30 Simple Ways To Increase Affiliate Sales For Your Business
Do you want to discover the best ways to increase affiliate sales? That is not the most straightforward task marketers must tackle.
Pursuing commissions is even more challenging when you’re just getting into affiliate marketing for beginners.
Most marketers struggle with boosting their monthly affiliate sales, but they don’t give up on the goal:
They are making money while sleeping – that’s one of the fundamental reasons why people launch online businesses in the first place.
After all, affiliate marketing provides an excellent way to build a passive income stream.
Today, I’ll share proven affiliate marketing concepts that will help you increase your online income.
This post contains affiliate links – read my affiliate disclosure.
How To Improve Affiliate Marketing Sales
Top Ways To Increase Affiliate Sales Online
1) Learn What Key Performance Indicators You Should Pay Attention To
As a newbie affiliate marketer, you’ll first need to understand the meaning of a couple of affiliate marketing terms.
While getting visitors to click on your affiliate links is essential, converting these clicks into sales matters way more.
Now, what is a key performance indicator in affiliate marketing?
To sum up, a key performance indicator is the metric promoters and content creators use to determine the effectiveness of their marketing strategy.
Here are a few such indicators you should become familiar with from the start of your affiliate marketing career:
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): CTR is a metric that shows the clicks vs. views.
- Conversion Rate: Think of conversion rate as conversion vs. clicks metric. Overall, the process is successful every time a reader takes the action you want them to take.
- Revenue By Traffic Source: In short, a revenue by traffic source is the income you’ll receive from each source of the traffic to your offers
- Average Session Duration: The ASD will show you how long a visitor stays on your page – you can use this metric to discover which pages your readers find most valuable
Generally, you’ll need to check these indicators regularly to determine how your affiliate offers perform and make changes if necessary.
2) Understand Why You Need To Create Sales Funnels To Convert Readers Into Buyers
Do you know what a sales funnel is?
Don’t sweat it if the term is unfamiliar to you – most beginner marketers fail to recognize the importance of knowing how essential sales funnels are.
At some point, though, you’ll need to learn how to create sales funnels for the affiliate products you promote:
Using a sales funnel for a marketing campaign is probably the most effective of all the ways to increase affiliate sales.
Every sales funnel has to achieve the following goals:
- Draw Attention To The Offer: Naturally, a sales funnel must create awareness among the target audience of the product you’re promoting.
- Establish A Connection Between Marketer And Visitor: As a rule of thumb, people don’t buy from individuals they don’t trust. So, the second goal your funnel must hit is building trust and strong relationships between you and your readers.
- Recommend Without Forcing: A well-crafted sales funnel will never show you desperate for a sale.
- Score Affiliate Sales: If your sales funnel accomplishes the previous three goals, making affiliate sales is inevitable.
3) Each Affiliate Campaign Must Provide A Clear Answer To The “What’s In It For Me” Question
Quite frankly, earning affiliate commissions is not as simple as some people would like you to believe.
However, it’s not that complicated either once you realize the fundamental principle behind selling in general:
Above all, people will invest in whatever you’re selling if they consider it valuable enough to justify a purchase.
In other words, what’s in it for me always plays a crucial role in the mind of each of your potential customers:
Present a product/service that will solve their problem, and you’ll see your affiliate offers constantly converting into sales.
4) Create High-Quality Content That Will Easily Convert Readers Into Buyers
OK, I know that most of you understand that writing valuable content is one of the best ways to increase affiliate sales.
With that said, not all content types perform equally – some will suit your affiliate marketing needs better than others. So, what type of content is the best to utilize the power of affiliate marketing?
Blog posts and relevant content like product reviews, tutorials, case studies, and how-to guides are more valuable from a client’s perspective. After all, such articles make it easy for readers to see the benefits of the product you promote.
Never underestimate the marketing power of a product comparison in a post – pitting valuable products against each other will do wonders for your affiliate income.
How To Write Product Review That Will Sell
Take a look at the best practices for content creation when writing a product review:
- Try The Product First: Think what you will, but the audience can smell a phony from miles away. If your product review doesn’t prove that you have a first-hand experience with the affiliate offer, that review won’t convert. The only way a reader will trust your take on a product is to try it yourself first.
