Are you curious to know how to increase affiliate sales from your website? Do you know why few bloggers make thousands of dollars in affiliate commissions while others find it difficult to make even one sale?
Hands down, affiliate marketing is the best way to make money online. It helps you earn passive income which means you can make money even while you sleep. But here’s the thing: it’s not at all easy to increase affiliate sales.
If you’re struggling to boost your affiliate product sales, this post is for you where we’ll discuss about some of the most effective ways to start increasing affiliate sales quickly.
Let’s get into the details without much ado.
Top 5 Ways to Boost Your Website Affiliate Sales In 2018 And Beyond
#1. Educate, don’t sell
Educating your audience is the most effective to build long term relationship and make sales from your website. Unfortunately most people send sales pitches as soon as they start building an email list. While it may work for few industry but it doesn’t work in all industries.
If you’re wondering about how you can educate your website audience into a sale, here are few most effective tips for you.
Offer expert advice:
One of the reasons to start a blog is you can use your content to educate your audience easily. Instead of creating generic content, offer expert advice through your website.
Remember, people don’t buy from strangers. That’s why it’s so important for you to become a go-to guy in your industry. If people perceive you as an expert in your field, it’s so easy to convert your audience into customers because people trust influencers and prefer to buy.
That being said, even if you’re just starting out, you can achieve expert status through your content (be it through podcasts, videos or articles). Make sure to spend as much time as you can to create timeless content that actually helps your audience.
Learn from competitors:
Competitor research is one of the most effective ways to learn how to sell more from your websites. Observe how your competitors are educating their audience with their content (be it videos, podcasts or articles) and also notice how they are using their content to sell more.
You never know what new tactics or insights you gain by carefully scrutinizing your competitor websites, so make sure to spend time in researching your competitors.
Here are some of the ways to do competitor research to increase affiliate sales from your site easily.
- Use tools like Buzzsumo to find out the top performing content of your competitors and see if you can create content on the similar lines by making your content 10 times better.
- You should also get access to premium SEO tools like SEMrush to find your competitors top performing keywords, content ideas, backlink sources and so on to increase your organic traffic as search traffic directly affects your overall affiliate sales.
- Find out your competitors traffic generating and money making pages. You can read their income reports (if any), closely watch out for the product pages that they often promote through their site and email lists to see if you can also monetize your site with the similar products or services.
#2. Provide “extra” benefits
Why should someone buy from you instead of your competitors?
If you can answer that question, you can make a ton of affiliate sales from your website. Most people don’t provide “enough reasons” to buy from them and that’s a big mistake.
If you’re just starting out as an affiliate, no one actually trusts you and they always think twice before they open their wallets to purchase something from you. That’s the reason why you should focus on improving your “trust factor” or work on developing your social proof.
Make sure to provide exclusive benefits to those who buy products using your affiliate referral links. The best example I can discuss is, I promote Bluehost through my website and my Bluehost sales are pretty good even though I don’t promote or talk about it aggressively on my blog.
Do you know the reason behind Bluehost sales although I don’t promote it hard? The reason is simple: I provide “extra discounts” to those who buy using my affiliate link.
Bluehost usually costs $4 per month (basic plan) but I offer it for $3 per month (we’ve tied up with Bluehost to be able to offer that extra discount) and that’s the reason why people buy using my affiliate link instead of someone else.
The bottomline is, if you can provide extra discounts, additional benefits or giveaway something for free when someone buys using your affiliate links, most people would be glad to buy from you even if you’re not an expert!
#3. Take advantage of “special days”
The holiday season is the most profitable in sales for the marketing industry in the United States, if you are a business owner or an affiliate marketer, you shouldn’t ignore holiday season.
Here’s what I mean by special days;
- Holiday season
- Black Friday
- Cyber Monday
- New year
- Christmas season and so on
During the holiday season, usually affiliate product creators such as hosting companies, SEO tool developers etc offer whopping discounts to attract new customers and you’ll usually get discounts up to 90% or even more.
That’s when you can easily start increasing affiliate sales from your website by promoting all the affiliate products aggressively. Here are few things you can do to increase your sales.
