Affiliate marketing is one of the most powerful tools in your digital marketing arsenal. As a business owner, affiliate marketing can help you to publicise your products, zero in on the kind of demographics you want to attract, and naturally and organically insert ads into content that people will genuinely want to read.
However, you can’t simply press a button marked “maximise ROI with affiliate marketing” and expect the success to come unbidden. You’ll have to put a little work in if you want to increase your chances of success, so without further ado, we present our guide of helpful tips and tricks on how to maximise your ROI when you’re using affiliate marketing!
It’s all about the content
More than any other kind of marketing technique, affiliate marketing is all about the content you’re creating. If the content created by bloggers isn’t meaningful and engaging, then you won’t see a return, because nobody is going to want to read it, so nobody is going to find the links embedded within the content. That’s why it’s important to emphasise quality content over everything else. Make sure your affiliates are writing about something that people will care about, and doing so in an informative and entertaining way.
Make sure conversions are easy
While content is, of course, critical to any affiliate marketing initiative’s success, it’s also important to make sure that it’s easy for customers to convert when they’re reading your content. That means the links you provide to your affiliate bloggers should be clear, simple, and obvious; they should lead right to the product or page you want to promote, with no fuss and no interstitial stages. This will also make it easier for bloggers to insert links into content naturally and organically, so do make sure you’ve done your part.
Focus on the bottom line
When you’re engaging in affiliate marketing, it can be easy to get lost in a world of analytics and metrics. You can spend hours looking at impression rates, click-throughs, and other stats that, in the end, don’t really matter. There’s only one number you really need to be looking at when it comes to affiliate marketing: your profit. Are you making money on sales, and is that money more than you’re spending on marketing? If so, then you’re in the black, and you don’t need to worry about anything else. It really is that simple!
Research your competition
Affiliate marketing isn’t easy when there’s so much competition out there. You can bet that your competitors are probably also looking for affiliate marketing opportunities, and they’re going to be searching for ways to undercut you at every possible turn. Look into what your competitors are offering in terms of commission and try to be aggressive with your competition. If you don’t offer good rates, then affiliates will just look elsewhere and want to promote someone else’s product or service, and that’s only going to come back to bite you.
Create a budget and stick to it
While it is absolutely crucial to start out in affiliate marketing with good rates, it’s also critical to make sure that you have a budget which you can stick to. When you start routinely going over-budget, that’s when you know you’re taking things too far, and if you’re under-spending, then you’re not going to see any realistic return. Nobody can tell you exactly how much it’s going to cost you to start affiliate marketing; that depends entirely on your market research, the capital that’s currently available for your business, and what kind of results you personally want to see.
Talk to your affiliates
It’s too easy to just set up your affiliate marketing program and assume that your affiliates will be motivated to continue it without any ongoing communication. However, talking to your affiliates is absolutely key to achieving success in the affiliate marketing world; it lets them know you’re still around and that you still want to engage with them. Talk to them about how things are going and ask them if there’s anything they need from you. They’re performing a valuable service for you, after all; you should treat them as befits that service’s value.
Keep watching your affiliate network
It’s tempting to simply think that you’ve found a golden goose when you arrive at an affiliate network that works for you, but the sad fact is that this network may not always be the right choice. Keep looking for ways to improve your communication with your affiliate network, as well as your own efforts; search for methods you can use to change your links, improve your commission rates, or offer services your competitors don’t. That’s how you stay on top in the world of affiliate marketing; complacency is a real killer in that industry.
Disclose your affiliate relationships
The worst thing you can do when you’re engaging in affiliate marketing is not to disclose that you’re doing so. Not disclosing affiliate posts or content could not only hurt your search engine process, but it could also land you in trouble with government organisations or regulatory bodies that have strict guidelines regarding advertising.
For instance, the UK Advertising Standards Authority – which isn’t affiliated with the UK government, but which essentially governs the world of advertising – requires that affiliate content be “obviously identifiable”. Make sure you know what laws and regulations apply to what you’re doing, depending on where you’re operating. That might not sound like a tip for maximising ROI, but hey – there’s nothing better for continuing to see a return on an investment than ensuring that investment is legal and compliant.
