Complete Transcript: Affiliate Marketing Strategy

Hello and welcome to the Smart affiliate marketing podcast.

I’m Paul, and in this episode we’re going to be looking at affiliate marketing strategies.

So if you’re feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, confused and you’re tired of making low or no income, all you need to get on the road to success is a well crafted affiliate marketing strategy.

And that’s the purpose of this episode.

OK, let’s look at affiliate marketing strategies.

And really, from what I’ve seen with myself and other affiliates over the years is that the ones who succeed have an affiliate marketing strategy, and they stick to it – not rigidly, perhaps, because you have to have some flexibility. But you do need to have an overall strategy to make progress.

Now, the affiliates who don’t have a strategy they, buy course after course. They have shiny object syndrome. They jump from one action to another without honing their skills. They struggle with traffic, they miss opportunities, and they hardly make any income whatsoever.

However, those with a strategy, they tend to focus their efforts. They maximise the return on their time and money invested, and they build long term, sustainable and successful businesses.

So that’s why having an affiliate marketing strategy is important. It is usually the difference between success and failure within this industry.

Before we get into the strategies, one thing that has to be right for the strategy to work is to have the right affiliate marketing mindset.
This I’ve discussed in a 10 minute podcast, which is Episode four, Affiliate Marketing Mindset, And you can refer to that if you need any help with your mindset.

But mindset is something you should work on on an ongoing basis, even if it’s just having daily affirmations. But having the right mindset is essential for successful affiliate marketing.

This episode is an overview of strategy. I’m not going to go into too much detail on each of the steps because those are more tactical. And today we’re just looking at overall strategy.

If you do want a shortcut to having an affiliate marketing strategy laid out for you, if you go to my website Smart affiliate Podcast.com and on the menu under Resources and Tools, you’ll find a link to a free step by step checklist.

Now this checklist is basically a 20-step affiliate marketing success checklist, which is an affiliate marketing strategy that you can follow and take your affiliate marketing results to the next level. It’s 100% free for you to download, and you can use the checklist in conjunction with various podcast episodes as a 20 step action plan to your success.

So with mindset going on in the background, the first step is to choose a niche. This I discuss in Episode six called Niches to Riches, and it’s all about finding the sweet spot between passion and profit.

Once you’ve selected your niche, you then need to move on to keyword research and building a customer avatar. I have a 14 minute podcast on building your customer avatar, and it’s Episode seven, and by doing these steps, you’ll be identifying your passions and who your target audience is. You’ll be researching their needs, their demographics, their pain points, and you’ll start to understand the people that you’re going to be trying to sell products to for a commission.

The keyword research will lead you to find out more about these people and what they type into Google, for example, and by learning all of these things early on, you’re going to know your audience.

You’re going to know where they hang out, and by knowing these things, it’s going to help you target them with the right adverts, the right content and things that are going to resonate with them and give them solutions to their pain points.

Once you know these things, you can then move on to content creation and other traffic generation methods. Now each traffic generation method has its own skill set in itself. So with traffic, I would suggest just using one or two methods at a time.

Get those honed, build your skills in that area, and when you’ve got that optimised to the best you possibly can, then you can consider adding more strategies and traffic sources to your arsenal.

Personally, I like to use a combination of free traffic and paid traffic. So I have a website, a blog, podcast, YouTube channel. This brings me lots of free traffic. I also use pay-per-click adverts for various campaigns, but I only did one at a time and then added to it.

And by doing your initial research and finding out who your potential customers are and where they hang out, this will lead you to develop a successful traffic strategy that you can implement.

Now, within affiliate marketing, some people just have a landing page. Basically no website, no blog. They just build landing pages and use pay per click to send traffic to their landing page, which in turn sends the people onto their affiliate offers.

This can be a fast route to success, but you do need to know what you’re doing. You do need to optimise and split test these pages and traffic sources because initially you may lose money.

But if you test and tweak, you can turn those campaigns into profitable ones. In the early years I made that mistake. I paid for some traffic. I didn’t get a positive return on my investment, so I gave up on that traffic source. Well, in hindsight, I should have been testing and tweaking those campaigns until they became profitable.

Your traffic may include websites, SEO, video channels, blogs, social media, LinkedIn. There’s a whole host of traffic sources, but knowing where your potential clients hang out is key to your success when driving traffic.

And one thing we haven’t looked at yet is which affiliate programmes are you going to be promoting to your potential customers in Episode 15 of the Smart Affiliate marketing podcast called Affiliate Partner Secrets. I’ve discussed how to find and choose high converting affiliate programmes. That’s well worth a listen is it will put you on the right road to finding high converting affiliate programmes that are going to actually make you money when you promote them to your targeted audience. It’s very important that the product aligns with the pain points of your target audience and helps them either overcome a challenge or achieve success in whichever field they’re looking at.

When choosing affiliate programmes, it’s good to try and develop relationships with affiliate managers because they have insider knowledge of what actually works with those products.

And you can learn from the success of other successful affiliate marketers and gain a shortcut to success for yourself.

OK, so so far we’ve looked at developing a niche, a customer avatar doing keyword research, understanding your customers, working out how you’re going to target them with content creation and other traffic sources, and we’ve looked briefly at product selection.

Now, as I said, this is a strategy overview. I’m not going into the tactics in this episode, and most of them are touched on within other podcast episodes that I’ve produced.

So now we’ve got the basis of a successful strategy. Let’s look at some affiliate marketing tools and resources that you can use.

If you head over to my website SmartAffiliatePodcast.com – Under “Resources and Tools” on the menu, you’ll see a link to a page called “Affiliate Marketing Resources”.