- Include Both Advantages And Disadvantages: Everyone knows that there is no such thing as the perfect product. So, don’t hold back on the cons of the product – state them along with the pros so the readers will know what they’re getting.
- Offer Alternatives: There is not a single product that can satisfy the needs of every single reader of yours. Likewise, adding an alternative affiliate offer to a product review is another way to serve each visitor.
Pro Tip:
Ultimately, a product review will serve your affiliate marketing strategy if it’s valuable and engaging.
Close your product review by prompting your readers to engage with its content – they can ask questions, share their experience with the product, etc.
Another Pro Tip:
Link to your Tools And Resources Page from relevant content. I’m sure most of the tools you use in your business offer affiliate payouts, so use that to double your affiliate sales and enhance your content marketing results.
Related: How Affiliate Bots Can Help You Earn $6,000 Monthly
5) Optimize Your Product Landing Pages
First and foremost, your product landing pages should be the backbone of your affiliate site. Such a page must contain all necessary info about the product, but not only:
Consider it the final stage in the purchasing process for your clients.
How can you ensure your product landing page will deliver a higher conversion rate?
Your product landing page needs to contain all the following elements:
- Clean Design: Remove the clutter and other little things that might distract your readers from the offer.
- Stunning Visuals: Incorporating a YouTube video demonstrating the product in action is always an effective marketing strategy.
- Social Proof: Including testimonials from happy customers will double your chances of making affiliate sales.
- Strong Call To Action: Placing a call to action on your product landing page will likely be the difference between a sale and a read.
- Clever Placement Of Your Affiliate Links: The affiliate links on the page must fit the content flow – make sure you add more than one.
6) Do An A/B Test To Identify Your Best-Performing Content
Quite frankly, all the ways to increase affiliate sales fail compared to the importance of performing A/B testing as a marketer.
I mean, how will you know how well your affiliate website is doing unless you put it through a test?
Conducting an A/B test to see which elements of an affiliate campaign perform better is a great way to secure higher conversion rates.
You can perform A/B testing on everything from articles, pages, emails to banner ads.
If the thought of doing A/B testing is intimidating, you can relax – some WordPress plugins and tools will assist you through the process.
How To Run A/B Test
- Pick elements to evaluate (layout, visuals, headline copy, call to action)
- Decide which metrics will measure the success of the test
- Choose the number of tests you want to perform until you determine the winner (sample size)
- Create two versions of the test while changing only the element you want to test
- Run the test
- Check the results, evaluate them, and pencil in the external factors affecting them
7) Provide Exclusive Offers And Brand Discounts For Your Readers
Once you gain some experience as an affiliate marketer, you’ll soon realize the massive role exclusivity plays in the success of any affiliate campaign.
Never underestimate the selling power of an exclusive offer:
As a rule of thumb, if people see a product as an out-of-reach gem, it becomes of a higher value to them – and they are more likely to buy it.
So, benefit from exclusivity and incorporate it into your affiliate marketing strategies and campaigns.
For example, you can offer your visitors all of the following exclusive deals:
- Discount codes
- Coupon codes
- Early access to new company’s products
- Access to premium products/product bundles
- Memberships
8) Publish Listicles And Comparison Pages
Earlier in this article about the best ways to increase affiliate sales, I mentioned the type of content that converts well.
Within that previous paragraph, the central piece was the product review. However, comparison/listicle articles are invaluable to any successful affiliate marketer building a profitable online business.
Such articles often provide tons of value to a larger audience, take less time to create, and drive the most traffic to your unique affiliate link.
Your listicle should be easy to navigate – your readers will appreciate the effort and hard work once you ensure a better user experience.
9) Repurpose Existing Content
Since we’re still on the subject of leveraging different content types as a way to boost sales, let’s add repurposing content to that mix.
Regularly creating new content is a tough job and takes a long time.
Repurposing existing content is a clever strategy most promoters often implement to reach the next level of affiliate marketing success.
Transforming one type of content into another will save time and allow you to reach a new audience while extending your brand awareness on different platforms.
