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If you have reached the point in your affiliate marketing where your commissions are flatlining, you definitely aren’t alone.
There is a well-known statistic that leaves even the most optimistic marketer second-guessing their career option.
Just 10{57b8cc37fd24bce1cf64c8b05d9407ce9171516056c1f5e762677747187a0de4} of affiliates are responsible for 90{57b8cc37fd24bce1cf64c8b05d9407ce9171516056c1f5e762677747187a0de4} of sales.
Before that number sets off any alarm bells, read on. In this post, you will discover 12 fantastic new affiliate marketing tips for 2021 that you probably haven’t tried before.
So let’s get started and help you get those affiliate commissions growing again.
Avoid The One-Link Strategy
When it comes to affiliate marketing, 2021-style, there is definitely one tactic that isn’t going to work.
Do not write a blog post and add a single affiliate link to it.
There was a time when traffic was cheap. It was simple for marketers to push out hundreds of blog posts that had one or two affiliate links in them and make a solid return in commissions.
However, there are a couple of reasons why that doesn’t work anymore.
Firstly, people scan content now far more than they used to. Grabbing the attention of your audience requires effort, and if you drop a single affiliate link in that post, it is likely to get missed.
Secondly, traffic is at a premium. If you get a click to a social media post, a blog article, or an email, you need to work really hard to convert that person into a buyer.
And don’t forget. You are competing with hundreds of other affiliates for that purchase.
What To Do Instead
Spend time re-working articles and making those affiliate links stand out. Use language that will entice the reader to take action, and don’t be afraid to be obvious about what you want them to do.
If you want them to click a link to check out the latest price of a product, tell them exactly that in those very words.
Make Affiliate Marketing Part Of Your Funnel
Traditionally, affiliate marketing has been front-end. In other words, you earn your affiliate commission from recommendations you make from blog posts or posts on social media.
However, by doing this, you are only tapping into cold traffic. What about promoting your affiliate products to your most loyal followers?
Selling To a “Warm” Audience
The most obvious option is your email list, and most affiliate marketers are already promoting their products to their email list.
If you aren’t, spend time looking into the best affiliate programs for beginners to familiarize yourself. But if you take the time to review your entire marketing funnel, you can really boost your affiliate income.
Here are some ideas:
- Promote your top affiliate product as part of your lead magnet
- Include a “must-have” affiliate product as a recommendation in a free webinar
- If you sell information products, include a list of personal recommendations
- Include recommended affiliate products in your after-sales support
Focus On Quality Over Quantity
40{57b8cc37fd24bce1cf64c8b05d9407ce9171516056c1f5e762677747187a0de4} of businesses now list affiliate marketing as their biggest marketing channel. As more companies become clued-up to the benefits of using affiliates to promote their products, affiliate networks have been flooded with hundreds of programs for marketers to select from.
With such a huge range of affiliate programs available, and some boasting record-breaking EPCs (earnings per click), it’s tempting for even the most established affiliate marketer to sign up for a new program to get their share of the prize.
However, if you want to beat the competition in 2021, start thinking about quality instead of quantity.
With so many opportunities available, you can afford to be highly selective about the programs you sign up for. Take the time to research the program first.
A handful of fantastic affiliate programs will bring you far greater revenue than signing up for every opportunity that falls your way, especially in 2021.
Spend Time Building Strong Relationships
The benefit of going for quality over quantity when it comes to your preferred affiliate program is that you can take the time to build up a relationship with that business.
As we move into 2021 and beyond, closer relationships between affiliates and businesses will become ever-more important.
Businesses are looking for affiliates they can trust. Affiliates are looking for businesses who can offer them a great return for the time and effort they put into promoting that business.
Getting to know the affiliate manager first hand is one of the best ways you can do that.
Negotiating Better Rates
One of the big benefits of getting to know your affiliate manager on a first-name basis is that you are more likely to pick up better rates.
This is an affiliate marketing tip that many beginners aren’t aware of. Many established affiliate programs offer far more competitive commissions to those affiliates who have proved themselves.
Once you are able to demonstrate that you can convert traffic consistently each month, talk to your affiliate manager about whether you can progress to a better commission rate.
How To Negotiate a Better Rate
- Showcase your monthly traffic growth on your website
- Demonstrate a month-by-month rise in your email list (with good click-through rates)
- Share with your affiliate manager the ideas you have about future promotions
Plan a Professional Launch
Gone are the days where you drop an affiliate link onto a blog post and watch it earn you a passive income. In today’s competitive world, your affiliate marketing needs to be more strategic than that.
A carefully planned product launch for your affiliate promotion can bring huge returns when you get it right.
A launch is all about having a full end-to-end promotion, including a deadline, and ideally offering an exclusive bonus or discount at the same time.
