9 Experts Weigh In on the Best Single Tip for New Affiliate Marketers

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular forms of marketing, yet many beginners struggle to make a living with affiliate marketing. Many ads and courses will sell new affiliate marketers on promoting bad products and services and this results in the new affiliates wasting their time and money. We surveyed 9 affiliate marketers and asked them for their best tips for new affiliates. Here’s what they had to say:

Tip #1: Create buyer personas

Research your audience carefully. Before starting affiliate work, create customer profiles and/or buyer personas. Once you know your customer inside out you can identify niches that will offer the best conversion rates and highest AOV. Affiliate marketing is not just about approaching any site and hoping for the best, you need a strategy. Sure, there are some generic sites (e.g. some coupon sites) that can convert really well, regardless of their niche. But don’t just rely on these.

Another tip is to reach out to newspapers. These increasingly rely on affiliate links for their revenue due to the decline in actual physical newspaper sales. Not only will the links send amazing amounts of traffic, but the SEO value of the links will be incredible for your rankings.

Tip #2: Get free traffic from social media

Start off with free traffic, especially if you’re a beginner. The most recommended platforms are TikTok and YouTube. Create a TikTok account and start uploading short form videos relating to the offer you’d like to promote.

Once you’ve got some traction on your TikTok account, start uploading YouTube shorts as well as regular long form content. Now keep in mind you don’t want to start all of these at the same time. You can always build up to each of these traffic sources.

Overtime as a result of your consistency you’ll have an army of videos out there, all collecting views, all bringing you leads and sales in your affiliate marketing business.

Just make sure to always create valuable content that helps people.

Tip #3: Focus on one marketing channel

Go deep building an audience that knows, likes and trusts you. We’ve all heard the money is in the email list. It is. But if you’re changing your niche and your audience all the time and you don’t lead with value you’ll burn out your list in no time. Pick one marketing channel to master at a time, go deep at whatever investment is needed and don’t give up until you’ve cracked the code. Then and only then pick another channel to test and add. Way too many entrepreneurs become a jack of all trades but a master of none.

Tip #4: Start building your email list

Email lists are one of the best ways to exponentially grow your affiliate revenue. When you capture the visitors on your site and turn them into email subscribers, you have the ability to sell and market to them repeatedly. Instead of a visitor landing on your website one time and leaving forever, you can use opt-in plug-ins to make them into email subscribers and you can provide them with valuable content and get more affiliate sales. The vast majority of 6, 7 and 8 figure affiliate marketers leverage their email list as a consistent stream of affiliate revenue.

Tip #5: Target Long-Tail Keywords

Identifying and targeting long-tail keywords is a great SEO tactic to increase traffic to your affiliate website. These keywords specifically serve the searcher’s intent, and therefore visitors who are near a point of purchase are more inclined to use them.

Despite the fact that these particular keywords often have lower search volume, they typically have higher conversion rates. There are many strategies you can use to identify long-tail keywords relevant to your niche, some of which include:

• Do some competitor research – You can check which long-tail keywords your competitors are trying to rank for in the SERPs, using SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush.
• Google Autocomplete Suggestions – Type a general keyword into Google (or another search engine) to see what autocomplete recommendations come up.
• Research FAQs in your niche – People are increasingly asking questions in the form of queries. Therefore, you should start to utilize question modifiers like “what”, “can” and “how” throughout your content. This can be an effective way to capture featured snippets that appear at the top of a Google search results page.

Tip #6: How to Plan the Content Calendar (The Right Strategy)

When you’re starting as a new affiliate, you just don’t know what to publish and when. It’s very essential for newbie affiliates to plan the content calendar in advance.

To start planning the content you can just go by your content publishing strategy. For example, as an affiliate marketer, I prefer to divide content into two categories — informational and commercial. As per the expert’s affiliates and our encounter you should go with a 60:40 ratio for informational content and commercial content.

You can create one spreadsheet, or create a
copy of mastersheet here. For our research process, we make use of different tools mostly Ahrefs and Semrush. You can add all the topics for the month in that sheet like all the informational and commercial content. Then you can start assigning it to your specific writer or team accordingly. The perk is you can also check the workflow what’s being done and what’s pending on the way. This way you can do monthly content audits and check the workflow of published and pending content.

Tip #7: Target transactional keywords

The best way to get more affiliate revenue is to generate more traffic to your affiliate pages. Most bloggers often write about informational posts and try to add in affiliate links throughout the post. A better approach is to target keywords that have a transactional intent. These are usually posts like “best blogging platforms” or “best VPNs”. By targeting these kinds of transactional posts, you can improve your affiliate clicks, conversions and sales dramatically.

Tip #8:

We always help get our affiliate clients set up with a solid content delivery network to make sure their website pages are being served as rapidly as possible. Speed is both a search engine ranking factor but also impacts usability in a big way. Cloudflare is our go-to provider as they have data centers all over the world along with low latency and a complete suite of security solutions.

Tip #9: Don’t cash your checks too early

It’s easy to get excited and go out and apply for dozens of affiliate programs before your website gets lots of traffic. When building a site using SEO, it’s easy to focus on the wrong things. And one of these can be investing time applying for these brands before you have traffic.

Only a tiny percentage of your readers will take you up on clicking on a referral link to explore further. And even fewer are going to make a purchase. So more than likely, you need thousands of visitors to an article to make a few sales. There are always exceptions to this. But you’ll be happier in the long run if you first focus on building out traffic. Then you can work on creating partnerships and applying to their programs.

Plus, many programs want to ensure you’re a good fit and can send the right potential customers. So creating ways to get traffic is the right first step.