Have a look at a few examples that will show you how to repurpose content:
- Build an infographic that showcases the highlights of a blog post
- Post the most powerful quotes of an article as an image on Instagram
- Create a video for your YouTube channel around an article’s content
- Combine the content of several articles into a PDF or eBook
10) Make The Best Of Merchant’s Resources
Chances are, you’re already working with some of the highest-paying affiliate programs in your niche. But are you taking full advantage of everything affiliate partners have to offer?
I’m talking about the resources and marketing materials a merchant provides for its affiliates.
Unfortunately, some affiliates choose not to use sales copies, banners, and templates they can access – and that’s one of the common mistakes in the affiliate marketing industry.
Why shouldn’t you use promotional material that you don’t have to work to build on your own?
11) Build Relationships With Affiliate Managers To Secure Higher Affiliate Payouts
Hands down, one of the most underused ways to increase affiliate sales is negotiating a higher commission rate by building relationships with affiliate managers.
Generally, you can see how much an affiliate program is willing to offer to marketers to promote it on a product’s public page.
While most newbie marketers have no choice but to accept the official payouts, experienced affiliates with established social media platforms and customer base can ask for more.
Here is a great example – imagine you have a YouTube channel with thousands of subscribers and videos that attract tons of views and new audiences.
Owning such a platform will put you in the perfect position to reach the marketing manager of an affiliate program you like and ask for a higher commission once you begin promoting the product.
You’ll be surprised how often such affiliate marketing efforts will deliver a positive outcome!
12) Use Tables For Products You Promote
Whether creating a product review or a listicle type of article, adding a product table is always an excellent idea.
In my opinion, placing a product table within your post works best for listicles:
A product table allows visitors to see, compare, and rate multiple products.
Furthermore, using a table will let you collect multiple affiliate links in one place to boost your commissions.
Adding a table in WordPress is easy – I’m sure you’ll have no issue managing it.
13) Add New Affiliate Products To Existing Content
Those of you familiar with SEO know that your older content is your strongest content:
If that content is of high quality, it must bring you organic traffic and affiliate marketing sales. Why not update such articles by adding fresh info and more relevant physical or digital products?
You can always do something to improve blog posts – just like there is always a way to increase their conversion rate by providing more buying opportunities for readers.
Placing more product links in well-performing older articles will not only boost your affiliate income but will increase your blog traffic as well.
14) Improve Your SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Speaking of SEO, let’s talk about how improving it is one of the easiest ways to increase affiliate sales.
There isn’t much to explain here – it’s pretty simple:
Bettering your SEO will result in more traffic. And more traffic means extra opportunities to score affiliate sales.
Working to improve the organic reach of your business is time-consuming but worth the effort.
The first step is to learn as much as possible about keyword research. Choosing the best keywords to target will help your content rank well in search engines.
Consider taking an online course that teaches SEO and using an effective keyword research tool to dominate the search results – securing free training on platforms like Wealthy Affiliate is a great place to start.
15) Find The Right Products To Promote
Picking the best affiliate networks to join should be crucial for your affiliate marketing strategy. Moreover, there is a lot that needs to go into that decision on your part:
Joining every affiliate marketing program is an amateur move that will crush and burn you as a promoter. Going after potential partners everywhere is not how affiliate marketing works.
With that said, how should you choose an affiliate program? After all, the available items are not your own products that you know inside and out.
By all means, there are a couple of factors to consider when selecting a successful affiliate program to join:
- Recurring Commissions: Does the affiliate program you have in mind offer recurring payouts? Promoting recurring affiliate programs will allow you to make money after the initial sale and build passive income.
- Search Volume: Is the product you want to promote in high demand? Don’t hesitate to join the product’s affiliate program if it is.
- Conversion Rate: Believe it or not, the conversion rate and product/brand image are closely connected. Use that to your advantage and earn cash while satisfying the audience’s needs.
A piece of advice:
When starting to work as an affiliate marketer, go after less competitive products – that will give you a good chance to earn decent affiliate sales early on.
Related Read:
16) Keep Building Trust With Your Visitors
As I’ve mentioned, people don’t buy from individuals or companies they don’t trust.
