Affiliate Marketing is big business. There are many players competing for the attention and adoration of a finite number of users, and while there is no sure-fire way to becoming a successful affiliate marketer, you can certainly help your chances by following a few simple pointers.
While your primary objective as an Affiliate Marketer is to drive sales, registrations or leads; you need to understand that this isn’t possible without a captive and trusting audience. Trust isn’t built overnight, it can take months of hard work to build even a small captive audience.
What’s more, trust isn’t a one-dimensional concept. Neil Patel breaks it down into two core components: security and reputation.
Website security has certainly come to the fore over the last few years, with both large and small websites under constant consumer scrutiny. The first step is to get an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate is a file which installed on a secure web server identifying a website.
The certificate identifies and vouches for the authenticity of the company or website, so users know the site that they’re browsing is safe and trustworthy. Take a look at our certificate now. To do so, head to the address bar and click on the padlock to the left of the address. This will give you all of the associated information with the website’s certificate.
There are a number of different organisations that can provide these certificates at a nominal cost. Check out the likes of DigiCert, RapidSSL, Thawte and more.
Reputation
Reputation is arguably the more difficult aspect to deal with. You can be up and running with your security certificate in relatively little time. However, you’re in for a longer slog before you can truly claim to have a captive and trusting audience.
There are several ways you can build trust. Start with the basics: make sure your content is of the highest quality, your website has been designed by someone who knows what they’re doing as well as having a privacy policy.
Yes, affiliate marketing is all about sales and conversions. However, you’re doomed to fail if this is all your website tries to achieve. Ensure that your site and its content solves problems for users and provides unique insights as well as advice tailored to your particular niche. Do this consistently and the rest will fall in place over time.
Other things you can do to help build trust is linking to any positive mentions of your website/services/products in the press. You can dedicate a section of your homepage to this. You can also include things like consumer testimonials as well as opening posts up for comments and responding to users’ questions.
Remember, this isn’t an overnight process. It takes time and it takes effort. With Affiliate Marketing, you get out what you put in. So make the effort to nurture your audience and provide them with engaging content.
Understand the products/services you’re recommending
This is an important one. You can’t offer purchase advise to anyone if you do not understand the products or services that you’re recommending. This is especially true when it comes to betting and online casino games.
This also speaks to sticking to a niche. If soccer betting is what you consider yourself an expert in, don’t try to come across as an authority on horse racing or casino games. You will get found out relatively quickly.
There’s no harm in speaking broadly about products or services that you’re not 100% sure on. For example, you can speak about Spina Zonke’s maximum payouts or minimum bets. However, if you start to speak about RTP and trying to explain features of games you haven’t spent time playing, you’ll quickly come across as an layman attempting to impart “expert” advice.
Get your ad to content ratio right
Yes, you want to serve as many ads as possible but you don’t want your content to be secondary to your affiliate banners. There are plenty of websites out there who do not get this mix right, stuffing as many ads as they possibly can into the users’ viewport.
This looks spammy and untrustworthy. It also means that your site’s content isn’t really designed to solve the problems or answer the questions that visitors are are coming to your site to find. If this is the case, the user will bounce and will not consider your site in future.
Box smart when it comes to your ads. Use a mix of banners, anchor text links and buttons. Make sure ads and affiliate links integrate seamlessly into your website’s look and feel and nest them within your content with care.
Take a look at the below example from blogpros. There’s more space dedicated to adverts than there is for content.
Contrast this with the Hollywoodbets Blog. There is a single advert at the top of the homepage with a few more banners as you scroll down the page. It doesn’t detract from the content but is still prominently displayed above the fold.
Get this mix right and you should find users are spending a couple of minutes on each of your pages with your affiliate links and banners still driving a decent amount of clicks and conversions. Get this mix wrong and you will find users spending a couple of seconds on each page, an unusually high bounce rate with few to no clicks and conversions.
