6 Advanced Affiliate Marketing Strategies to Try

You’ve poured a ton of time into creating a blog. You are regularly posting content, so you’re starting to build up an audience.

At some point, you’ll probably want to monetize it, right? Why not get all that hard work to pay off?

So, you dive into affiliate marketing, which has a lot of earning potential. A study from VigLink (now Sovrn) shows that affiliate marketing is the biggest revenue generator for publishers after Google AdSense.

Once you’ve started with affiliate marketing, you can gain more revenue from using more advanced affiliate methods.

What is Advanced Affiliate Marketing?Before we get into advanced affiliate marketing, here’s a quick refresher on how affiliate marketing works.

Affiliate marketing is an effective way for anyone with a blog or social media following to earn money. Basically, it’s commission-based sales. You promote a product to your followers, and if they purchase through your affiliate link, you get a cut of the profits.

Many affiliate marketers use networks like Amazon Associates or ClickBank to find products they can promote. Since these networks have a wide variety of products available, it’s pretty easy to find things your audience might like.A lot of people think of affiliate marketing as a way to make easy, passive income. That is only partially true.

Sure, you can make some money by just slapping a few links on your website, but if you really want to profit from affiliate marketing, you’ll have to put some thought and strategy into it.

So “advanced affiliate marketing” could be defined as using sophisticated strategies to earn more from your affiliate marketing.

What does this mean in practice?

It could mean finding the best niche to promote, choosing products your audience will like, and finding effective ways to promote them, among other things.

Below, I’ll explain how you can use advanced affiliate marketing to earn more money from your online content.

6 Ways to Incorporate Advanced Affiliate Marketing Into Your Business and Increase Revenue

So, you’ve already got an affiliate marketing site built but are looking to take your site to the next level? Here are six advanced affiliate marketing strategies to try.

Tailor Your Products to Your Audience

This one is super important: Make sure you’re promoting things your audience wants.

This can be more complicated than you might think.

Choosing great products to promote is about more than just picking categories that are generally aligned with your blog. It’s about understanding your audience and their psychology.

For example, you might assume that a new high-tech baby stroller would be an excellent product to promote since you have a parenting blog. But maybe you’ve drawn in a lot of price-conscious readers with your posts about meal planning, coupons, and budgeting.

If you promote a product that’s out of most of your readers’ price range, they won’t buy. More importantly, you could end up looking inauthentic and too salesy, which will turn people off and hurt your brand.

When it comes to understanding your readers, data and analytics are your friends. Use them wisely.

If you don’t already know who’s reading your blog, you should take steps to find out. Software like Quantcast can show you this data or use the Demographics and Interests feature in Google Analytics.

Be Transparent With Your Affiliate Efforts

If you want to make money with advanced affiliate marketing, you have to be transparent.

You should let your readers know when you’re using affiliate links for a few reasons. First, it can help you stay on top of regulation and avoid any potential legal issues.

Second, it helps you build and keep your readers’ trust. If your audience suddenly “finds out” they’re being marketed to when they didn’t realize it, they’ll get upset, and you’ll lose your following — meaning you’ll be making zero money from your affiliate program.

A third reason you should be transparent about affiliate links is that it makes your site look legitimate and less spammy, which is essential when trying to avoid search engine penalties.

Don’t forget that Google penalizes “thin affiliate pages,” so along with being transparent; you should also make sure your affiliate links are integrated into interesting and valuable content.

Choose Great Products in a Profitable Niche

Maybe you’re thinking of building out new content based on affiliate products. If that’s the case, you’ll want to make sure to choose a niche that can make you money.

If your market is receptive to high-value products, that’s a good place to start. Since you’re earning a commission, selling something more valuable will make you more.

Of course, a low-value product can also be interesting if it’s super desirable, and you manage to sell a lot of it.

I’ve already covered the basics, including choosing a profitable affiliate marketing niche in a previous post. One of the tips I gave was to use Google’s Keyword Planner to identify in-demand keywords (and, therefore, possibly valuable products that are worth spending the money to advertise).

Another tip is to look for products and categories that are trending right now. If something goes viral, there’s no better time to promote it with an affiliate link or product review.

To check if a product is currently hot, you can use BuzzSumo and Google Trends.

Put Affiliate Links Where the Most Traffic is

You don’t always have to create new content to make more money from affiliate links..

Another advanced affiliate marketing strategy that’s super easy to implement is going through your existing content to see which of your pages are currently getting the most traffic. You can do this using Google Analytics..

Once you’ve identified a few high-performing pages, add affiliate links to them..

You can also promote individual pages using paid social ads or Google AdWords. By driving more traffic to those pages, you’ll be driving more clicks toward your affiliate links..

Be strategic about this, though. Try to choose pages that are already doing reasonably well and making affiliate sales, so you don’t waste money trying to promote underperforming content. .

A/B Test Your Affiliate Links and Banners

A/B testing is a crucial technique for any online marketer, and it can also help you optimize your affiliate marketing campaigns.

Take two different versions of an ad, landing page, or other marketing asset and see which one performs better. In the case of affiliate marketing, there are a few different ways you could use A/B testing.

If you’re using affiliate links, you could test the links to see how they perform in various positions on the page. For example, links near the top of an article might be more visible, and therefore get more clicks

If you have affiliate banners, you should A/B test them the same way you would any other ad to help overcome banner blindness.

Various ad positions and colors may perform more differently than you might expect since color can have a surprising impact on conversion rates.