Use this checklist of best practices when planning your affiliate marketing.
1. Always be selective when choosing any products to promote. Products need to be relevant to your audience and high quality. The business needs to be honest and trustworthy. Remember, this is your reputation on the line.
2. When you are promoting products, do not focus on the price of the product but on the benefits, that buyers will receive. If there is a unique offer or discount price, that is the bonus.
3. Ask your audience for feedback. Ask what they are struggling with. Ask how they like what you are emailing and writing about. Ask if they purchased a product through your recommendation, how they are linking it, or what results they are seeing. Showing you care helps build strong bonds with you and your audience.
4. Ensure your posts or emails offer plenty of value when promoting affiliate links. It should be able to stand alone, whether or not you include a promotion.
5. Start with the goal of your campaign, then search for the right product to promote. Do not promote anything without a plan. Randomly promoting products can lead to low commissions and broken trust with your audience.
6. Don’t sell or include affiliate links in every email you send. Subscribers get tired of being bombarded with offer after offer. Send some messages that just talk about what you’re doing or offer a tip or two without any type of promotion.
7. Spend time building relationships with your subscribers. Audiences who feel connected with you are more likely to trust your word and buy based on your suggestions.
8. Always look for programs that offer a good commission, 20% or better if possible. Those offering low commissions may not generate enough commission for your effort.
9. When searching for services or products to promote, see what the movers and shakers in your niche are promoting. Industry leaders often vet the companies they promote quite well before recommending them.
10. Track your opens, clicks, and buy statistics to see which products sell well, which types of promotional material generate the most sales, which headlines get the most open, and so forth.
11. Look for businesses that offer affiliates pre-made content to help you promote their products. You can often find emails, images blog posts, lists of benefits, sales angle suggestions, and more from companies.
12. If products from a particular company are popular with your audience, but the company’s affiliate center is lacking, contact companies to see if they could provide you with some pre-written material.
13. Ask your audience about their favorite companies, products, or types of products. Ask what they look when buying products. This will give you an idea of which features you need to look for when searching for products to promote.
14. Make sure you reach the maximum audiences possible by ensuring your website, blog, and emails are optimized for mobiles. If your audience can’t read your messages, they can’t buy.
15. Take time to learn about what makes great headlines call-to-actions, and lead-ins. Better headlines lead to more opens. Better lead-ins get people reading and better call-to-actions generate more sales.
16. If you’re doing a big promotion, and including bonus items, create a custom landing page for the offer. On this page, include the details of what people get not only from the product you are promoting but your bonuses as well.
17. Make use of all types of content to promote the products. Some people prefer reading, others would rather watch a video, and some may prefer to hear from you live. The more ways you reach out to your audience, the more sales you’ll make.
18. If you do not have email services, choose a reputed email service. There’s nothing more frustrating than spending days to creating a great email campaign only to have a large portion of your messages get blocked or filtered.
19. Make sure your website and lead are up to date and offer good information. The bigger you grow your list, the more exposure you get for your recommendations and suggestion.
20. Keep segmenting your list, so you can better match product offers to your subscribers. The closer the match, the bigger the sales.
21. Test higher-priced products with low-to-mid-range products to see, on average, how much your audience is willing to spend.
22. Don’t forget to promote complimentary products. For example, if you promote a training course on losing weight. In the next week or so, you could promote a more specific product that compliments weight loss.
23. Spice up your promotion by highlighting potential upsells and extras available, This gives your audience a heads-up that they will be presented with more than one offer. But do so in an exciting way.
24. And if you want to make your promotion even more visually appealing, why not ask the company if you can use their stunning product photos to showcase your offering? You might even be able to snag some persuasive sales points straight from their website to use in your own promotion!
25. Regularly check your affiliate links to make sure they are still working or not.
