for one.  You offer them you easy solution whether it be information, or a tool they can just pay for that handles it, then you are offering something that will enhance their lives and you’ll more than likely make the sale.

Add a ‘tools’ or ‘resources’ page to your website

Sometimes, people go looking for tools for to solve multiple problems.

They land on your website which discusses what they’re trying to do and see your ‘Tools’ page and consider that there may be some big time savers in there – this will tip them off to what tools you’re using and they’ll want to follow suit.  You offer your affiliate products which will help them and they can see what they like and possibly purchase!

This is something a lot of affiliate marketers do and swear by!

Interview the product owner

If your audience trusts you and reads, watches or listens to you interviewing someone then a stronger connection is made and the product you’re promoting becomes more attractive and trustworthy.

Your overall image improves to as you are seen as someone on the inside who is in the know, so there a multiple benefits. They can also share tips and insights into your affiliate product that most people aren’t aware of.

Try emailing the owner of the program and asking for an interview!

Promote your results using the affiliate product you’re promoting

If you use the product and get impressive results, then show them off!

People relate to other people.

So when someone sees you using a tool and getting the results they want, the connection is made that it’s easier and more possible with that tool.  So promote your results and your affiliate link and the likelihood of a commission will improve.

Don’t rely on image banners and ads

If all you do is place banner ads on your site promoting a product, expect little success in the world of affiliate marketing.

I mentioned earlier that you need to pre-sell your affiliate products if you want to increase your conversions. People can become blind to your advertisements, especially if they visit regularly.  After all, they’re there for your content and if you put spammy looking banners up their brain will associate that with wasted space.

Put free and helpful banners and images up that lead into more helpful content, an email list and/or eventually the content that sells your affiliate product.

Tell a story

Again, people relate to people.

This is one of those tips you get to have a little fun with. When you tell a story people can follow your narrative as you address your problem, how it felt and how desperately you wanted to get past it.  When you then go through the steps and the great feeling of success the product helped bring you – people see themselves in the shoes of the character in the story.

Emotion runs deep. When you follow a story you can relate to you become the character in your own mind.  But when the solution to your problem arrive sin the story, that character surpasses you and you being to want to be where they are.

This is a powerful way of getting people to really want what you’re offering.

You can be a bit elusive with it also. For example, you could title your post something like “How I managed to lose 100 pounds in 3 months (after trying everything)”. People who struggle to lose weight and go from fad to fad feel that the title describes them perfectly.  They read on and you explain your story, how this affiliate product was the game-changer and they’ll either reject it as a sales pitch or be excited about trying it out and make a purchase.

Minimize page load time

If your page takes forever to load, people will leave.

Well actually, if your page takes longer than 3 seconds to show up they will still leave!

We often get caught up overloading our sites with plugins, widgets and don’t optimize our sites for speed. I have a post which can guide you through how to speed up WordPress here, so people get what they want fast and you are able to more easily promote your product to them.

Make your affiliate links easy to spot

If people can’t tell that your links ARE links, then they won’t get clicked. So make sure your theme’s design has the links in a nice bright color that is different form the text.

Furthermore, links can still blend in to an article even if they are bring.  So one thing to add to this tip: you can do is build up to your affiliate link and then put it on it’s own line, in bold and even highlight the background.  You could do this with a button, like below:

Here’s a Link on it’s own line!

If you don’t know how to add buttons into your content, simple create an image and link that out instead.  You can use photoshop or Canva (which is free).

Then it will be hard to miss, but here’s the thing…

Don’t over do it.  If you get too aggressive and “in your face” with your links people will be resistant to them instead and you’ll lose a little trust as you seem to be just wanting to to sell something.  Which basically means you want something and you’re not giving first. People want to you to be generous, in return they will be too.

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Choose quality over money

Remember I said you should go for higher commission affiliate products, well don;t sacrifice quality for money…

Choosing quality over money, you’ll make more money. Confusing?

Basically, if you sell an inferior product because you make a higher commission, people will be less likely to buy because you can often smell a stinker a mile away. Offer a high quality product people rave about and you’ll make more sales which should eclipse the sale of the crap product.  It also boost your credibility whereas a low quality product will destroy it.

Remember this tip: Quality over money!

Choose an affiliate product with a good landing page

Imagine that you find the perfect product, you set up an awesome presell and everything looks as if it should work perfectly. Then you customer goes to the affiliate page and it’s horrible, they second guess their choice and decide not to buy.  No affiliate commission!

If your affiliate product has a crummy landing page, then it’s going to be difficult to convert people if they’re met with something that changes their mind after all of your hard work trying to sell them this product.

Some things to look out for and avoid:

• Pages with banner ads
• Pages that promote other products for their affiliates
• A phone number (you won’t get  commission if ordered over the phone)
• Very busy design that’s difficult to follow and full of distractions
• Images that won’t load or are fuzzy and pixelated
• Uses the font ‘Comic Sans’
• Too many different calls to action
• Way to much text that’s not visual or scannable
• Poor grammar and incorrect spelling that’s very easy to spot

If you see page and it turns you away, then it turn your visitors away too.  That simple.