Here are some steps to include in your launch:
- Decide on a launch date
- Look for a unique hook or angle for your promotion
- Speak to your affiliate manager and ask about any exclusive bonuses you can offer as part of your launch
- Prepare your promotional copy
- Start putting out some early promotional material on social media
- Email your audience about your upcoming promotion
- On the actual launch day, run several communications out to your audience to let them know about the launch and remind them of the deadline
- Give your audience one final warning before the offer ends
- Send out one final communication after the offer is closed and let your audience know when you’ll be running your next promotion
Track And Audit Your Links
Metrics are your friends. For any serious affiliate marketing looking to make their mark in 2021, it is imperative you take advantage of the vast choice of tracking tools out there.
At a minimum, you need to track where traffic is coming from, so you can see which of your promotions are successful.
But it’s also worth getting to know more about advanced marketing metrics such as tracking conversions. If you can work out the ROI of each of your marketing efforts, it will go a long way into helping you improve your next promotion.
Become a Specialist
If you want to have an advantage over other affiliate marketers in 2021, one of the best affiliate marketing tips you can adopt is to become a top expert in the field.
Knowledge in a specialist area can really help sell a product, especially when promoting high-ticket programs or goods.
The most lucrative offers tend to have a huge number of affiliates doing big promotions at the same time as you.
That means that whatever blog post, advertisement, or email you put out to your audience, has to be more informative, more detailed, and more engaging than what anyone else is doing.
Swim Against The Tide
Travel is an obvious affiliate promotion to avoid in 2021, as the pandemic continues to do its damage around the globe. Or is it?
In reality, running affiliate promotions in a niche that many others consider unfashionable might be a great strategy to adopt in 2021.
The rationale is simple. The world is changing rapidly. The global economy is uncertain. If you pick a niche on a downturn and spend months building up an audience in that niche, you may get richly rewarded the next time that industry is on the up.
And when that industry does start to pick up, you might find yourself with very little competition and an audience ready-and-waiting to hit the buy button.
This is the perfect option for those looking for a more long-term affiliate plan.
Create Your Own Bonus
If you are serious about making a success of affiliate marketing, then you need to go that little bit further with your promotion than anyone else.
That’s the reality in 2021.
One of the easiest and most effective ways of doing that is to create your own bonus. This works best if you are promoting a product that really complements your brand and is something you can add value to.
If you are promoting an information product, create a bonus information product, such as a webinar, eBook, or training series.
If you are promoting a tool, see if you can find a complementary tool and offer it at a discount to your audience as a bonus.
If you are promoting a physical product, find a low-cost product that you can also ship to the customer. As long as that product is less than your affiliate commission, it is still a profitable option for you.
Nothing Is More Powerful Than Video
Video has become the default medium for many top affiliate marketers, and with that in mind, 2021 is the time when you really need to incorporate video promotions into your marketing material.
Video is becoming ubiquitous on the internet, and that’s one of the reasons it has become such a powerful marketing tool.
People are becoming more comfortable with the idea of seeing faces and listening to what people have to say.
And when you chat on video, your audience doesn’t have their guard up against advertisements and promotions in the same way they do with social media feeds and blog posts.
Plus, it’s a great way to build up a relationship with your audience. A long term relationship will help you make repeat affiliate sales to that same audience.
If you haven’t tried video before, test the waters with a small 5-minute video that you can publish on YouTube.
But remember – always use the appropriate affiliate disclaimers in your content, even when you are speaking on camera.
Add Big Promotional Days Into Your Calendar
Since 2005, Black Friday has been the busiest shopping day of the year. People are ready and waiting, credit card in hand, to find that deal and snap it up.
There is no buyer as “hot” as a Black Friday buyer, and as an affiliate marketer, it’s essential to mark that day in your calendar and make sure it coincides with a great offer you can put in front of your audience.
But Black Friday is not the only big spending day of the year. And if you are planning your 2021 marketing campaign, here are other dates you might want to add that you may not have considered in previous years:
- Earth Day (22nd April) – great for the environmentally-conscious audience
- Back to school (end of August) – perfect for those in the parenting niche
- Cyber Monday (the first Monday after Thanksgiving) – this is becoming just as popular as Black Friday
- Super Saturday (the last Saturday before Christmas) – the final chance to catch those last-minute Christmas gift buyers
Turn These Affiliate Marketing Tips Into Your 2021 Action Plan
If you take away just one of the many affiliate marketing tips from this post, make it this one. To succeed in affiliate marketing in 2021, you need to go above and beyond the competition. In other words, you really need to make a commitment to giving it 100{57b8cc37fd24bce1cf64c8b05d9407ce9171516056c1f5e762677747187a0de4}.
Start the year with the mindset that your promotions are going to be so enticing and unique that your audience would be crazy to miss out on the offer.
Familiarise yourself with the tools and techniques you need to make these twelve tips work for you. And put them into action before your competitors do.
Have you tried a new affiliate strategy in your business recently? Did it work? Tell us in the comments below.