How to Succeed With Affiliate Marketing: A Practical Guide

If you're looking for a sustainable stream of income as a publisher or an advertiser, affiliate marketing is certainly worth considering.

A powerful branch of performance advertising, affiliate marketing is a concept where advertisers commission affiliate partners (also known as ‘affiliate marketer’) to promote their products or services and ultimately, generate revenue.

Executed effectively, affiliate marketing offers a 12:1 return on ad spend—an incredibly healthy ROI. Plus, 80% of publishers and advertisers utilize affiliate marketing to boost profits as well as engagement.

Intrigued? Here we consider how affiliate marketing works and the approaches you should adopt to monetize your efforts effectively.

How affiliate marketing works: an overview

There are various elements to consider when it comes to affiliate marketing—including the main parties involved in the process:

• The advertiser: The individual or business that sells a product or service.

• The publisher: The individual or business that promotes the product or service on the advertiser’s behalf. (Networks in most cases)

• The platform: The service or publication that connects the advertiser with the publisher and optimizes ad placement while offering revenue-generating opportunities (AdStyle).

• The consumer: The individual who buys the service or product.

Now that you know the entities involved in the process, let's dive into monetizing your affiliate marketing efforts.

Monetizing your affiliate marketing efforts

You understand how affiliate marketing works, but how do you get started? We’re going to tell you about these essential monetization tips.

Discover your niche or specialty

When it comes to affiliate marketing, spreading yourself too thin will only dilute your efforts. That said, finding your niche from the get-go is essential.

Decide which types of products or services you would like to promote and you will be able to focus efforts on a specific niche. To help you make an informed decision, you should ask yourself these questions:

• Do you know about or believe in the products or services you're looking to promote? Remember, you need to sell them to consumers and encourage conversions—so, this is important.

• Based on your research, how much competition is there in your potential niche and how much commission can you earn from each conversion?

Tip: Choose a niche that you’re comfortable with, but has a decent range of products to promote within the vertical. Finance, for example, offers the opportunity to promote products or services from credit cards and bank accounts to mortgage products, with commissions ranging from $1 to $1000.

Choose the right affiliate marketing products & networks

Once you’ve settled on your niche, you should select the products you would like to promote.

Regardless of the commission you earn from a specific item, you will need to put in the same amount of work—so choosing products that you know how to promote well and offer a healthy ROI is essential.

Typically, higher value or ‘big ticket’ items offer a chance to up-sell (for instance, if you’re promoting a whitepaper, the business in question might also offer a video-based tutorial course) and make more money, so it’s worth exploring these options.

Also, engaging with the right affiliate networks will open you up to the most lucrative opportunities.

For suggestions on high-quality affiliate networks reach out to your account manager at AdStyle or our team at support@ad.style 

Get your content right

With your potential products and affiliate networks in place, it’s time to start creating some content.

Engaging, targeted content is the cornerstone of any effective affiliate marketing campaign. By producing informative, value-driven blog posts, articles, and ads, you will encourage potential customers to click through on your promotional links and earn you a commission.

To deliver the kind of content that will drive your affiliate marketing success, you should create it for specific user demographics—people that are most likely to find value in what you’re selling.

Use platforms like Google Trends and Quora to discover what kind of queries or questions your target audience is searching for and create the kind of content that offers informative, practical solutions.

In addition to producing blog posts and articles to promote your affiliate products and earn commission, you should also consider native advertising to place the right messaging in front of the right audience and ultimately, drive more revenue.

Analyze & improve

To maximize your affiliate marketing efforts and increase your revenue over time, it’s important to leverage data-driven insights to analyze the performance of your content or advertising efforts.

By understanding what drives engagement and what doesn’t, you’ll be able to refine your strategy and ultimately, improve your affiliate marketing ROI.

Whatever analytics tools or tactics you use, the bottom line is: testing, tracking, and analysing your performance on a regular basis will help you improve your efforts, which will help you earn more money on a sustainable basis.

Affiliate marketing takes time and patience but follow these tips, focus on creating valuable content, and you will reap the rewards. Best of luck.

For more promotional pearls of wisdom, read our essential guide on how to drive conversions to your eCommerce business.

Our team is ready to assist you in setting up your affiliate campaign with AdStyle - a leading content recommendation network helping brands, agencies and marketers to drive results and the highest conversion rates on the market.

Reach out for more details!