Do you do affiliate marketing?
I guess answer for this question will be YES for every blogger. Every blogger do that, the only difference is their approach and products.
But what kind of posts you use for affiliate marketing. According to me based on the kind of posts structure affiliate posts can be divided into 5 types.
Image Credit: Idea go
1. Direct Post
In this type of affiliate marketing, you just choose the products and write a review or post about it. This looks simple to do but it is hard to write as you don’t have a base to work on.
What I mean by the base is you are not comparing the product with anything, so there is no benchmark to prove that your product is doing good. The message in this type of posts should be crisp and you should project good and bad points for your product.
This type of posts mostly suites for new breakthrough products in a niche, where nothing is there to compare.
Structure of these type of posts should at least contain:
- Introduction
- Usefulness/Working Description
- Positives
- Negatives
You can add other sections based on the product needs.
It will be more effective if you have used the product. If you have done that than you can share your personal experience in the post to give customer more confidence about the product.
2. Indirect Post
This is kind of opposite to Direct posts. You write posts about related topics and in between posts you mention your products. There is no detail description of the product.
You will end up creating a curiosity and leave a link for the customer to follow. Customer will learn details about the product from the parent site.
In these kind of posts it is very important to add a link at the right place, if the link is way too late or too early customer might not click on it. So the placement of link is most important.
These can also be used to point to direct posts. You can direct the customer to your direct posts where he can learn more about the product before going on to advertiser site. This can be a good way if you want to improve your conversion rate.
These posts can be useful if your advertiser offers cookies for some time, because it is very rare that a person will buy a product in a first go.
3. Comparison Post
These are comparison posts, you take 2-3 products and compare them on some grounds. Many users will like to choose between similar products and comparison is a wonderful way to help them.
While writing these posts it is important to choose products correctly. If there is a wide gap between products than it is not going to fetch much attention, as most of the customers will already will be aware of those.
Products should have narrow gap as this will keep customer interested, and if you can point minute gaps then they will trust you more as an expert on your niche.
Another thing is number of products, usually having 3-4 products for comparison is good. More than that can turn off the customers as usually people looks for comparison to make the final decisions and they have 2-3 products in mind.
One benefit of these type of posts is that you don’t have to prove which product is better, you can point the gaps and leave the decision on customers. This doesn’t mean that you won’t tell if a product is scoring more points in an area, it is just that you can avoid giving final judgement.
Other benefit is that you can be an affiliate for all products used in comparison.
4. Offer/Coupon Post
These are short and simple posts just promoting any offer or coupon provided by advertisers. Depending on your niche these can be useful.
Like I own one another site blogs4android.com, where I offer reviews, news and latest offers for android handsets. In this website my most common post type is Offer/Coupon posts, as users are looking to save some money on new handsets.
If there are many offers comes from advertisers than these posts can be good earning models.
There are one problem with these posts as they tend to be short is nature, which is not SEO friendly. So promotion of these posts need some efforts.
5. Others
You will say that I have added this just to complete my list of 5 kind of posts for affiliate marketing, but it’s not true. There are other kind of posts (actually these can be other than posts also).
These are just a method of doing affiliate marketing by other channels or offering helpful tips related to the affiliate product.
For example When I wrote a post for changing footer information for Elegant Themes, my intention was to help the other users. Along with that I am telling my users that I use this theme, which will create a trust for my Direct Post for Elegant Theme (If I will decide to write one).
Their can be other methods also like mentioned in my earlier post, you can change some visible places of your site to an affiliate link, this will give user an option to see what you are using and will give you a way to earn some money.
So how do you like these types and which one you use in your blog…?
I have several blogs, and occasionally I have used the indirect post method.
Another way to approach this is to just blog about anything you like, then after a while have a look at your stats and see what keyword searches people are arriving by. Then you can find products that relate strongly to these keywords and put affiliate links into the relevant posts.
Keyword research is really important to check which product is working for us, after all not all product works the same.
This is the second post I read on your site and again very useful tips. I had been including affiliate links in posts on several of my sites (health & relationships niches) but am now starting to go back and delete them. Reason being that anyone clicking those links, whether they buy or not, is likely to finish up on the vendor’s list when I’d like them to be on mine. What I propose doing is adding some related squeeze pages on my own site and linking to them. Do you have any thoughts on that? Since most of my niche sites (particularly in health) promote a range of products so a one size fits all “subscribe to my list” opt-in option doesn’t really seem to fit the bill. Hopefully as I read more on your site I may get some answers:)
Squeeze pages can be very good, I understand being them on the manufacture site but isn’t that’s the whole purpose of affiliate marketing..I am also going to some experiment with squeeze pages, will let you know how its come out.
I’m keeping my site completely income-free for the first while. Trying to encourage sharing and stuff. Once I’m getting enough traffic, I’ll try to monetize.
Thanks, This can one of the strategy to start the site, and a good one too. I am doing a case study on how to start your site and running some experiments here. Would love to hear your experiences..
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