Consider bypassing the landing page!

In some instances you can go straight to cart with some affiliates, but you better check if that’s OK before doing (read the terms).

Depending on which affiliate marketing platform you’re on will dictate how you can actually do it. But many people on Clickbank do it and you can even add a product to someone’s cart on Amazon Associates.  This means you can create your own landing page with an “add to cart” or “buy now” button that bypasses your affiliate’s site.

If it improves your likelihood of sale, why not?

Look for a long cookie length

This is one of those lesser-known affiliate marketing tips that will multiply your opportunity to make more money.

Imagine you send people to an affiliate and 100s of people a month buy this product you promoted…

…but it was after the cookie length. Damn, again no commission.

For example, because Amazon is visited so frequently, your visitors have 24 hours to buy something if you’re to get the commission.  Anytime after that and you get nothing.

But a lot of other affiliate programs have cookie lengths of 30 or even 90 days.Sometimes it takes a while for someone to decide to buy – this way you get a month or 3 months for any of your referred prospective buyers to purchase and earn you the commission.

Link to other pages using your affiliate link

Why push someone through the front door, show them in through the side door instead. Some products, such as information products, can be better sold if you can get prospective buyers to become hooked on the free content provided by your affiliate.

An example of this tip in action: So if my friend Bob is selling an E-book, going straight to a landing page will probably result in poor conversions. But sending people to carefully selected content written by Bob, via an affiliate link, means you get them hooked on his information first.  You can then send them to a landing page a later date if you want, but they may want to buy in the meantime so you’d get a slice then too.

If your affiliate has a link generator it’s easy to start, a long cookie length is also recommended as it may take time for people to decide to buy.

Be ready for phone users

Again, this tip is basic but do not ignore it!

If your website isn’t responsive, then what are you doing?

But hey, even if it is responsive, how usable is it?  You might sit there on your desktop putting together awesome pages and blog posts and find that people get to your site via phone and it’s just not as effective.

Be phone ready with a responsive design so you can sell to anyone, on any device. Grab a solid theme like Divi to make that happen.

Be honest, address the weaknesses of your affiliate product

If something looks too good to be true, it usually is.  People believe that, especially when spending hard earned money.

So when you talk about this life changing product and promote it as this flawless and unbeatable solution to life than people will be skeptical.  Talk about the strengths, sell them.  But also address what you don’t like about a product and even better, talk about the work-arounds and how you made it fit your needs anyway.

This means people will have a better idea on what to expect and it will also appear more honest, because it is.  This can help tip the person over the line because they can see you’re being honest. If people believe what you say (and it should be the truth) they’ll be more likely to buy based on your recommendation.

Write top list posts (and include your affiliate product in it)

This is more of a website traffic tip, but it’s perfect for affiliate marketing.

I’ve improved my traffic immensely with top list posts.  One of my websites which I use as an example here a lot, grew from a few hundred to a few thousand visitors per day when I started writing them.

The reason they work is because people go searching for some tips, tools or resources when faced with a problem.  They go looking for “the best” or “the top” resources, tips or tools.  So the top list post format feeds into that directly and lends itself to longer 2000+ word posts packed with keywords and long-tail keywords that are very scannable and easy to digest.

They’ve been putting lists into magazines and articles long before the internet for a simple reason, people love them!

As an affiliate marketer not only do you get more traffic, but you can easily list the top products in your niche, compare them and you have many opportunities to sell those products and make a commission.

High traffic + a list of easy to promote products = more commissions.

I show you how to write top list posts here.

Write comparison and versus posts

This is similar to a top list post except it focuses mainly on comparison instead of a quantity.

Sometimes people are faced a choice between two or more products and have no idea which to choose.

You, being the expert, typically offer a particular affiliate product but maybe you just aren’t convincing them. Well, you can promote all (or both) of the products out there by writing up a simple comparison post to give them some tips and pointers and improve your chance of making an affiliate commission.

Try out the products your comparing, create a list of pros and cons for each and even identify the characteristics of the person they each suit. 

Here’s an example using WordPress Themes (which I actually use):

The Thesis Theme is terrific for advanced web-designers a coders who use WordPress who want full control over how their WordPress site looks, while The Divi Theme is for less advanced but reasonably savvy users who still want to customize their site.  But beginners are better off with pre-designed themes or Theme packages as they don’t need to do as much work.

By qualifying each product and who it’s suitable for you make it easier for prospective buyers to make a choice, so compare and rate the quality of each for multiple chances to earn your affiliate commission.

Refer back to these posts

Not every post you write is there to sell, but that doesn’t mean you can’t capitalize on the opportunity your value posts bring you.

By identifying ways to conquer a obstacle or problem, you can mention some relevant posts that will help out link to them for further information. You then turn a highly traffic value posts into a lead in to a money making post.

it’s not rocket science but it does help by giving your audience solutions and making you more money!

