The Dos and Donts of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing has risen to become a multi-billion dollar venture.
Promoting other brands’ services or products or allowing others to advertise yours is a way to extend the general audience reach, significantly enhancing sales.
It can be a sole or passive income stream, but there are crucial things to do and those to refrain from for success in this field.
You will need to promote only products you know, select campaigns with high conversions, negotiate smartly with advertisers, and create excellent calls to action.
While doing all the vital things, you should never promote tens of products on one page, target people who don’t match your advert or create clickbait.
Let’s get started on the rights and wrongs of affiliate marketing.
The Dos of Affiliate Marketing
If you own a decent blog, it is the right time to include affiliate marketing in your monetization plans and strategies.
But be cautious: you need to do it properly to avoid damaging your reputation or it becoming a giant task.
1) Only Promote Products and Services you know.
Once you toss yourself into affiliate marketing or publishing, you are allowed to choose products and services to promote.
It is advisable to promote only the products you know about, have used, and have experience with as it is easy to write about topics that interest you.
Also, you can give a lot of advice regarding the product or service and answer as many questions as possible correctly.
If visitors or viewers see you have vast knowledge in the field, they will most likely buy through your links.
2) Choose Campaigns with the Highest Conversions
Choosing the correct campaigns will help you generate more from your visitors.
You might be tempted to go for campaigns with the highest commissions, but you need to ask yourself if the same campaigns convert well.
Affiliate networks offer insight into campaigns with the most fantastic conversions; however, the statistics often mislead many.
For instance, credit card offers often have higher commission rates and higher conversions.
A novice affiliate might be tempted to run with the offer and begin promoting, only to realize that the offers do not measure up.
Affiliates that promote credit cards are larger firms or banks with a massive advertising budget that a regular affiliate can’t beat.
These groups have higher conversions since they often pay for PPC campaigns, and their target audience is very expensive, thus the conversion rate.
Measure campaigns that achieve higher ‘eCPC’ – a metric big affiliate firms and networks use.
Campaigns with lower commissions per click have higher chances of producing higher revenue.
3) Organize Campaigns Properly
Affiliate publishers should track their campaigns, and it is essential to have relevant software.
Have well-visualized overviews of your campaigns, invoices, visitor numbers, statistics, and performance to optimize your campaigns and constantly increase your ROI.
Affiliate marketers maintain thousands of campaigns through platforms like ShareASale, CJ, and ClickBank.
This allows you to spend more time handling your businesses while they handle the monthly statistics and invoices.
4) Negotiate with your Advertisers
Reach your advertisers once you notice campaigns or ads that are running well.
Skilled negotiation offers room for increased revenue you can get in commission rates.
If you bring more sales or leads to advertisers, they might be willing to increase your commission percentages.
It is a win-win thing as you will be more motivated to promote relevant advertisers.
5) Excellent Calls-to-Action
When readers scroll through your newsletter or website, you should be ready to use your call-to-action to convince them to buy.
If they are moved, they will click through to the advertiser.
Ensure that the call-to-action is visible to all visitors at a glance, and you can do this by using a different color from the other content.
You can use buttons with bright green or orange color, but it depends on the colors you are using.
The message should be crucial and attractive for visitors to click through.
6) Have A Disclosure Agreement
Disclosing your affiliate arrangements is a best practice you should always follow.
Have a short disclaimer on your site notifying readers and visitors that products or services you advertise on your site may be from an affiliate agreement or compensation from the companies involved.
7) Embrace Technology or HTML Code
Most people are afraid of joining affiliate programs because they will often be required to add specific HTML codes and lines to their back-end editors, add plugins, or specific links to their sites.
It isn’t a cross-fit workout like you think, as most companies with affiliate marketing programs have support lines, and you will get all the help you need.
You can start by introducing one product at a time and do the thing right!
Once you notice progress, keep rolling out more, and before you know it, the income will be worth the effort.
Here are more straightforward things to add to the above:
8 Commit to the affiliate program.
9 Build a loyal online presence.
10 Grow your email lists.
11 Conduct research and do all your homework well.
12 Create high-quality and compelling content.
13 Promote advertisements that match the visitors.
14 Place product and service links in relevant sections.
15 Work with the affiliate manager for more success.
16 Track your results.
17 Be patient
Don’ts of Affiliate Marketing
Here are some things you should avoid doing to ensure you remain within the best practices of affiliate marketing.
1) Avoid promoting Tens of Products and Services on One Page.
You might have seen websites with tens of affiliate ads on them.
Recommending so many products and services in one newsletter or blog distracts your readers.
You don’t want to annoy your visitors with an oversaturated page as it could bounce quickly.
Most affiliate publishers do this, and it leads to disappointing results.
It is better to promote one campaign, match the page’s content, and focus more on your newsletter or landing page with one campaign.
2) Don’t Clickbait
Never provide wrong information to get visitors clicking at all costs.
For instance, services are promoted as free; then, you suddenly need to pay after registration.
It is excellent if you know how to generate so many clicks (click bait), but it isn’t how affiliate publishing and marketing works.
You don’t want to anger your advertisers with wrong advertising information about their products or services.
