Hi guys,Clickworld here again with another interesting value bomb on affiliate marketing strategy.
I'd be lying if I say that successful affiliate marketers don't know more than you; they do
But the things that you call "secrets" are not secrets at all.
The top marketers simply have knowledge of fundamental marketing techniques, hard-won experience and lessons learned from the countless mistakes they've made over the years.
There are no loopholes or hacks that can help you game the system.
There are however tried and tested strategies that are based on reliable frameworks.
They work 100% every time.
But you still have to execute them.
No genie or magic wand will do it for you.
So if you're ready to do some hard work, here are 5 proven tips that will help you drive affiliate sales every time.
1. Understand the Needs of Your Audience and Promote Benefits
Before you start creating content, choosing products, or even setting up your website, you need to ask yourself some key questions about your target audience.
Who are my buyers?What are their needs, problems, and challenges?What are their aspirations and dreams?What are their fears and doubts?What is it about their lives that they want to change?What are the products that can help them solve their problems and achieve their goals?Why would they buy that product from me?
The expert marketers that you dream to emulate one day, spend hours upon hours understanding the real needs and wants of their target audience.
They don't just create content out of instinct or gut feeling.
They research and find the problems that people are so desperate to solve that they'd spend any amount of money for it.
And once they understand the core needs of their audience and their reasons for buying a product, they create content that addresses those needs and focuses on the benefits of the products instead of promoting their features only.
Examples of Understanding The Needs Of Your Audience & Selling Solutions/Benefits
They don't promote mattresses, they sell a good night's sleep, an active work day, a high performing career, an enjoyable time with family. Again, not just a mattress.They don't sell weight-loss eBooks, they make their prospects dream of a perfect body.They don't promote matchmaking services, they make you imagine a life full of love, comfort, and cherished memories.They don't sell website hosting services, they promote better user experience and higher sales
Because people buy benefits, end results, solutions, escapism, and, convenience among other things (i.e. what they believe the product will do for them and their life), but they never buy "features".
2. Understand Your Role in the Affiliate Marketing Cycle
People can buy whatever they need directly from Amazon, Ebay, Walmart Target, or any other retailer.
Why do they buy from middlemen (affiliates) like you?
You need to understand this to fully appreciate the importance of your role in the affiliate marketing cycle.
As an affiliate marketer, you play the role of a bridge between the customer and the supplier.
Though that doesn't simply mean you can just dump yourself down in the middle between a Google searcher and Amazon and hope to skim off a click via your affiliate link and net an easy commission for no work.
You can't simply regurgitate product features, specifications, pros and cons and other basic benefits that can be found already on Amazon.
No, you must learn how to give added value to the consumers so that they have good reason to go through your website instead of the direct source.
Here are some ways you can give value as a middle-man / affiliate:
By solving the problems of your visitors and connecting them with the best product for their situation over just hard pitching products at them.By providing information or value that the end retailer like Amazon isn't providing or making clear.By offering bonuses on top of the product that compliments or extends the purchase.By showing ways to use or benefits of the product that aren't obvious.By helping users find the best price or discount that they wouldn't get by going directly to the end retailer.By answering all their questions and objections around the product that are holding them back from purchasing.By clearly showing how the pain, problem, discomfort or inconvenience they are experiencing will be removed when they own the product.
3. Offer an Authentic Experience That Goes Beyond the Product Sales Page
Trust is the key to selling online.
But how do you build trust with first-time visitors?
By offering an authentic experience that
beyond the original sales page of the product you're promoting.
Any Tom, Dick, and Harry can create an affiliate site, write a vague product review with no in-depth details of the product, and use spun content copied from the product's original sales page.
The internet is full of such rubbish (no one trusts it).
The best affiliate marketers stand out from all this noise by creating authentic and credible content that's based on their personal experiences. They don't rehash the same information that's already available on the internet.
Instead, they use the product themselves and share insights that are not available on the product's sales page.
Their reviews don't read like product advertisements, they discuss the pros and cons of the product in detail, and help the readers determine whether its the right product for them or not.
Doing so immediately makes their recommendations more reliable and gives them a much higher click-through rate (CTR) than the sites that churn out non-stop promotional content. And this is exactly why a reliable affiliate marketer can get 10x more sales from the same amount of traffic as compared to a newbie.
Authority Hacker, for example, is a site known for its high-quality content that's based on the personal experiences of its owners. Here's a detailed review they published on the best and the worst content writing services.
Here's an equally impressive example.
There are hundreds of "Start a Blog" guides on the web but this one by Jorden stands out for a couple of reasons.
Most guides show you the setup process of a WordPress site only. Jorden goes a step further and covers Wix and SquareSpace as well.She shares her own experience of creating a site with WordPress, SquareSpace, and Wix and lists the pros and cons in detail which makes her review much more useful and credible.
4. Solve Problems, Build Trust, and Overcome the Fear of Selling
What comes to your mind when you think of the word "salesman"?
A slimy car salesman, a pushy door to door salesman, or a cold calling agent hellbent on making a profit by selling you products that you don't need, want, or even like.
Like it or not, people hate salesmen.
But you're not a salesman.
You're a marketer.
And there's a clear difference between the two.
Marketers don't sell products, they solve problems and sell dreams.
When you adopt the right strategy, people not only buy from you but also thank you for offering products that they needed.
It's all about building trust with them, showing them that you care about their needs, and understand how to solve their problems.
Problem-solving is the key word here.
No matter how useful and detailed your content is, if you only publish product reviews, you'll have a hard time building an engaged and loyal following for your site.
The top affiliate marketers make sure that, along with the conventional product reviews, they also publish a large volume of problem-solving content related to the different aspects of their niche.
Doing this can help you in a couple of ways.
It will build the topical relevancy of your site for Google Searchand help you rank for a wider range of keywords related to the products you're promoting.It will help you build rapport with your audience by answering their questions through high-quality content and makes them believe that you actually care about them.
5. Use Email Marketing To Start an Ongoing Relationship With Your Buyers
For some odd reason, most affiliate marketing newbies (especially those promoting Amazon products) consider email marketing a waste of time.
If you're one of them, I've got news for you.
From Patt Flynn and Spencer Haws to Yaro Starak and Charles Ngo, every successful affiliate marketer considers email list building one the key components of a successful affiliate marketing strategy.
In fact, a survey by Affiliate Summit found that email is the top traffic source for nearly 42% of affiliate marketers
Why?
Because even though you can't directly send Amazon product links to your subscribers via email, you can still use an email list to repeatedly bring traffic to every new piece of content you publish (with affiliate links) on your blog.
Seriously, I'm surprised I even have to make all these arguments to convince you about the importance of having an email list.
It gives you uninterrupted access to your audience so that you can offer them massive value with your emails and build a relationship that based on trust. If you're on the NicheHacks email list, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.
Stuart regularly sends amazingly detailed emails with so much actionable value. He has built such a strong relationship with his subscribers that they trust every tip he shares and every product he promotes.
Just look at this case study, for example where Stuart generated over $15,000 in affiliate commissions for one single product in just over 10 days through an email campaign, this level of income isn't possible without building an email list.
And he's not alone.
There are so many affiliate marketers(even Amazon affiliates) who've used email marketing to double their revenue.
And here's the best part.
Starting and building an email list, and automating the whole email marketing process with autoresponders, doesn't require any technical expertise. I've explained the whole process using three of the best email marketing tools (GetResponse, MailChimp and AWeber) in this post.
Feel free to chat me up
Or IG @clickworldng
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