What are the secrets of affiliate marketing?

For years I struggled to learn affiliate marketing. I started over 10 years ago and began by building websites that I hoped would rank in Google’s free search engines. Back then, courses taught this strategy because it used to work well! Over time and with the millions of websites and affiliates trying to rank their content, this strategy became more and more difficult.

However, I ranked a few websites and made a couple of sales here and there. But I was by no means making a living and had spent many hours watching videos and learning over a long period of time. I was there in the towel many times but I knew it was something worth pursuing.

One of the secrets of affiliate marketing is to stick with it until you get some results. Learn from your lack of results but keep learning and never stop. My strategies were flawed in the first instance. I expected an easy win. I suspect many people go into affiliate marketing expecting the same thing.

Over time, I slowly realized the time and effort it took to make affiliate marketing work for me. I learned that just because I wrote an article, it wasn’t necessarily going to be seen by millions of people! In fact, most of my articles were never even seen. I didn’t know how to promote them and get them to see them. I just hoped everyone would come, because, well, I was special and it was just going to work! How naive!

One of the “secrets” of affiliate marketing is building an email list. I got the best results once I had a subscriber list and promoted a product with paid advertising. This is probably the fastest way to see results in affiliate marketing. Content creation takes time and there is no guarantee that your content will get a large enough audience to start selling something.

Building an email list is vital for anyone who wants to build a real business from affiliate marketing. Without one, you are relying on your website visitors to buy from you after they land on your website. This only gives them a few minutes to make a buying decision. Put them on an email list and you can extend this time frame to months and even years ahead. Additionally, you can build a relationship with your subscribers by offering them value, knowledge, and information that can be useful to them.

Paid advertising is another ‘secret’ of affiliate marketers. I avoided paid strategies for a long time because I had no confidence in the products I chose. I didn’t know how to run paid campaigns and I was afraid of losing money, because I didn’t have much! So I stuck to ‘free’ marketing strategies like writing articles and creating videos. However, the results were very limited due to the strategy I used and the niche I was in.

It takes much longer to get traffic if you focus only on organic strategies. Paid traffic is instant, but then again, it takes time to learn and master.

The other ‘secret’ to using paid traffic is choosing the right products to promote. Again, this was something that took me a long time to understand. Having products that continue to pay, even after your initial sale, is a major key to making affiliate marketing work for you. Initially I was selling products that only paid me once. Also, I only made $40 or so on the sale of a $100 product.

I later learned that top affiliates choose larger items to promote for better commissions and choose memberships to sell so they can earn ongoing commissions each month. A subscription product that pays you a small amount each month is worth much more than a single product that only pays you once. For every customer, you can earn a residual income, potentially for a lifetime. 100 customers turns into real income because of the ongoing commissions you receive each month from your membership.

Upselling is also another affiliate marketing “secret.” An upsell is basically a product that is sold to a customer after they have already purchased from you. Even if you’ve been to a fast food franchise, you’ll know that they always offer an upsell. “Do you want fries with that?” it’s an upsell. “Would you like to increase the size?” it’s an upsell. By offering many products to existing customers, you can earn much more than selling just one product.

An existing customer is much more likely to buy from you because they already paid for something. Top affiliates know the power of upselling and benefit from more commissions from every customer. Personalized repetition is an important factor in most businesses, so you should also consider your affiliate marketing business.

Here’s one final affiliate marketing secret. Most starting affiliates will focus on getting someone to their website to convert them into a subscriber. They will spend a lot of time working on the number of visitors to your website. But there are two factors in turning a visitor into a subscriber. The number of people visiting your website is a factor. The subscription fee is another. You can get many more visitors to become subscribers simply by changing your subscription offer.

Cross-testing various opt-in offers, and in particular, making a clear call to action with a profit-driven ‘giveaway’ offer is the best way to measure this. So don’t focus entirely on building traffic because you can make more progress if you create an attractive freebie offer to build your email list.