3) Never violate Terms and Conditions of the Campaign
Your relationship with the advertiser is vital; thus, you need to adhere to all the campaign’s terms and conditions to ensure you keep working with them.
Some of the commonly violated rules are promoting products and services in newsletters or social media, yet the advertiser forbids it.
Violating terms and conditions might mean that you’ll never promote the campaign or work with the brand again.
4) Avoid overdoing Pop Up and Banner Ads.
Most people hate it when they are trying to browse something and ads keep interfering with their scrolling.
Never use bunches of pop-up ads lest your readers get annoyed and start loving your competitor’s content.
5) Don’t promote products that aren’t in or related to your Niches
Anything you promote on your site must be relevant to your audience.
If your niche is babies and toddlers, don’t promote senior citizen items.
What you promote should be of value to your target audience; otherwise, they will take their attention to different sites.
If you have more than one niche and feel like you can work things out without mixing, create separate sites for each.
It allows you to enjoy safe affiliate marketing without the risk of losing your audience because of clutter information.
6) Don’t be too Salsey
Don’t sell like a pest since such salesmanship drags your progress.
The more you keep pressure on selling, the faster your audience will begin avoiding you, and the result is few to no sales.
Learn to educate then serve your target audience, and once you build a strong relationship with them, they will trust you and the products you promote easily.
7) Never rely on One Source of Traffic.
If Facebook ads work best for you, don’t double down on them since your account can get shut, and you completely lose your income stream because you haven’t discovered how to get more traffic from other sources.
Diversifying is key. You can combine Facebook ads with your blog’s organic traffic from Google and other search engines.
Also, repurpose blog posts into interesting videos and publish them on YouTube.
If one source of traffic is depleted, you have a backup.
Below are more things you should never do if you want to be an affiliate pro:
8 Don’t get into affiliate marketing with unrealistic expectations.
9 Don’t share popular services or products only.
10 DON’T GIVE UP!!!
Wrap Up on the Do’s and Don’ts of Affiliate Marketing
Join affiliate programs knowing what you are getting into and don’t have a mindset that it is possible for everyone.
It might seem like little to no work, but it has its bits and bytes that need to be followed for success.
While affiliate marketing is something you all can do, it takes time, strategy, and effort before seeing the results.
The pointers above should help you find success in affiliate marketing.
Have more tips that I didn’t highlight in the article? Share your ideas in the comments!
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Hey Mark, as a new affiliate marketer, 2 months barely, I have learned a great deal from your post. We have one site so far with one product niche, although Im thinking it may be too broad. The site name is womens apparel and more . So as you can see, we have been blogging about more than womens apparel, like shoes, bags, fragrance, jewelry, etc. One good thing I guess is we never run out of material to write about.
I want to ask you about having a link in our posts unrelated to the subject matter. What I am referring to might be a link to Wealthy Affiliate. Do you think, in your experience that this would do us more harm than good.
The other thing I was thinking about was affiliate partnerships, like Amazon. You mentioned about negotiating higher commissions when driving more traffic to their site. Were you referring to large affiiates like that or more niche specific ones.
I know I will be referring to your site in the coming weeks as you have a lot of excellent information that will help us.
Hey William, a decent niche I wish you well with it. Look at Google and put in questions like why does or what if followed by niche relevant topics. It will show you searches people are looking for answers to and is a good way to get traffic if you write content about the questions.
On the links, I would stay clear of promoting WA or other money-making topics. It’s better to stick to niche-related programs as it will give your site better authority. It’s a bit of a waste putting in other links as people will not follow them and if they do will not buy so better to have an ad about a sale at one of the big apparel chains.
You will not be able to negotiate with Amazon unless you are getting out of this world traffic. I was talking more about smaller niche-specific ones or even stores that don’t have a program set up yet if their gear suits you why not talk to them and get one set up. There are plugins to do that too.
I have been reading a lot about affiliate marketing. So, I kinda know the theory. And I like the model behind it.
However, I want to say thank you because you went into practical aspects that I had never read before. You went into the nitty-gritty of this business model. I didn’t know I needed to have a Disclosure Agreement, and a couple of other things.
Sure Ann there are loads of things to think about when working on an affiliate website and it changes all the time. For instance, GDPR, affiliate disclosures and link no follow rels are three recent developments that were not required a few years ago.
Sign up to one of the major SEO websites to keep informed and always read emails that come from the line of Amazon Associates or other affiliate platforms for changes to agreements and terms so you are always up to do.
This is a great list of Dos and Don’ts for affiliate marketing. Many people get into this type of online business to make a secondary income and I can vouch that you can in fact do this, but it does take time, work and effort. The list you provide is also needed because there are many pitfalls that beginners can fall into, such as trying to promote too many products with no added value on their site. Readers can see through that and will leave in their droves if they see it. Personally, I see affiliate marketing as growing bigger in the future as consumers want more personal recommendations from people they trust. But there is a danger there as you, say, and marketers need to keep their integrity and promote products they know about and have experience of. Thanks for these very helpful tips.
Hi Gail, there are many pitfalls that’s for sure. I agree I see many marketers trying to promote too many things and it does hurt their credibility. Its better to pick a few programs and work hard at promoting them before moving on.