- Make sure to prepare for the holiday season well in advance and write product reviews along with the deals and discounts (and mention how much one can save during the holiday season).
- Start building links and optimizing your pages that you create exclusively for special days like black Friday and cyber Monday so you can start generating more search traffic to those pages when the deals actually go live.
- Use your email list to your advantage and be active to promote all the products along with the discounts.
- Also plan for the last minute rush as most people purchase last minute deals and persuade them to take action by using call to actions like “last minute deals”, “offer ends within 2 hours” and so on.
#4. Email list can be your weapon
Observe any successful affiliate marketer, majority of his sales come from their email list.
If you’re ignoring email marketing, you’re losing a lot of money on the table. Here are two shocking facts about email marketing.
- Email marketing spending in the United States would grow from 2.07 billion U.S. dollars in 2014 to 3.07 billion U.S. dollars in 2019. (Statista)
- Email has a median ROI of 122% – over 4x higher than other marketing formats including social media, direct mail, and paid search. (DMA and Demand Metric)
Here’s the email marketing ROI (per $1 spent).
So if you want to increase affiliate sales in 2018, start building and growing your email list. Here are few simple yet most effective tips to build and grow a high quality email list to increase affiliate sales in 2018 and beyond.
- Provide freebies such as eBooks, plugins, tools, cheat sheets, videos or anything that helps your audience to solve their problems. Just don’t offer a freebie for the sake of building list, do it to actually help your audience. Your freebies should be so good that your audience are willing to pay money for it.
- Start writing guest posts for others. Whether you know it or not, guest blogging is still the most effective way to build a high quality email list. The people who visit your site after reading your guest posts are more tend to listen to you or buy stuff from you, so make sure to spend quality time to write guest posts for top sites in your industry.
- Start conducting giveaways. If you’re just starting out and looking for ways to quickly grow your email list, giveaways work like a charm. Just make sure to provide related products or tools that match with your target audience instead of attracting freebie seekers.
- You can offer Facebook signups to start collecting emails easily and also use your email signature to provide a link to the email list building landing page to start growing your email list.
#5. Give, give, give, ask
I’ve been earning money from affiliate marketing for over 10 years now and I want you to know a less known secret to make more commission from affiliate product sales.
Give, give, give and then ask.
Here’s what most affiliates do: they sell from day 1. They don’t provide any value to their audience, email subscribers or website visitors. Their focus will be mostly on generating sales instead of offering something for their audience and that’s the reason why majority of the people struggle with sales.
If you want to increase affiliate sales, give first. Give more before you ask for a sale.
Here are few of the most effective ways you can give and provide more value to your website audience before you ask for a sale.
- Think like a go-giver, not a go-getter. Yes, if you want to make a ton of sales online, you need to hustle like anything and think like a go-getter but the successful affiliate marketers reverse engineer everything by focusing on giving first, asking for the sale later.
- Focus on building trust and strong rapport with your audience. The best way to do that is to focus on building an email list and send as many valuable newsletters as possible without promoting anything. Instead of providing affiliate links directly from your email list, you can redirect your subscribers to your landing pages where you can actually ask for the sale.
- One of the most effective ways to increasing your affiliate sales from your website is to get more referrals. You can ask your email subscribers or those people who already bought something from you to share your stuff to their friends or with their network. You can provide freebies or offer exclusive offers to your referrals in order to persuade them to refer you over your competitors.
Above all, make it extremely easy to buy stuff from you. Don’t let your website visitors to go through a lot of steps to be able to buy products using your affiliate referral links. Make sure to include an affiliate disclosure to instantly build trust with your audience.
Final thoughts about increasing affiliate sales from your website
Showcasing social proof, educating your audience about the products you promote, adding value before you start selling, building an email list, using special days such as holidays to your advantage – all these things work like a charm to increase your affiliate sales.
Just focus on implementing one strategy at a time and you’ll see better results in the long run. Don’t forget that affiliate marketing is all about long term, so don’t look for shortcuts.
Do you’ve any questions for me? Did you find this post useful in increasing affiliate sales? Share your thoughts in the comments below.