5 Content Marketing Strategies to Build Your Affiliate Marketing
If you work in digital marketing, you’ve probably come across the term “affiliate marketing.”
The concept of affiliate marketing is anchored on revenue sharing. It usually involves working through an affiliate network to promote products and earn a commission through people buying the product or service through your marketing efforts, via a link on your website or in an email.
It’s a great strategy that can drive sales and generate solid online revenue. The method is so effective for both brands and affiliate marketers that 79% of marketers use affiliate marketing to engage existing customers.
Before you should at least conduct a marketing audit of your business. This will help identify areas of weakness in your affiliate marketing strategy and will keep you aligned with your business goals so you can see what’s working (and what’s not).
Keep in mind though that content is the very reason your audience ended up finding you to begin with. So, it almost goes without saying that content marketing and affiliate marketing go hand in hand in terms of building your brand’s visibility. To this day, content marketing remains one of my most effective affiliate marketing strategies. Therefore, if you want to know how you can use content to build your affiliate marketing, take a look at some of the most effective strategies:
1. Establish Your Blog as an Authority Site
At this point, it’s clear that building your brand requires you to establish yourself as an expert. Given that you’re not the only business out there trying to accomplish the same, the question is, what can you do to stand out?
The answer is simple: go the extra mile.
Don’t take the generic route and develop “fluff” content simply to populate your blog. Take the time to understand what kind of content your audience wants and put in the extra effort to create posts that have more depth, present more data, and are highly informative and engaging.
Take note that the average length of Google’s first page results is around 1,447 words. This gives you a lot of wiggle room in terms of creating in-depth posts where you can insert your affiliate links seamlessly. By focusing on creating insightful content, you’re able to establish your blog as an authority site. The reputation that you steadily build will ultimately have a halo effect on the affiliate links you post, allowing you to communicate with more credibility.
2. Personalize Your Emails
Email remains one of the most effective marketing channels that digital marketers can tap into. According to statistics, every dollar you spend on email marketing will yield an average return of $38. That’s an incredible 3,800% ROI—if you know how to maximize email’s potential.
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In the context of using email for affiliate marketing, we strongly recommend that you make the effort to personalize your emails. Email is your direct line to your audience and gives you a powerful means to influence their purchasing decisions.
A well-crafted affiliate email campaign can place your product or service front and center for your audience and encourage them to make a purchase. However, this entails following several best practices such as personalizing your emails.
Do this by, segmenting your email list based on demographic and psychographic considerations such as interests, locations, behavior, and other relevant criteria. Personalized subject lines are also important. According to one study, emails with a personalized subject line are 26% more likely to be opened. Furthermore, when it comes to affiliate marketing, a little personalization can really build your relationship with your target audience.
3. Redirect Traffic with Valuable Videos
Successful affiliate marketing can be done in tandem with content marketing—and it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. For instance, video content is a great way to attract new audiences. Creating video can sound like a changeling task, but with a little bit effort or using the video editing services of someone more skilled, you will be able to obtain amazing videos.
Video is a very cost-efficient and effective way to generate free traffic and get indexed on Google, which will help drive search engine traffic and YouTube traffic.
What constitutes relevant and valuable video content for affiliate marketing? We suggest product guides, tutorials, and/or reviews. Product comparisons and unboxing videos are also popular types of video content that potential customers find very useful. This can help boost your Google search results, which in turn result in better exposure.
4. Capture Leads with Ebooks
Freebies have always been an effective lead generation tool used by marketers. For affiliate marketing, ebooks in particular have proven to be very effective.
The strategy is pretty straightforward: You write an ebook relevant to your business containing all the relevant affiliate links while carefully ensuring that you’re creating highly valuable gated content. You can use the help of professionals from essay writer service to ensure the content is relevant to your business. You then promote it online through blogs, social media, and ads as a way to boost inbound marketing traffic and serve as a source of lead generation.
5. Build a Resource Page for Your Website
A resource page on your website can serve as a central repository of all the things that you recommend for your readers. We still recommend focusing on creating a comprehensive blog page as well as developing video content to highlight and showcase affiliate marketing products. Moreover, a central list containing all recommendations and affiliate marketing links can be very useful.
A rundown of links will definitely serve its purpose. It’s a good idea to include a brief summary of why you recommend each tool, platform, or resource. If possible, add logos to boost credibility and ramp up visual appeal. If you take the time to craft your resource page like a blog post rather than a simple list, you will create a more engaging platform for content that contains all your affiliate marketing links.
If you want to get a better idea of what it means, Pat Flynn’s smartpassiveincome.com offers a clear example of how you can maximize resource pages to boost your affiliate marketing efforts.
Bottom Line
The content marketing strategies we utilize and are familiar with are great tools that can be used to expand your affiliate marketing efforts. Some of the great examples above can help you leverage content that’s simple and actionable. Give it a try and let us know how well it works out for your brand.
Author Bio
Prafull Sharma is the Founder of content marketing agency LeadsPanda. He shares tips to 2x your content marketing results on the LeadsPanda blog.
Related Reading:
- The top conversion tracking tools for marketers
- 5 Awesome Affiliate Marketing Strategies to Generate More Sales
This blog post is about:
- Build Your Affiliate Marketing
- 5 Content Marketing Strategies to Build Your Affiliate Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
Originally Posted: August 16th, 2017.
Post Updated: July 1st, 2021.
