25 Affiliate Best Practices
- Always be selective when choosing 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.
- When promoting products, don’t focus on the price of the product but the benefits buyers will receive. If there is a unique offer or discount price, that’s a bonus.
- 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 your audience.
- When promoting affiliate links, ensure your posts or emails offer plenty of value. It should be able to stand alone, whether or not you include a promotion.
- Don’t promote without a plan. Start with the goal of your campaign, then search for right product to promote. Randomly promoting products can lead to low commissions and worse, broken trust with your audience.
- 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.
- Spend time building relationships with your subscribers. People who feel connected with you are more likely to trust your word and buy based on your recommendations.
- Look for programs that offer a good commission, 25% or better if possible. Those offering low commissions may not generate enough commission for your effort.
- When searching for products or services 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.
- Track your opens, clicks and buy statistics to see which product sell well, which types of promotional material generate the most sales, which headlines get the most opens and so forth.
- Look for businesses who offer affiliates pre-made content to help you promote their products. You can often find emails, images blog posts, list of benefits, sales angle suggestions and more from companies.
- If products from a particular company is popular with your audience, but the company’s affiliate center is lacking, contact them to see if they could provide you with some pre-written material.
- Ask your audience what their favorite companies, products or types of products are. Ask what they look for when buying products. This will give you an idea of which features you need to look for when searching for products to promote.
- Make sure you reach the maximum number of people possible by ensuring your website and emails are optimized for mobile devices. If your audience cannot read your messages, they cannot buy.
- Take time to learn about what makes great headlines, lead-ins and call-to-actions. Better headlines lead to more opens. Better lead-ins get people reading and better call-to-actions generate more sales.
- 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.
- Make use of all types of content to promote the products. Some people prefer reading, others would rather watch a video, some may prefer to hear from you live. The more ways you reach out to your audience, the more sales you’ll make.
- If you don’t already have one, choose a reputable email service. There’s nothing more frustrating than spending days creating a great email campaign only to have a big portion of your messages get blocked or filtered.
- Make sure your website and lead magnets are up to par and offer excellent information. The bigger you grow your list, the more exposure you get for your recommendations.
- Segment your list so you can better match product offers to subscribers. The closer the match, the bigger the sales.
- Test higher priced products with low-to-mid-range products to see, on average, how much your audience is willing to spend.
- Don’t forget to promote complimentary products. For example, if you promote a training course on losing weight. The next week or so, you could promote a more specific product that compliments weight loss.
- When promoting a special offer, mention any upsells available. This gives your audience a heads up that they will be presented with more than one offer. …but do so in an excited way.
- Ask companies if you can use their product photos in your promotions for the product. They will usually allow it and may also let you pull a few points from their sales pages to use in your promotions.
- Regularly check your affiliate links to make sure they are still working.
