What is the best affiliate marketing strategy? This is difficult to answer because it will be different for everyone. Some people will like blogging, but for others that’s incredibly tedious and too slow. Others will want to run paid marketing and get traction more quickly with paid marketing and a high ticket sales funnel.
But for many this is out of their reach financially. To earn the largest commissions online requires investment in a high ticket affiliate marketing product suite. But this gives you more opportunity for faster growth with an affiliate business through using paid marketing. Cheaper routes are more labour intensive and take longer. Blogging, or any form of organic traffic generation can take time. If you’re stuck in a job most of your working week, this will eat out of your remaining leisure time and not suit everyone.
Best Affiliate Marketing Strategy
There’s many affiliate marketing strategies you can use and ultimately your choice of strategy depends on you and how you want to work online. Here’s 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Social media, organic marketing through blogging or v’logging (video blogging) and list building are all good strategies when used right. With organic traffic generation you’ll have to keep at it for some considerable time to get the same results you might expect in a fraction of the time with paid marketing. But results aren’t even guaranteed with affiliate marketing; you’re in business for yourself! No sales equals no commissions! That’s pretty tough for beginner affiliates and something like 95% of newbie affiliates will drop out of affiliate marketing. See affiliate marketing failure rate.
To make your affiliate business work, you need to maintain the necessary motivation and this is key. So whatever your strategy for doing affiliate marketing, you’ll need a long term focus and to maintain the necessary motivation needed to succeed. This is tough when nothing seems to work, but gets much easier when you have some tangible results to work from and egg you on!
Best Affiliate Marketing Strategy – One Which Motivates And Inspires You
If you are heavily motivated by the work you do, no amount of disappointment will stop you from moving forwards! This, I believe is a major key to success with affiliate marketing. Not everyone keeps it up and many drop out before they see consistent results. They lose faith in what they are doing, and stop believing it is possible. So, rather than look at the method with which you do affiliate marketing, it’s wise to look deeper to your motivation levels and driving reason of your “why?”. With a big enough “why?”, you’ll push past your failures and keep going far longer than if you begin an affiliate business on a whim to just simply “give it a go”!
Start With Why is a great book on this topic written by Simon Sinek. He suggests in his book that it is the “why” which motivates anyone to achieve something noteworthy. Without a strong “why” you won’t push yourself to grow beyond the problems inherent in a large achievement.
Some Affiliate Marketing Strategies
Here’s a few basic affiliate marketing strategies you can use as an affiliate marketer:
- Blogging
- Video blogging
- Organic marketing – Search Engine Optimisation
- Email marketing
- Paid marketing – YouTube, Adwords, Bing, Facebook etc.
Blogging and organic video marketing are slow strategies which can gain traction over time. Paid marketing is much faster and you can build an email list with paid marketing into the thousands within a few weeks of days depending on your marketing budget. But spending a lot on marketing doesn’t guarantee you sales, and you will need to test and measure your marketing efforts before being able to scale up quickly.
Otherwise you can get into trouble quite quickly! Google will eat up your budget very quickly if you’re not careful with it. Spending a lot of money on paid marketing isn’t necessarily for the reckless though. If you’re careful, you can learn which adverts work with only a tiny budget. But if you don’t have money which you’re prepared to invest/spend (and lose) while learning which tactics work, it might not be for you.
Plus with paid marketing you’ll need a high ticket product range. Otherwise it’s much harder to be profitable. Recurring revenue affiliate programs can help too so they are worth considering.
Choose A Strategy Which Works For You
It’s easy to get caught up in the many affiliate marketing strategies, and procrastinate about which to use. Some people have more money and less time, so they should use paid marketing. Others have more time and less money so generally speak they would probably suit content creation better, or a combination of the two.
When I started affiliate marketing I use cheaper methods like blogging and video creation. Only when I saw some regular income from my affiliate business did I start using paid marketing. But that’s not right for everyone and you can grow an income online far quicker if you use paid marketing up front. If you’re unsure of the different affiliate marketing business models, this is a good place to start your research. Or get an affiliate marketing mentor to help guide you and hold you accountable.
If you’re serious about creating an income with affiliate marketing, your mindset is the most important thing to work on. An affiliate with a “I’ll give it a try” mentality is much more likely to quit than someone with a “whatever it takes” attitude. See also affiliate psychology. This is perhaps much more important than your strategy…