If your aim in life is to generate passive income so that you can live the lifestyle that you want, then running a blog and selling affiliate products is one of the very best ways to go about doing that.
Affiliate marketing is great, because it only takes a single sale to potentially earn a decent sum of money (unlike AdSense) and because it allows you to actively push the products and services you want to sell (again, unlike AdSense).
But many bloggers will often fail to capitalize on the full power of the platform, not realizing the best ways to monetize their blogs or promote them. And even if your blog is working well and bringing you in plenty of cash right now, there are probably still more ways you could be capitalizing on it further. Read on and let’s take a look at five of the best strategies for monetizing your blog.
Spread Your Bet
One of the most important tips for your affiliate marketing is to try lots of different schemes and to throw as many of those at the wall as you can. Let’s say you have an article on shoes for instance and you include a link to buy a pair of nice heels. Now this might work for a number of your visitors, but there are still going to be those who aren’t in the market for shoes right now meaning you’re not capitalising fully on that traffic. Add in a link to buy belts to go with those shoes and you’ve just collected some of those people – with affiliate marketing it really is a matter of ‘the more the merrier’. At the same time, by having lots of different affiliate accounts, you don’t risk losing your whole business model because one of those sites shuts down or your account gets inexplicably band. Try lots of affiliate schemes, introduce new ones to keep things fresh, and experiment with different combinations across your pages. Avoid Small Fry
That said, you should still be discriminating when choosing your affiliate links. Not only is this important because you need to ensure that your visitors trust your recommendations, but also because users clicking and buying the $3 item on your site are unlikely to return and then click to buy the $20 item – even if they otherwise would have been interested. Sending someone away from your website is something that you should avoid unless you really have the right financial incentives.
Branch Away From Your Blog
Bear in mind too that you don’t need to stick entirely on your own site to sell your affiliate products. You can hand out fliers to a landing page, you can post on forums and give advice, and you can use other community sites and tools. Palet.ly for instance is a site that allows users to put together a ‘look’ and then link to the clothes that make up that appearance. If you’re selling clothes then this could be a great place to get some clicks. And don’t forget Instagram!
The Ad Route
You are an affiliate marketer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t also use advertising the old fashioned way. That means creating PPC ads to your own site and directly to the affiliate products, but it also means creating ads and putting them on your own site. People are used to clicking image ads so this can be a great way to get the people who don’t follow your hyperlinks, and at the same time it will also be good at attracting attention at a glance.
Sell the Lifestyle
And above all, remember to make those products seem desirable and to remember the ‘value proposition’. Whatever you’re pushing, you aren’t selling items you are selling lifestyles and dreams – so you aren’t selling protein shakes, you’re selling a superhero-like physique, endless confidence, success with the opposite sex and raw physical power. Throughout all your posts and images you should be promoting this kind of lifestyle and showing the readers what they could achieve if they clicked your links. Remember this and you can’t fail.