Now ideally, you can bookmark this resource page because you’ll want to refer back to it many times in the future.

This page covers things like affiliate networks, tracking software, link shortening tools, funnel builders, page builders, email marketing, social media tools, website hosting and SEO tools, content creation, payment processors, training and education, recommended reading.

And there’s even a “Glossary of Terms” where I’ve provided 60 definitions of common terms and acronyms used within the affiliate marketing arena. This will help you understand the industry better and is a quick education within itself.

The whole URL is WWW dot smart affiliate podcast.com/affiliate, hyphen marketing, hyphen resources, forward slash or just use the menu on my website.

As I said, it’s worth bookmarking that page, and there are quick links so you can navigate that page easily, and it’s an invaluable resource for your affiliate marketing success. It’s totally free. There’s no opt in required. It’s a resource that you can freely use.

Another great tool for affiliate marketing success is to use AI within your strategies.

Now, if you go to my episode nine called AI Power Up. This will teach you how AI can enhance your affiliate marketing results, and it also gives access to a Free AI Kickstarter Course, which is available on my digital learning platform. WWW dot smart online academy.com. And if you look at the top menu, there is a link to the Free AI Kickstarter course, which will get you on your way implementing AI into your marketing strategy. Again, that course is totally free.

And overall, AI in affiliate marketing can be used to enhance your strategies by creating content, using chatbots, image and video generation, social media management and much more.

OK, we’ve covered a lot. Let’s look at some tips for success using affiliate marketing strategies.

First tip is that consistency is key. Now you need to be consistent and persistent. So if you decide to do one blog post a week stick to it.

Put it in your diary and make sure you do it every week.

Better still, you could work in advance so that if you have to release one podcast episode a week or one blog post a week, you could work in advance whereby you’ve got two or three weeks of a buffer whereby if anything happened, if you were sick or if you went on holiday, your content would still be there for you to publish. If you have a buffer and some pre created content ready to distribute.

The next tip is to build trust with your audience. So be honest. Be transparent, be genuine, build the “know, like and trust” factors. And this will help your sales and commissions by serving your audience well.

Another tip for success is to continuously learn.

Now, I don’t mean “buy lots of courses” and so on. What I mean by this is that when you move on to the next step within your strategy, you learn the tactics of that strategy. For instance traffic – and learn how to get traffic on a particular platform, hone your skills, improve your skills and keep learning.

The next tip is to make sure you can measure and analyse your results. So on a regular basis, either weekly, fortnightly or monthly, you should be looking at the analytics of perhaps your website or the affiliate offers you’re promoting. See how many visitors you’re getting, how many are converting into sales, see what’s working and what isn’t working. Then test and tweak your strategies accordingly.

The next tip is to diversify your income streams. Don’t be reliant on just one source of income because if anything happens to that source, then you’re left high and dry. By all means, initially start with just one product, but you should soon add more products into your affiliate offers so that you’re not dependent on just one source of income.

The next tip is when creating content, prioritise quality over quantity. Good, valuable, actionable content for your audience is the recipe for long term results.

Don’t just write a blog post because you have to write a blog post every week. Make sure you give valuable content within that blog Post.

Another tip is to be ethical and transparent by disclosing your affiliate relationships. Don’t try and hide the fact that you’re an affiliate. It is actually a legal requirement for you to be open about your affiliate relationships. And if you’re promoting products, you should be letting your audience know that you would make a commission on that.

And the last tip is to have fun and enjoy the process!

Stay passionate about your niche. Have your affiliate marketing strategy and stick to it. Know what you need to do in terms of creation of content and generating traffic. Keep a diary, albeit digital or on paper, and stick to your strategy.

Remember, this is about building solid foundations for a long term, sustainable and successful affiliate marketing career.

Forget the get rich quick, the overnight success. It just doesn’t happen, and it’s a fallacy put about by people selling courses who simply want to extract money from your wallet at the expense of your career.

Remember, it could take months for you to make the first commission. That’s fine. If you have solid foundations, those commissions are then going to continue.

The last thing I want to touch on in the affiliate marketing strategy podcast is common affiliate marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.

Now, I have done a whole episode on this episode 14 called “Avoid these 10 affiliate marketing blunders to skyrocket your income”.

The 10 blunders I discuss in that episode is:

• Number one. Lack of Consistency and Dedication.
• Number two is choosing the wrong niche.
• Number three is targeting the wrong audience.
• Number four is ignoring the audience needs and interests.
• Number five is promoting the wrong products or services.
• Number six is using ineffective marketing strategies.
• Number seven is producing poor quality content (which we’ve discussed already in this episode.)
• Number eight is ignoring the best practises of search engine optimisation.
• Number nine is failing to disclose affiliate relationships, and
• number 10 is failure to build and nurture an email list.

You may have heard the term the money is in the list, so it is quite important that you do build yourself an email list that you can market to on an ongoing basis.

And many marketers, myself included, will tell you that the best return on investment is from building an email list.

OK, that pretty much wraps it up for this episode.

If you want a ready-made affiliate marketing strategy, simply head over to SmartAffiliatePodcast.com and under the menu resources and tools,  you’ll find a link to a free step by step checklist, which is a 20 step Smart affiliate success checklist, which will help you on your affiliate marketing journey. It’s totally free to download. It coincides with many of the podcast episodes that I’ve mentioned, and it gives you a 20 step by step method to achieve success and take your affiliate marketing results to the next level. So head over to Smart affiliate Podcast.com and grab your free 20 step checklist.

OK, that’s me done for today. If you need any help, you can contact me via my contact page on the Smart affiliate Podcast.com website.

I’ll be back next week with another episode, so until then, do well and goodbye!