How To: Increase Your Affiliate Marketing Sales

So you joined an affiliate network of some sort and now you want to sell, sell, sell! How do you maximize or increase your affiliate marketing sales? To be honest, that is a loaded question and there are several ways it can be answered. In an effort to make this article as helpful as possible, I’m going to provide you with a getting started guide to affiliate marketing on the Internet that will in turn help you maximize your affiliate marketing sales and potential.

While this article doesn’t cover advanced affiliate marketing techniques (perhaps in another article), it will help you get started, or if you’re already familiar with affiliate marketing but aren’t having much luck, it should help you refocus. However, with that said, if you are still interested in learning more or have additional questions after reading this article, feel free to reach out to me and I’d be happy to help.

Alright, let’s get right into it. Here are five tips to help you improve and maximize your affiliate sales.

1. Affiliate products should fit your website’s content

Content strategy is one of the most important things when it comes to building a successful website. Whatever your content is about is where you should be focusing your efforts on affiliate marketing. It seems like common sense, but many people attempt to sell things on their site’s that are completely unrelated to their site’s content.

This will not work out well.

The reason it doesn’t work is because your site’s audience/visitors are there because the content is what interested them, not because you are selling a digital camera in the sidebar. So sell products that fit your niche/vertical. If you write about technology, you should be looking to sell software, hardware, gadgets/electronics, and other tech accessories. But don’t just place a link and hope someone clicks on one and that it will convert — it won’t, 99.9% of the time because there’s no context or intent with the click.

Once you have a selection of products that fit your site’s content, integrate the affiliate marketing into your content. Reviews, articles, recommendations can all be used to promote products successfully. One thing to keep in mind is that not every product, even if it does fit your site’s content will sell successfully. In fact, be prepared for some products sell better than others, and some to not sell at all (and that is okay).

2. Experiment with price points

Ah, price. Price is important to many people and everyone has different price sensitivity, as an affiliate marketer, you need be conscious of that and take it into account when promoting products. In other words, unless your website’s content focuses exclusively on luxury products, you should experiment with both low cost and expensive products. I know that you may not make that much commission on a percentage basis, especially for products that aren’t very pricey, but it’s important that you show your audience that you aren’t just about making a quick buck off of them.

If you only promote expensive products, you run the risk of turning off your audience and in the end, that’s just about the worst thing you could do. Besides, at the end of the day, you should be promoting the best product for the job — whatever that may be. You owe that to the people reading your site.

3. Know the products you’re promoting

You may have heard one of Warren Buffett’s most famous pieces of advice: buy what you know. In that same vein, affiliate marketers should sell what they know.

This is a big one. Sell products that you know and feel comfortable recommending and answering questions about. Too often people just try to sell whatever they can link to but don’t know anything about, and that isn’t going to help you long term. If you have fallen into this trap, it’s okay. It’s a common mistake, a lot of people tend to do it, but now is the time to refocus your efforts.

4. Cross-merchandising is useful, if it makes sense to do it

There may come a time when you may want to promote two products at once, if that is the case, make sure they compliment each other. For example, if you reviewed a particular smartphone and one of your points in the review was that it seemed to scratch easy, in addition to using an affiliate link for the smartphone, it would also be a good time to recommend a case for the phone (for which you could also use an affiliate link).

If you want to step up your affiliate marketing game even further, the most ideal situation for that particular example would be to have already reviewed or include additional information about the case you are recommending. This builds trust with the visitor and allows them to know you’re not just recommending any old case, but that you took the time to look into that particular case.

Which actually brings me to my last tip: don’t sell just to sell.

5. Don’t sell just to sell

Everything you are marketing to your audience should have a purpose. The products you recommend should solve a problem or offer some kind of added value that can’t be found anywhere else. If a better product exists that is free or cheaper, that is what you should be recommending. These days, the best and most successful affiliate marketers have built a trust with their audience. That is super important to remember — so don’t forget it.

Do you have any additional affiliate marketing tips? Feel free to leave a comment!