You don’t have to create products to make money online. If you are creating any form of content online, you can recommend and sell products to your audience that is created by someone else and take your share as a sales commission. That’s an amazing way to earn passive money, right?
The creator of the product gets a new audience, the more you sell to your audience the more money you make, and your readers benefit from your recommendations. It’s a win-win-win.
But with the amount of competition in the field, and the excitement to make more money, many bloggers bombard their users with affiliate links in their posts and wonder why they aren’t getting enough conversions. If you are one among them, here are our top 9 tips you can implement to create content for affiliate marketing that boosts conversions and helps you make more money.
- Establish yourself in a niche
- Build an active, trusting community first
- Build a targeted email list of verified email addresses to send emails with affiliate links
- Create honest reviews
- Create comprehensive guides and tutorial articles
- Write detailed comparisons posts
- Demonstrate products through videos
- Create a resources page containing all the tools and products you use
- Ensure that your content is mobile friendly
Let’s look at each of them in detail.
1. Establish yourself in a niche
Your content should have a plan. Who is it serving and what problem is it trying to solve? That area will be your niche. Without that, you will be writing about random things and even if you get visitors, only a small part of your website would be of value to them.
Instead, it is advised to pick a specific area you want to create content around and be very comprehensive in your coverage. When your affiliate products are limited to a niche, each visitor can find more than one product useful at different stages. They will see you as the go-to person for the niche, and hence consider the products you promote to be of value.
Neil Patel has a post on how to research and find a profitable niche for affiliate marketing on his blog that you can check out for more information.
2. Build an active, trusting community first
This flows naturally from establishing yourself in a niche. A consistent brand message and image across all your media channels creates trust. Showcase in-depth understanding of your niche by offering valuable information to your audience. Reliability, credibility, and trust go a long way. People will return to your website if they think you are offering good quality content. So focus on offering that. You can use our writing and content marketing services to take your content to the next level.
Engage with your audience in the comments or on social media and get to know their pain points.
- What problems are they facing?
- Is your content addressing their needs?
- Are there products that are going to help them solve their problems?
Once you have a loyal community who look up to you for solutions, you can find products that are going to be valuable in their journey, and offer it to them.
3. Build a targeted email list of verified email addresses to send emails with affiliate links
With an email list, you can promote the products anytime, and it will go straight to the inbox of your target audience.
You audience subscribed to you because you provided them some value. They want to learn from you. They want to know what you have to say and the products, services, and tools that you think are beneficial. They know what they signed up for.
You can create email mini-courses that takes a user step by step through a solution to a problem they are trying to solve. This way you can get more people to sign up. Each step can have a set of affiliate products you are promoting. You could send out newsletters with the ‘best of’ content series and ‘best of’ tools series to remarket some of the products.
4. Write honest reviews
One of the best ways to earn money through affiliate marketing is to create in-depth honest reviews of products on various media through articles, videos, or audio. The review should cover the available features, it’s practical applications in various situations, and the problem it successfully solves.
Before you decide to promote the product, you need to ask yourself if the product is something your audience will find useful and how you could prove to them that it helped you overcome a problem. You can record the progress you have made while using the product and let that be a testament for its usefulness.
5. Create guides and tutorial articles
Guides and tutorials become valuable resources that teach your audience how to get a particular result or solve a particular problem. This can be leveraged to showcase how you used a certain product to solve your problems and how they can do the same. The inclusion of affiliate products as a natural extension of solving a problem that your users face will result in better conversions.
A great example of this is many of the guides and tutorials by Pat Flynn on how to earn passive income online. He gives details of his process and the products that he uses adding value to others while boosting his sales in affiliate marketing as well.
6. Detailed comparisons posts
When you have more than one product serving the same purpose, you can curate a comprehensive comparison post detailing the differences in prices, usability, benefits, features and more. Between the stimulus to buy and the actual purchase, buyers do a lot of research about the available options, check the reviews, and compare one against the other. This is when they will reach your post, get a lot of information that may help them choose what to buy and eventually convert.
Check out this informative post on Rob Cubbon’s blog on why comparison posts work.
7. Demonstrate products through videos
Much of content consumption and marketing is moving to video. According to HubSpot, video is a relied marketing tool for 81 percent of businesses in 2018, which is 63 more than in 2017. You can make videos to create various types of product-related content such as:
- Unboxing of items along with explanations about the features
- Reviews, pros, and cons of having used a product
- Comparison videos of different products solving the same problem
- Easy to follow tutorials about how to use a particular tool or product
8. Create a resources page containing all the tools and products you use
Creating a one-stop resources page makes it easy for your readers to find everything they would need to know about the products you use. Organize the list into categories. For example, all the resources you use to create your podcast or YouTube videos can be grouped together.
Here are some ways you could leverage the resources page to include them in the content that you create to boost your conversions and sales from affiliate marketing.
- Link to the resources page on the main navigation menu.
- Add links to direct the users from popular posts to the resources page.
- Include a link to your recommended tools and resources at the bottom of your emails or newsletters.
- Direct your guest post readers to the resources page by adding the link in the author box or include it in the articles.
- Link to the resources page in the description of your videos or make a video version of the page.
9. Ensure that your content is mobile friendly
The number of users on mobile devices who shop and browse has seen tremendous growth. If your website and content are not mobile friendly, you are losing out on a big chunk of your readers which reflects poorly on your conversions. Your site may be even abandoned if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. To optimize for speed and usage on mobile to boost conversions. Mobile-friendly websites also have an SEO advantage. It will increase your website visibility and drive more traffic.
So there you have it. Our top tips to help you create content for affiliate marketing that boosts conversions. Feel free to reach out to us in case you need help creating amazing content for your business.