Affiliate Marketing Tips – 5 Tips to Grow Affiliate Business

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We continue to make good progress with our affiliate networks. We have planned for the holidays ahead of time & have used our resources to sell specially on the holiday months. (for more on this, read an earlier article Affiliate Blogging Tip – 12 Months to Grow Sales).

Many of you who have signed up from my websites have come back with one big question – why isn’t the sales growing? Though I have answered most of you in emails with tips, I thought it might be a good idea to publish a few of the tips that can help new affiliates in this post on Affiliate Marketing Tips Series.

We will shortly publish an ebook with more than 25 tips that can help you have a great start with your affiliate marketing.

Growing Affiliate Business Tip 1 – Choose the Easy Path First

For beginners to affiliate marketing, it could be very overwhelming to compete with the large retailers who offer tremendous discounts & spend millions of dollars marketing their products.

My first advice to new affiliate marketers & affiliate bloggers is to choose the path of least resistance. Choose products or services niches that have sold eternally – books, music, games, electronic accessories etc are possible choices.

Take advantage of being first in the new emerging markets (Click Here to Read Emerging Affiliate Marketing Niche – Get Started Early to Profit in New Niche Markets) where its easy to sell & the profits are higher.

Growing Affiliate Business Tip 2 – Plan Advertising Ahead of Time

Most of the new affiliate marketers jump into setting up a website, load it with products, wait for 2 months for things to happen & when nothing sells, start to advertise!

Wrong approach!

Even before you begin, you must keep the proven sequence of activities:

• choose your niche – research to identify products, geographies & demographics
• choose the right domain name for your website
• choose the right technology & layout to build your affiliate business site
• choose the right email marketing partners
• choose the incentives to offer – discounts, free gifts etc
• choose the right advertising networks – direct ads, social media ads etc
• initiate a campaign to measure the response
• launch your products

Growing Affiliate Business Tip 3 – Focus on Landing Pages

Once you have a visitor, either from a campaign or from organic searches, close the sale as quickly as possible. The biggest mistakes new affiliate marketers make is to try & sell too many things to one visitor even before they buy a single product from your site!

Wrong practice!

Choose the right website design so that the visitors can focus on one product at a time. Once a sale is closed, show other products & offer the customer a tour to other parts of your website.

Focus on the landing page that can help close a sale. Click Here to Read Affiliate Marketing Tips – Whats Wrong with Your Landing Page.

Growing Affiliate Business Tip 4 – Optimize for Search Engines

I would never advise you to spend hundreds of dollars on optimizing for search engines. Click Here to Read Blogging Tips – How Far Should You Go with SEO. But I do recommend following a few simple points that will go a long way in optimizing your website landing pages for organic searches:

• use META tags correctly – TITLE, KEYWORDS, DESCRIPTION
• use keywords in your landing pages – 1:4 is a good keyword density
• use images on your landing page & tag images with an optimized name, TITLE & ALT tags
• do not hide keywords or stuff your landing page with keywords – this only harms your landing page
• use breadcrumb navigation so that any page is just one or 2 clicks away from the main index page of your site

Growing Affiliate Business Tip 5 – Target Sales the Right Audience

Pitch your sales to the right audience. This could help you save advertising money & get more conversions. As an example, if you are selling Acai Berry health supplement, run advertising campaigns where people are health conscious & spend money on nutritional products. Narrow your campaigns within a certain age group that are more likely to use Akai Berry frequently.

Many times, affiliate marketers run general ad campaigns, using up all their advertising budget with few hits & almost no conversions.

Conclusion

Planning is important. As a new affiliate marketer you may be thrilled to go out there & sell, but you will only come back empty handed if you have not planned each & every campaign properly.

There is no magic wand, no generic mantras that will get you thousands of dollars when you set up an affiliate website. Follow these tips & you will see results. I will also encourage you to experiment – run split tests to understand how your visitors are navigating your sites. With the results, optimize one step at a time.

The last point, as I have repeated very frequently, is patience! To give you some idea, the first sale we made on one of our affiliate site was 4 months after we launched our site. Those were the longest 4 months we ever had – but we kept our patience & experimented with designs, layouts, campaigns, SEO & finally they all came together!