Is Affiliate Marketing Different than Traditional Marketing?
Marketing is the first thing we need to discuss, without it you will not be successful. So let’s start with the basics. Your new affiliate marketing business is no different than if you had a traditional home town storefront. As an affiliate, your main objective is to sell the products and services offered by your partner merchants. Unless you can do this, you can never hope to make a significant amount of money with affiliate marketing programs.
So the reason why we market our business is so that our customers can find our store, which in this case, is our website. So how do people find your affiliate marketing business website when there are millions of them out there? It is called Driving Traffic and there are two types:
- Paid Traffic
- Free Traffic
Boost Your Affiliate Marketing Business with Free Traffic
We all like free so let’s start there. With over 4 billion searches conducted on Google each month, it is a good place to start. Putting a bit of effort to get your website ranked by Google is a great way to help capitalize on one of the largest single sources of free traffic.
Most website owners that run an affiliate marketing business however are clueless when it comes to the topic of getting a site ranked on Google. I’m sure you are familiar with the way people search using Google. You type in a word or phrase in the search box and you are referred to pages and pages that suggests relevant websites that you may want to visit. Have you ever checked out the second page? Most people do not.
So our goal then is this – get your website on page one of Google! In other words your affiliate marketing business needs to be ranked in the top ten spots for your keyword to be on page one. By the way, in case you don’t already know, a key word or keyword phrase is simply the words you place in the Google search box that we mentioned earlier.
#1 Action to Boost Affiliate Marketing Business: Learn good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) skills.
When you make an effort to practice and implement these skills you’ll have a huge advantage over your competition. SEO tactics can be very complex so we I will share with you more details in several upcoming posts. These are just three of the things we will cover:
Keyword research
A major part of SEO is picking the right keywords to target for your niche. So doing research before you do anything else becomes important. This research will also help you decide what domain name to pick.
Syndication Marketing
Your affiliate marketing business website must continually be updated if you expect your visitors to keep coming back. Your site must have useful content, as well as tools that will help your target audience. A good way to keep it fresh is to blog and do article writing.
Article Marketing is a form of advertising where authors make their articles available for distribution and publication on other sites.
Blogging is less structured but gets you the same results. We will discuss the basics on how to write them and how to submit them.
With the right article targeting the right keywords, you will see an incredible increase in traffic to your affiliate marketing business within just a few days of submitting your article. See how this is all tying together?
Video Marketing
Online videos convert 2 to 1 better than standard means of selling products. So it’s important to learn how to make simple little videos that don’t take long to make but can get you a lot of TARGETED traffic.
Through video, your visitors can experience your marketing in 2 dimensions – sight and sound – rather than one. Engaging more senses can only help in your effort to build trust and loyalty with your audience, so video is a great way to build an instant bond with visitors and this translate to better traffic for your affiliate marketing business!
Like I said its complicated stuff but I’ll make sure I cover it in basic enough terms that you will understand!
See you next time,
Cheryl T Campbell
4winds of Change, LLC