Offer discounts if available

Often when you sign up to become an affiliate, you can also receive an affiliate newsletter – which I highly recommend in a lot of cases.

Why? Because they will let you know when a sale is on or if there’s a coupon code you can use to promote the discount with! Many affiliate offers have a permanent discount link you can use to make your sales pitch just a bit more convincing.

If something is out of your customers’ price range, that discount could be the thing that get’s them over the line. 

I often discuss the Divi Theme here on this website and have made upwards of $800 it in a single day by promoting it during Black Friday sales.

So don’t under-estimate this top tip!

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Analyze, Review and Refine

Go over the pages and campaigns you use most to promote and look for weaknesses.

This can be done by scanning your page, changing and testing or even going over analytics and reports to see where they’re falling flat. You can also spot patterns of success and strengths in successful campaigns and replicate them into your weaker ones.

This process in this quick tip will help you grow really quickly.

Create evergreen content

Is the product you’re promoting just a fad? Here’s a tip…

Imagine if you spent a week creating the most awesome affiliate campaign ever and the interest died off a month later.  You past effort has officially stopped working for you. But if you create posts and promotions that sell products that are stable and never going out of fashion then your effort will continues to seel for you for as long as it’s accessible.

Everyone wears clothes, every website needs hosting and every boxer needs gloves.

Playing the long game means you get build and compound your efforts.  There’s nothing wrong with the short game if you get a massive spike in results, but most people have more success shooting for the long-term with their affiliate marketing.

Link more than once in an article

Don’t make people search for your link, place it near the most compelling points of your article and definitely at the end.  People should be presented with your link in a convenient fashion so it’s a no-brainer for them.

If you’re worried about having too many links, you can link off once at the footer of your post and add an ID to the header and link to that instead. Here’s a quick walkthrough.

1. Simply create a H2 or H3 title (Heading 2 or Heading 3 in WordPress) that says something like “More Information on the Official Website”.
2. Switch from your ‘visual’ editor tab to ‘text’ (or ‘Edit HTML’ if you’re using the new Gutenberg editor).
3. Find your title, it will look something like this <h2>”More Information on the Official Website”.</h2>
4. In the first <h2> tag add id=”link”,  it will appear link this now: <h2 id=”link”>”More Information on the Official Website”.</h2>
5. Now simply make your links #link and it will auto-scroll to this section with your link being very easy to spot.

This is a pretty nifty affiliate marketing tip to avoid being flagged as too aggressive with your links.

Never stop learning

Sure, it’s general advice but we all need a reminder.

If you stop learning and take your finger off the pulse then the industry will move past you.  Keep on learning , reading up on Affiliate marketing tips, websites and even signing up for online courses that will help you to evolve.

Invest in yourself and you’ll be able to stay in the game for much longer and make more money.

Take action

My final tip for you is not get trapped in the learning phase without taking some action. Continue to learn, yes, but make sure you act because if you don’t nothing will ever happen.

Many people fall into the mistake of learning and getting hyped up watching YouTube Videos and taking courses, trying to perfect their knowledge so they can start strong. Like most things in life, experience coupled with learning is the ultimate approach to mastering a skill.

Learning is like picking up the facts in a soft way, experience is what hard-wires skill into your system. This is one of the tips here you should not ignore.

Reading about failures isn’t as strong a learning experience as experiencing failures. Don’t be afraid to take action!

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BONUS: Crowdsource Credibility to Boost Affiliate Sales

We all know reviews and social proof have a BIG impact on conversion rate. So, why not utilize this psychology to boost your affiliate sales?

Enter: crowdsourced credibility. 

This is where you validate the value of affiliate products by sourcing credible third-party insights/opinion. 

Here’s an example:

Robbie Richards runs a reputable SEO blog which he monetizes with affiliate marketing. Instead of publishing another post that lists every keyword research tool on the planet, he reached out to over 100 SEO practitioners to see which specific tools they used to perform keyword research for their online businesses and clients.

A lot of these folks were influencers in the industry with large online followings. Once they sent the responses in, Robbie aggregated the votes and built a leaderboard that listed the 10 best keyword research tools by vote count. The results have so much more credibility now because they are backed by influencers and practitioners. The reader doesn’t have to scroll through dozens of tools, sign up for trials and weed out the best options. All the heavy lifting has been done for them. 

Robbie has replicated this strategy numerous times on this blog. Here is another example that looks at the best SEO plugins for WordPress uers. Again – he crowdsourced opinion from dozens of SEOs and professional bloggers, and broke out the results by both all-in-one and single use plugins. So, the reader gets value whether they’re looking for an all-one-one plugin, or one that is just for a single use case such as improving site speed. 

On top of the conversion potential, these posts also have social sharing baked into their DNA. Influencers are glad to share content they are featured with their large audiences. 

Thanks for taking the time to read this whole post!  It’s pretty lengthy :)

If you have any suggestions or comments, please leave a comment below, let’s keep this conversation moving!

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