40 Suggestions for Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online especially for bloggers. You are provided a commission when you promote a product or service and a purchase i made with your referral link. Below you will find 40 suggestions for affiliate marketing.If you are new to affiliate marketing be sure to take a look at my Affiliate Marketing Beginner's Guide or my Tips for Affiliate Marketing first. Both of those will give you a better understanding about affiliate marketing and how you can apply it to your blog or website. 

40 Suggestions for Affiliate Marketing:

1. Think of you audience. Before choosing an affiliate marketing company be sure to think about your audience's needs. You want to help them or fulfill their needs.2. Relevant products. Take time to choose products or services that fit with the content of your blog. You do not want to add irrelevant links to products or services. Your readers will be able to see that you are just trying to make money.3. Choose wisely. Do not just sign-up with every affiliate program you come across. Pick and choose wisely. Start with a handful of products and see how well they do on your blog.4. Personal Recommendations. One of the easiest ways to add affiliate links into your posts is by giving a personal recommendation. Not only will it fit more naturally into your content, but you want to be honest. If there is a product that you use why not share it with your audience.5. Develop a strategy. Decide what kind of affiliate marketing you want to use: pay-per-click, pay-per-lead or pay-per-sale. You may find that one of these strategies works best with your blog than another or maybe you want to use all three.6. Valuable Content. Have pillar content that will engage your audience and have them coming back to your site. You want to be able to provide value to your reader first before you can expect them to trust you and buy a product you recommend.

7. Be honest. You want to be honest with your readers. Disclose that your post contains affiliate links. Be upfront so that they do not feel as if you are just trying to make a sale.8. Good review. An easy way to add in affiliate links into a post is by giving a god review. Your audience trusts your opinion, so if you reviewed a product see if they offer an affiliate program that you can include into your post.9. Track Results. Pay attention to your stats and see what programs are working. You may be adding your affiliate links into several posts, so be sure you are properly tracking which posts or promotions work better. You can try using bit.ly to track the links so that you can find out what you can do differently.10. Be helpful. Again, think of your reader's and figure out a way that you can help them or solve a problem in their lives. This will not only increase your success with affiliate marketing but it will build credibility with your audience because they will see that you are truly trying to help them.11. Monetize old posts. Once you have your affiliate programs setup go back into your archives and add these links where appropriate.12. Services. Often time people forget about all the affiliate programs for services and not just products. Look for ways that you can incorporate and offer your reader's different services to make their lives easier.13. Link Images. Be sure to link your post images with your affiliate links not just text.14. Content Creation. When you are planning your editorial calendar take the time to figure out content that you can put your affiliate links into. You may have an entire post that focuses on a particular product or service.15. Email Marketing. Do you have an email list? Your opt-in list is one of your best resources. Those people enjoyed your website enough to sign-up for your email list and more than likely value your opinion. This may be one of these easiest ways to generate commission with affiliate links, but do not bombard your list with all affiliate offers.16. Trustworthy. You always want your audience to trust you, so be honest and tell them what you did and not like about a product that you are promoting. They will value your opinion much more if you can give them the facts rather than just say "I love this product!"17. Call to action. Ending a post with a call to action is the perfect place to add in an affiliate link. What do you want your readers to do? Read another post? Buy a product?18. Be patient. You may not see any increase in revenue from your affiliate links immediately. It may take time to make money from your affiliate programs. One of the best parts of affiliate marketing is the passive income. You can add your links to a post and make consistent income from it month after month without having to do any work. So, be patient if you do not see results immediately.19. Avoid overcrowding. Do not overload a post with a ton of affiliate links.20. Banner Ads. There are a ton of different affiliate programs that offer banner ads. Instead of including your links into a post, consider put a banner ad in your sidebar.21. Transparency. Do not try to trick your readers into clicking a link. This goes back to being honest and having a disclaimer that affiliate links are included in your posts.22. Be Personal NOT 'salesy.' One of the best ways to add affiliate links into a post is when you are showing a personal interest in a product or service. Your audience will know when you are just trying to sell them a product.23. No-Follow links. All affiliate links that you have on your blog need to be 'no-follow' links. Read more about those links.24. Think realistic. You cannot expect to just add in a bunch of affiliate links and make a ton of money. Be realistic and understand that it may take time. Some commissions may be small, but overtime affiliate marketing may become your largest revenue stream.25. Diversify. Do not put all your eggs in one basket. If you are a blogger you want to have other forms of income.26. Traffic. The more traffic you have the better chance you have to increase your affiliate marketing income, but that does not mean if you are a small blogger that you cannot make money. There are a lot of blogs that have a small audience, but have a loyal readership. Often times these sites make great money from affiliate links because their audience trusts their opinion.27. Content withOUT affiliate links. Make sure that you have an even balance of content with affiliate link and content without. You do not want every single post to be filled with link after link of products that you recommend {unless your site is based solely on reviews}.28. Multiple Promotions. If you were not successful in making money from a particular post try using a different approach. Write a similar post that goes along with the first one and include your affiliate links. Try posting it on Facebook of Twitter.29. Different programs. Once you figure out what products or services fit with your blog then choose a couple different programs or affiliate companies. I have a list of examples of affiliate marketing programs to get you started. But, choose a few that you can offer to your readers. If one does not work well try another.30. Research. If you are not sure where to start check out similar blogs in your nice and see what types of companies they promote. Research those companies and see if they would be a good fit for your blog. You want to make sure that you are picking good companies because you are essentially endorsing them when you are adding in your referral links.31. Software. There are a bunch of different programs and plugins that you can use to help add links into your posts.32. Promote your own affiliate programs. If you have your own product or service you can offer your own affiliate program. For example, I have a book Real Ways to Make Money from Home and I offer affiliate 50% of the sale through eJunkie. {If you are interested in being an affiliate you can sign-up here}33. Stay relevant. Keep up to date with your affiliate programs campaigns. Update the banners or coupon codes.34. Favorites Page. Consider creating a page on your blog that has all of your favorite products or services. You can promote this one page and link to it in your posts. I always have readers emailing me asking what I use for certain products. Having a separate page for all of these items would not only be easy to promote but it does make it easier on your readers too.35. Time. Making money from affiliate marketing can take time. This can depend on your audience too. As your audience grows so can your affiliate income.36. Say NO. You do not have to do every single opportunity that comes your way. I get a lot of emails to promote products on my blog. Sometimes it is hard to say no when it comes to monetization but you do not need to take every income generating opportunity.37. Bonus. This can be two things. You can offer a bonus on top of the affiliate offer to your readers for purchasing or you can ask the company if they can offer a specific coupon code or discount specifically for your readers.38. Promotion. Use different traffic sources to promote your products or services. There are a lot of ways to drive targeted traffic to your posts. For example, Google Adwords can help you to target a specific audience.39. Know the affiliate companies. Get to know the affiliate manager. Work with them to see which campaigns they suggest and see if they can offer you a higher commission. Once I see that a product or service does well on my site I will talk to my account manager to see if I can negotiate a higher rate.40. Patience. Don't give up. Affiliate marketing takes time. There are a lot of factors that play into the amount of money that you can make. I hope that these 40 suggestions for affiliate marketing will help you to be successful and increase your income.