Here are 7 awesome tips to help you when you’re starting out in affiliate marketing.

1. Rise Through the Ranks

Affiliate marketing is becoming increasingly popular, meaning that it’s getting harder and harder to get your site noticed. Focusing on SEO and ensuring that you give your visitors a reason to stay on your site will help you rise through the ranks.

Six Simple SEO Tips

1. Reduce the size of images on your site: This will speed up load time meaning you don’t risk losing visitors while they wait. For more info on how to speed up your site, go to: Speed Matters: How to Boost your Site’s Performance

2. Broken links lead to broken dreams: Make sure all of your links work. Google will penalize your site if you have lots of links leading to dead ends, so make sure to go through and check them.

3. Answer people’s questions: People search for answers so make sure you are providing them. Unique information which is interesting and easy to read is a real winner. The more relevant you are to keyword searches, the more likely you are to rise through the ranks.

4. Invite interaction: Try to include ways for people to interact with your site so that they stay longer. If they read one article, give them easy access to others that might interest them. Give them the chance to comment and engage with other users. Don’t litter your site with unnecessarily confusing elements, but try to use additional elements to boost user experience.

5. Longer articles are not necessarily better: A lot of people think that the more writing they have the more time people will stay on their site. However, short, sharp writing which gets to the point and is easily digestible will be more effective if you can employ it across your entire site.

6. No BS!: Make sure you know exactly what you do and why you do it and then tell people. Don’t try to make it sound fancier than it really is. People hate that and it’s confusing. Imagine you had 5 minutes to tell your grandmother what you do so that she completely understands. That’s the level of writing you should be aiming at.

2. Keep a Scrapbook

When you’re searching the internet, keep a copy of ads which catch your attention. You can set up a Pinterest board and keep copies of all of the ads you like there. It’ll keep you up-to-date with strategies and be a continuing source of inspiration.

For more ideas about how to source inspiration for your campaigns, check out these articles:

Scrapbooks: How to Keep Track of Great Ideas

Brand Awareness and Direct Marketing Explained Using Classic Advertising Techniques!

3. Avoid Common Mistakes

Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn money from home. However, because it doesn’t require any previous knowledge of the industry a lot of people make mistakes.

Here are 5 of the most common mistakes to avoid:

1. Don’t be annoying!: Have you ever looked in comments sections and seen things like this:

It’s a rookie tactic with little payoff and not worth your time.

2. Be relevant: The rule ‘no publicity is bad publicity’ doesn’t work with affiliate marketing. You might be able to get a lot of people to click on your ads using catchy sensational headlines, but if they aren’t relevant, then those clicks won’t convert and you’ll be wasting a lot of money.

3. Target properly: Lots of affiliates starting out assume they know their target audience like the back of their hand. The truth is, people are weird and behave in unexpected ways. You need to learn your audience’s habits over time and constantly optimize until you can target super-effectively. To find out how check out: How to Expand Your Lookalike Audience Using Social Media

4. Don’t assume it’ll be easy: Like any job, affiliate marketing requires skills. While you might not need any experience to start, you certainly do to be successful. You’ll have to do a lot of research and make a lot of mistakes before seeing profits. This means investing time and money into making things work.

5. Don’t give up too early: The number one reason for failure is giving up. Affiliate marketing takes time and you will not get it right straight away, however, every loss is a lesson and a step closer to getting it right. It’s a bit like a maze. You’ll make a lot of wrong turns and eliminate them before finally finding the right one.

4. High Payouts Don’t Necessarily Mean High Profits

High payouts don’t necessarily mean you’ll earn more. To find that out, you’ll have to do some research.

You should look at the statistics for the offers you’d like to promote and check the EPC (Earnings Per Click), GEOs covered and the CR (Conversion Rates). Low results on these will tell you that it’s probably difficult to sell. You should also ask your account manager about the offer’s popularity and whether or not it’s competitive. If it is, then while your payout may be high, the frequency will be low.

5. Mobile Matters

When you’re creating campaigns on your computer, it can be really easy to forget about mobile users. Don’t! Mobile provides a huge marketplace for shoppers who are greedy for your goods. Therefore, be sure to optimize your campaigns for mobile too.

6. Try the Product

The best way to understand the product you’re selling is to try it for yourself. Getting hands on will give you access to the customer experience and enable you to fully understand all aspects and angles.

You can even add photos and videos of yourself using the product and provide handy guides showing the benefits customers will have. This will add legitimacy in the eyes’ of your viewers and will allow you to find more unique ways to market your offers.

7. Split-Test your Offers and Campaigns

Testing is the key to getting higher conversions so make sure that you always split-test your offers. However, make sure that when you split-test, you only ever change one thing between your 2 tests. Here’s an overview of what it might look like:

First Test:

Test A: Men Test B: Women.

Test B converts better.

Second Test:

Test A: Women 20-30 Test B: Women 30 - 40

Test A converts better.

Third Test:

Test A: Single Women 20 - 30 Test B: Married Women 20-30

Test A converts better.

And so on until you reach a profitable CR

Testing in this way will allow you to narrow things down until you have a really targeted audience who really want to buy your product. Once you find a really well-targeted audience that is likely to convert, then you can scale your campaign up and target a larger lookalike audience.

5 things to test:

1. Offers: Sign up to Affiliate Networks and get as wide a range of offers as possible before starting out. Here at Converting Team, we make all of our offers in-house and provide our affiliates with 100% original content. Sign-up with us today and see our latest offers.

2. Traffic sources: Some traffic sources are better than others for promoting certain offers, so make sure you test a few before deciding which ones to use.

3. Payouts: If you’re just starting out, then test payouts to see what works for you. Some affiliates prefer higher payouts with fewer conversions, while others like lower payouts with higher conversions.

4. Creatives: See which ads get people clicking and why. Be careful though because engagement doesn’t always mean success. Make sure if you’re getting a lot of clicks that you are also getting a lot of conversions, otherwise you’ll lose money.

5. Audience: Make sure you split-test your audience so that you can target with precision and get higher conversion rates.

Don’t be afraid to spend money on testing, all successful affiliates need to test and it will pay off in the long run. Impatience during testing is the number one reason why people fail in the industry. They give up because they don’t see immediate profits.

Instant profits are a myth and just like in any other industry, you’ll have to work to make money. The difference is, you’ll eventually be able to earn an uncapped income and work from anywhere in the world, so it’s worth putting in the extra effort early on.