Affiliate Marketing Tips for WordPress Bloggers

If you’re new to affiliate marketing, i’ll give you a simple description of what an affiliate program is, before we take a look at how to get the best results from the affiliate programs you choose to go with on your blog.

Affiliate program owners offer affiliates a commission for referring new customers to their website when they sign up for products and services.

Generally, merchants who own products and services create an affiliate program and use an affiliate manager to manage this program for them.

Some well known affiliate managers are:

• Clickbank
• ejunkie
• Shareasale
• Commission Junction

Some  merchants prefer to start an affiliate program on their own website using affiliate software or an affiliate plugin for WordPress.

For merchants, starting an affiliate program is a great way to:

1. Build an online sales force
2. Build links to your site
3. Drive traffic to your sales page
4. Build your brand

If you want to make some extra money from blogging, you’ll achieve the best results by joining affiliate programs which offer your readers products and services related to your blogs specific subjects & topics.

Here’s a few tips to help you get the best results from the affiliate marketing programs you choose to go with.

Find Out What Your Visitors Are Searching For

You can find out what keywords your readers are using to arrive at your site using Google Analytics & Google Webmaster Tools. This will give you a good idea on what they want and need.

1. You need to try and find out why are they searching for your content?
2. What can you do to help them? How can you help solve their problems?
3. What solution would fix their problem and take away their pain and frustration
4. What compels them to take the final step and sign up for a product or service

Write About Related Products and Services

Simply placing Google adsense, banners and links in your sidebar or header won’t convert very well.

Find products and services which are related to your blog posts content and then:

1. Test the product or service yourself. Example: Always test the products yourself and understand them like an expert. If you don’t want to spend the time using the product, find another which does interest you.
2. Write about your own personal, authentic experience Example: I’ve found the best converting products are the ones i’ve written about while using myself. I’ve also created videos showing the different problems you can solve using different products.
3. Include the Pro’s & Con’s not just the positives Example: The best results come from honest reviews of products where you also explain the limitations and negatives of a product or service as well as the solutions & benefits.
4. Write an honest review or tutorial which includes a list of solutions to solve the same problem: Example 4 Ways to Backup WordPress Files & Databases.

I’ve found writing about how to use different products to solve different problems, needs, save time etc, the most effective way to gain a referral commission as an affiliate.

Try Different Affiliate Programs Yourself and Learn

Some affiliate managers can make life as an affiliate, difficult. Some are really helpful which helps get better results as you tend to like the product more if the people around it are likeable and helpful.

I know there’s some great products and services out there that offer benefits and solutions which help people fix problems. Shop around for different affiliate programs and different affiliate managers.

Traffic to Each Page/Post

One of the best ways to get good conversion rates is to use affiliate links in existing content which already gets consistent traffic. You can easily work out which pages and posts are getting the most traffic using Google’s Analytics or a stats plugin and find out what keywords are used to arrive at these pages/posts.

Once you have worked out what your readers are searching for, you can include affiliate links for products and services related to the content on that page which should also be related to the keywords your visitors are using in the search query.

Track Your Results

Its important to find out:

• Whats selling and whats not
• How many clicks your need for one sale
• Which links are converting the best
• Which reviews, tutorials, blog posts & marketing programs convert the best

You’ll work out that a good conversion rate is around 2% or more. If you’re getting hundreds or thousands of clicks and no sales, as long as you know these stats, you can make positive changes.

Based on my own experience, the best results come from traffic generated by cornerstone content where you write about a range of different solutions which all fix the same problem.

These solutions should also offer other benefits like saving time and frustration. Some solutions in the cornerstone contents list should be free where there’s No affiliate commission in it for you but free benefits for your readers.

Some solutions can be premium where you can receive commission. Your readers need to be able to choose which solution they want to go with depending on their time constraints, financial situation etc.

What affiliate programs are converting best for you? Share your affiliate marketing tips in the comments.