Affiliate Marketing - Practical Tips for a Quick Start

For those who still want to make significant steps (and more sales) with a blog, website or mailing list, affiliate marketing is an interesting option. For experienced online marketers and online retailers this is of course a piece of cake, but how do you get a good start with this? Eight comprehensive tips to get off to a good start with affiliate marketing.

With affiliate marketing you are rewarded for redirecting visitors through an advertisement on your website. If forwarded visitors lead to a product purchase (sale) or a registration (lead), then as a website owner you will receive appropriate compensation.

1. Register with an Affiliate Network

As a website administrator, the question quickly arises of how to get in touch with potential advertisers. You can register with an affiliate network, an intermediary that runs campaigns of brands and websites. The purpose of an affiliate network is to match advertisers with potential publishers, and vice versa.

The most famous affiliate networks in the America are ShareASale, CJ (Commission Junction) and Rakuten. Together these organizations manage campaigns of almost all well-known websites and online shopping stores in the America. By registering you have direct access to promoting thousands of campaigns from almost every well-known website. This saves you a lot of time and effort when it comes to finding a suitable advertiser on your website.

2. Promote Campaign That Matches Your Visitors

Before you start placing advertisements on your website, it is important that you know what the needs of your target group are. If you know what your visitors are looking for, you can make a targeted choice for an advertisement on your site.

Sketch the 'problem' of your visitor and for each popular page on your site consider why the visitor is reading the content and what the visitor would like an answer to. With this problem sketch you can find advertisers who can solve the visitor's problem or answer the question. If you find a campaign that meets the wishes of your visitors, the chance of approval from the advertiser is high.

3. Choose a Suitable Niche

Choosing a suitable niche increases your chance of success. Five tips for choosing the right niche or industry:Try to find products with a high profit margin. If a supplier or online store has a lot of profit left over from a product, then there is also more room to give an affiliate publisher a nice commission.

Check out niches with high affiliate commissions. In the affiliate networks mentioned earlier, you can check for each advertiser what the commission is per sale or lead. The commission percentages vary enormously. Sometimes you only get 2 cents for a sale, at another online store it is 10 percent or more. It is wise to make a calculation in advance of how many sales or leads you need to generate before you earn from it.

4. Look at the competition

If the competition within a niche is fierce, think carefully about what you are getting into. On the one hand, the many competitors confirm the popularity of the niche, on the other hand, it is very difficult to compete with sites that have been around for years.

5. Process Ads Naturally

If you have clear what you want to advertise on your website, it is important to consider where the advertisements should be placed. The place of an ad has a lot of influence on your result.

If you can explain in an article both textually and visually why a provider of a product or service is a good choice, your visitor is more likely to click through on the ad. Always consider whether you can immediately solve the visitor's problem with this provider. If that is not the case, a featured advertisement can actually cause irritation with your visitors. An advertisement is only properly incorporated into an article if it actually benefits the visitor.

6. Have Multiple Advertisers

As an affiliate publisher you remain independent through multiple advertisers. If you focus on one advertiser, but the commission percentages change or the advertiser stops, your compensation will also stop immediately. Make sure you have multiple active campaigns open. This way you can immediately switch between your advertisers if something changes.

7. Be Reliable

A rule of thumb for every affiliate publisher: make sure that the information on your website is completely correct. It sounds so logical, but with many affiliate websites this is not the case. Many sites try to get the visitor to click through as quickly as possible instead of informing them properly. Advertisers on referral factory value well-informed visitors, also known as 'warm' visitors, because they are more likely to purchase a product or service if the information is clear in advance.

8. To Measure Is To Know

Found a spot for your affiliate ads? Then we have to wait for the results. To measure how advertisements run, you don't just look at the commission or the amount of sales and leads. A campaign where the commission is very high, but the conversion is low, may well yield you less than a campaign with a lower commission and a high conversion.

The best way to measure your affiliate campaigns is based on Effective CPC, you can track which allows you to calculate the average click of your visitor. This way you can see in the overviews exactly which ad is running best.

With these basics, every website administrator is ready for the first affiliate campaigns. Good luck!