3 Tools Every Affiliate Marketer Needs in Their Toolbox
Affiliate marketing—generating an income or commission
through the promotion and recommendation of products, services, and tools that
others are selling—can be an amazing addition to your passive income portfolio
and a wonderful way to round out your offerings, provide additional value to
your audience, and, of course, get paid in return.
Over the years, affiliate
marketing has helped me generate more than a million dollars online.
Affiliate marketing is a simple
concept to understand and it’s cool because you can get started right away.
But, it’s not easy to master and it takes time for it to become a consistent
and reliable income stream for your business.
When I started out online in
2008, affiliate marketing methods were more along the lines of finding products
with great commissions, usually through an affiliate network with a number of
different products to choose from. The next step was to buy advertisements
through ad services like Google Adwords to drive traffic through those
affiliate links.
When people make a purchase
after clicking on that advertisement, you could earn a commission, and I know a
number of people who have made millions using this method.
I’ve tried it myself, but I
quickly lost $500 because of poor product selection and advertising.
This kind of marketing is
called “push marketing,” where you are pushing out a message or offer to a
target audience in hopes of capturing their attention and finishing with some
sort of transaction.
My affiliate marketing methods
involve more of a “pull marketing” strategy, where instead of aggressively
reaching out to new people to drive sales, I’m instead including
recommendations and affiliate links within existing conversations and the
content that I already publish within my brand.
If you want to build a
long-term affiliate marketing strategy in your business, you must think about
“pull” strategies. I love these because they are less aggressive, part of a
natural conversation you’re already having with your audience, and are largely
based on the relationship and trust you’ve built with your audience.
Plus, when you recommend
something great, it can actually strengthen the relationship you already have
with your audience, because you’ve vetted and found something useful for them.
For example, half of my million
dollar affiliate earnings come directly from the products and tools I recommend
on my resource page, a helpful one-stop-shop that includes all of
the best tools and resources my audience can use.
Without much promotion, this
resource page is visited more than 100,000 times per month. You should
definitely have a resource page on your site, one where you could recommend your
favorite tools, books, products, classes—anything you know that will help your
audience.
Personally, I only include
items that I’ve used and have come to trust, and I recommend you do the same.
And
that’s the secret to successful long-term affiliate marketing: promoting and
recommending products that you know add value and help your audience achieve
their goals, relieve their pains, make their lives more convenient, fill in
knowledge gaps they have about a certain topic, etc.
Start with that, and the earnings
will become a byproduct of how well you serve.
There are a lot more affiliate
marketing-related topics coming up this month on SPI, but I wanted to share
three tools you can use to help you as you move forward with integrating
affiliate marketing into your business.
You don’t need each of these
tools, but perhaps one of them will be a major game-changer for you.
Pretty Link is WordPress plugin (the lite
version is free and all you need to get started), and it cleans up your longer
affiliate links so they become shorter, easier to share and much easier to
remember.
This is especially helpful if
you’re mentioning affiliate links within podcast episodes or YouTube videos, or
even in live situations on stage or while on a broadcast.
Plus, the plugin keeps track of
the number of clicks for each Pretty Link you create.
For example, I promote
LeadPages from time to time on my website. The affiliate link that is provided
to me from LeadPages, after signing up for their affiliate program, is:
There’s a lot going on here in
the link, and of course it would be silly for me to share it the way it is on a
podcast or YouTube video. Even including it as is within an email can be a
little off-putting for some, too.
Thanks to Pretty Link, I can
shorten and customize the URL so it’s easy to remember, share, and track:
So now, the link becomes:
https://www.affiliatemarketing.com/leadpages
I have more than 1,000 links
set up through Pretty Link.
Some affiliate links redirect
through several Pretty Link urls so that I can keep
track of where on my site certain links are
converting (or not).
For example, I have the main
LeadPages URL I shared with you above, but I also have:
https://www.affiliatemarketing.com/leadpages-rp
This is the link I include on
my resource page (hence: rp) so I can keep track of how clicks behave on that
particular page. It doesn’t matter if it’s harder to pronounce or type in,
because I never tell people to do that—this is the one they simply click on
when they are on that page.
The beauty of tracking on your
end is that if no one clicks on the links, you know that it’s not an offer you
need to keep, or perhaps you need to reframe it or incentivize people in a
different way.
Tool
#2 – Screenflow or Camtasia Studios
One of the best (and most
underutilized) affiliate marketing strategies is to tell people in your own
voice exactly what they’re going to get before they get it.
For physical products, it’s a
little easier to do. Just take a camera (your phone) and film yourself using
the product you’re promoting.
Unboxing videos on YouTube are
extremely popular, and more often than not, there’s some sort of agreement
between the person opening the box and the company who supplies that product.
It may be an affiliate deal, paid sponsorship, or a promotion. Sometimes the
company just gives that product to that person for free in exchange for the
review.
With software-based products
it’s a little more difficult to film a video, but using a tool like Screenflow (if you’re a Mac user) or Camtasia Studios (if you’re a PC user) will
help.
And yes, I do realize Camtasia
has a Mac version as well, but I prefer Screenflow over it.
Using these tools, you can
simply record whatever you’re looking at on your computer, along with your
voice. Whether it’s your full-desktop view, or just a particular window, you
can give people an insider look at programs, courses, and other things you use
online and recommend.
This significantly increases
the likelihood of someone clicking through your affiliate link, because like I
said, people like to see what they’re going to get before they get it.
Plus, as you walk them through
the product, they’re going to feel more comfortable knowing that you’ve used it
too, and also they’ll have an idea how to navigate it, so there are no
surprises.
This strategy is extremely
simple, but very powerful, and I hope to see more of you doing more videos in
the future.
Tool
#3 – Geni.us Links
Geni.us, formerly known as GeoRiot, is
a heavenly tool for anyone who is a part of the Amazon Associates Program
(a.k.a. their affiliate/referral program).
What Geni.us does is, well,
genius! You see, when you are an Amazon Associate, you can promote any product
on Amazon as an affiliate and earn a percentage of the total that that person
buys within a twenty-four hour period after clicking your link.
Yup. So if they buy that thing
you recommended, and a whole mess of other stuff, you get a commission on all
of it. But only if they live in the same country as you. If you’re an associate
in the U.S., then you can only generate an income from those who purchase
through your link who are also in the U.S.
People outside of the U.S.
click on your link are automatically redirected to their respective country’s
Amazon page, and you lose out on a potential commission.
But with Geni.us, that doesn’t
happen. A Genius Link will determine what country the click is from, and
redirect it through your affiliate link for that specific country.
Don’t think it’s a big deal?
Well, after using Geni.us for
over two months now, it’s reported that through all of the Amazon links I’ve
since shared, I have a lifetime reach of more than ninety-six countries!
You will have to sign up for
the associate programs in various countries to be able to earn a commission
from those countries, but it can all be done with the help of the Geni.us
dashboard. I’d recommend checking your google analytics to see which countries
are most popular in your audience, and then targeting those associate programs
first.
Here’s the country breakdown
for my site since working with Geni.us. Obviously, the U.S. has the most
clicks, but the other countries in total isn’t anything to shy away from:
What Tools Do You Use?
Do you have any tools for
affiliate marketing you’d specifically like to recommend? Share it below for
the rest of the community!
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