So, the most challenging task you’ll have to tackle as an affiliate marketer is building a trustworthy relationship with your readers.
What can you do to gain, improve, and keep the trust of anyone visiting your affiliate campaigns? A lot of ways exist to achieve that:
- Disclose Your Affiliate Links: Let your readers know that if they purchase something through your affiliate links, you’ll receive a commission at no extra cost to them.
- Promote Only Products You Use Or Would Use Yourself: Never try to sell a product you wouldn’t invest in and pay for with your hard-earned money.
- Post Testimonials: Social proof is one of the most powerful tools all experienced marketers use to advance their promotional efforts.
17) Start Building A Targeted Email List
Building an email list has to be a priority regardless of the type of business you want to develop:
Even if you don’t plan to earn money via affiliate commissions, having an email list matters. That email list will contain all the contact information of the people who are your most loyal followers:
If they’re willing to grant you access to their data, they already appreciate everything you can offer them. Subsequently, your email subscribers are the people who will most likely buy the products you promote.
Some of the best ways to build a targeted email list are providing an opt-in as a lead magnet and offering freebies.
ConvertKit is an excellent email service provider – it’s easy to use and will cover all your email marketing needs.
18) Try Different Affiliate Networks
Nothing stays the same – isn’t that a fact we all know?
Sometimes, affiliate programs shut down. Another time, they may decrease affiliate payouts and no longer serve you well as a marketer.
If any of that happens, you don’t have to keep promoting products or services you no longer can benefit from. No, all you’ll need to do is find, join, and promote a different affiliate program that will fit better within your affiliate marketing strategy.
There is no shortage of affiliate programs you can work with, so don’t settle – looking beyond becoming Amazon affiliates will be a good thing for your business!
19) Base Your Future Marketing Strategy On Your Current Results
First and foremost, there is no universal formula that works every single time for all affiliate marketers worldwide:
After all, promoters work in different niches and implement various affiliate marketing tips that depend on many factors.
What works perfectly for one affiliate marketer might not work well for you – even if you develop businesses in the same industry.
So, the best way to keep boosting your affiliate sales is to carefully examine the results you’re getting and develop a next step and further strategy based on them.
20) Never Hard Sell
The final point I want to make about the best ways to increase affiliate sales covers hard selling.
Long story short – not doing it will be a good idea!
Being too pushy and trying to sell a product way too hard will deliver the opposite results to the ones you expect:
After all, people enjoy buying but hate the feeling of being sold to, so do your best to avoid creating such an emotion in the buyer’s heart. Avoid selling tactics that are way too aggressive, and you’re gold!
I Earn Such Affiliate Commissions Monthly – See How To Do The Same!
10 Extra Ways To Increase Affiliate Sales
- Leverage The Marketing Power Of Facebook Groups: Joining relevant Facebook Groups and uploading social media posts will allow you to keep building relationships in your field.
- Spend Time On Quora: Platforms like Quora are excellent playgrounds to build yourself as an authority in the marketing industry.
- Repost Old Content To Medium: Medium will introduce your content to millions of readers – many of them are potential clients.
- Drive Organic Traffic To Localized Sites: According to statistics, people tend to buy products more if the content that promotes them is in their native language.
- Start A Podcast: Do I even have to explain how popular podcasts are?
- Analyze The Product Reviews On The Top Performing Affiliate Sites: Take notes on the way they structure their product reviews and use these notes to improve your own.
- Boost Your Sales Via Paid Advertising: If you have extensive knowledge of working with Paid Ads, put it to good use.
- Learn As Much As You Can About Content Marketing: We all know content is king!
- Publish Income Reports: Everyone loves seeing how a business owner makes money, so post income reports and reveal your revenue sources.
- Cloak Your Affiliate Links: Cloaking your affiliate links is a must – plugins like Thirsty Affiliates will take care of the cloaking.
Easy Ways To Increase Affiliate Sales: My Closing
Well, this is it for now – all my ways to increase affiliate sales are yours now!
Of course, there is always something I can add to this article. I’ll update it with more valuable information later on.
Until then, I give the word to you:
What are your favorite proven affiliate marketing concepts? Share them with me, and we can discuss them together!
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