10 Affiliate Program Tips for your Blog

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I have built up a list of top 10 affiliate tips for using on your blog, which I believe will boost your performance, and will help develop high skills of working in correspondence of your readers needs. Proper affiliate marketing is fundamental when promoting a product to your readers.

1. Think your Readers

It is an ultimate rule when thinking your readers motivations and their goals. Think through their eyes and ears, what do they wish to get from your site? Do they need information? Did they come to buy something? It makes a big difference when using your affiliate links for the specific audience. But you might have both information and a product to sell, but you also have many articles which can be optimized for both issues separately. Got the point?

2. Honest recommendations

There is no reason for just injecting the links somewhere in the post, think deeply give honest and reliable reviews or recommendations for the products you promote. Become a reader for few minutes think what would they want? If they don’t need a certain product would they buy it? NO WAY if only 0.00001% which doesn’t make sense at all. There was time that I thought that I can sell any available product but I didn’t make even single bucks. Even though I have referred about 178 people they didn’t really new how and why they need it. Always try the product yourself, if you are unable to do this ask your vendor to give clear information about the product.

3. Link Quality Matters

Let me start with a question: have you ever been sent to the cheap, poorly designed web-page? You know those horrible pages with red sentences in the middle, where some worthless products are offered as they have been worth millions. So think now! Why would you want your readers to use those products right? Would they appreciate it? Always offer quality affiliate links to an authoritative, useful site.

4. Link Deep inside your Content

When I started to use clickbank I was happy that I’ve found many quality products, but I was missing something as I didn’t really got lots of readers clicking and buying them. Well it was like “alright income” but I still needed more to reach my goals. The simple rule here is again think of your readers, what is the page about? If for example it is about bags, you’ll definitely want to link to a bag product. Specific sentences work best when the link appears in a description of a product.

One of my articles like top 21 seo tools gives a clear example of useful affiliate linking.

5. Link Position Does Matter

What I was explaining yesterday to one of my fellow bloggers is that link positioning is a key when using PPC or affiliate links. For Adsense or Bidvertiser you might want to use images nearby, you might do the same with affiliate programs. Some other bright spots like: top right/left sidebar, inside important sentences, near comments etc… Think what you are most likely to click.

6. Work on Community Concept

One of the main factors is your traffic, anyone can tell you that traffic quality is important, but what is a community concept? Community concept introduced by TED( see my review here) is now one of the strongest factor to be considered even by huge companies/corporations. In the bloggers case it might be readers with whom you have built trust and good relations. Social networks where friends must be a main factor of networking, like facebook, stumbleupon, twitter etc… Friends are always happy to try new product when they trust your honest recommendations.

7. Be a Master in Revenue Combination

When speaking of affiliate programs this is not the only thing bloggers might benefit from. Start using multiple revenue streams like adsense, adbrite, together with your affiliate links. Some might say that those might hurt each other, can it? Honestly have never experienced such thing, the key here is that some readers are more likely to click your adsense ad rather than go for an affiliate link. Bloggers opinions are varied around this topic, still you should be very attentive to this factor, never over advertise your pages (posts).

8. Always check the Terms

Most affiliate programs have main terms of linking to their product or service. Usually there are several restricted keywords for each service you promote. I wonder why nobody is blogging about it? I have seen hundreds of blogs who never pay attention to this; actually I have noticed several affiliate program links with restricted anchor text even on Progrecious Blog. Most service/product providers don’t pay any referral payment from restricted anchor lead, some affiliates where even terminated from the programs. Always consider re-checking your affiliate anchor text if you are not sure about their legitimacy.

9. Track and Analyze

Almost every affiliate program has the option to track the clicks and leads. If you want to track aff links inside social networks, the bit.ly url shortener also provides such option. It is important to understand which products sell better, if you have many clicks and few sales, you might want to consider giving more info to your readers about the product/service.

10. Time Matching

Think of scheduling your newsletter and your e-mail subscription lists. When a reader gets your message, what is the time they read it? Is it evening or Morning? Think when are they checking their mailbox and what is the best time for them to read your message all the way through. Go through your analytics check the country from which you receive the largest number of readers. Also consider the holydays and weekends every day works differently most offers don’t perform on holidays, but might perform better in the previous days. Exact time matching works great when promoting on social networks, test when your links get clicked the most. Do the checking every month or two.

Always keep you goals active and in progress, never surrender; remember you need time to develop your site, be patient and you will achieve your goals.