Everything is clear with the very concept of “content”, but affiliate marketing is a method of making money on the Internet, in which a person (or a “partner”) advertises a certain product, service, website or brand of the “seller” and receives deductions for each successful sale.

That is, three parties are involved in this whole story:

Manufacturer (seller) – the person or brand that owns the advertised product.
Partner – a person who encourages others to buy a manufacturer’s product. Typically, this role is played by bloggers, Instagram influencers,as well as webmasters or affiliate marketers.
Customer – a person who buys the product promoted by the partner (you know what we mean).

Types of content for affiliate marketing

We are sure you have heard more than once that quality content is the key to success. This may sound like a cliché, but it’s true nonetheless. First, engaging content is the best way to win reader loyalty and drive traffic to your site. Second, reputation is of the utmost importance, so no good salesperson will want to be associated with something of low quality or problematic.

Once you have figured out the importance of quality, let us talk about the types of content that are best suited for affiliate marketing.

Read more: How to make money from the site: 8 cool ideas

Email newsletters

One of the cheapest and fastest-paying business tools. An excellent way of communicating with the audience and, as a result, organizing repeat sales. BUT for email newsletters to really work, you must have customers who voluntarily agreed to receive them.

A question arises: how can you collect a base of emails? There are several nice ways.

Landing page

Have you ever come across sites that “spoke to you” directly? These were landing pages – individual web pages focusing on a specific product or service. Of course, preparing them is a little more difficult than making regular registration forms or pop-ups. But the result is worth the effort: landing pages have one of the highest conversion rates – around 2-7%. This is because landing pages are not full of unnecessary links, buttons or sections and therefore keep the target audience completely focused on the advertising offer.

Blog

Nowadays almost everyone has a blog: from top stars to local pet stores. What at the dawn of its existence was perceived as writing in personal diaries has now become a powerful marketing tool.

A blog is a great way to build trust with your audience and, as a result, make money from advertising affiliate products. When people trust your experience, knowledge and opinion, they are more likely to follow your recommendations. But therein lies a nuance: a reputation takes a long time to build, but collapses in an instant. Therefore, it is most likely that it will not work to advertise low-quality goods, mislead or make fake reviews.

Video content

At the moment, video content is the best way to grab the audience’s attention and advertise a product well. Here is why:

video can transmit (and convey!) a much larger amount of information;
it is usually much easier and faster for a person to click on a video than to plunge into reading a long text (for example, a blog);
it is a versatile tool that can be used to advertise almost any product.

E-books and manuals

Well-crafted e-books and manuals can easily transfer a person from the reader to the consumer category. The trick is to create a good mix of product ads with real value for the reader. Otherwise, no one will get to your affiliate link.

Life hack! Among other benefits, this is also one of the best ways to build a base for email newsletters – just encourage people to leave you their mail in exchange for a free book.

How to add to your blog for affiliate marketing

Let us take a look at what content will fit perfectly into an advertising blog.

Single product overview

This is the most detailed presentation of information about a specific product. Such reviews are, in fact, just one of many opinions, but the paradox is that customers tend to trust other people’s experience, so they often turn out to be much more effective than the most detailed instructions on the websites of online stores.

Comparison of two products

Most people tend to ask the price and carefully study the options available to them before any more or less serious purchase. Therefore, a review-comparison of two products in such cases is advertised like a house on fire. The main thing is to evaluate products that are really similar to each other.

Case studies

Like it was mentioned above, potential customers do not trust the official descriptions of products in an online store very much, but they do trust the experience of people who have already bought the product. Therefore, creating posts in the style of testimonials is a sure marketing ploy that will not be out of order anytime soon.

Approaches to copywriting

There are three main approaches to help you create the perfect content:

AIDA

This approach consists of (A) “Attention”, (I) “Interest”, (D) “Desire” and (A) “Action” . In fact, as you name the boat, so it shall float. AIDA is a kind of sales funnel that has a doubting reader at the entrance and a ready buyer at the exit.

Storytelling

The most unobtrusive and therefore most credible marketing move. In essence, storytelling is advertising wrapped in a “common man’s” story. Storytelling differs from selling articles in that it does not impose anything and does not actively offer anything. Therefore, the reader gets the feeling that this is not an advertisement at all and that their desire to buy the mentioned product is their own choice.

Call-To-Action

Call-to-Action is a technique traditionally dominated by most selling texts. It can be a neutral (just another promotion tool) or, if used at a maximum, a powerful boost to increase sales (more than one marketing research has noted that if you do not ask a potential customer for a targeted action, you will not get it)…

The thing is that the CTA must be used correctly. Otherwise it will look like a clingy consultant in the store from whom you always want to quickly run away.

Anatomy of a perfect post

How to write SMM posts so that they are read? Well, this requires a clear structure:

Enticing visuals. You only have a few seconds to hook the reader and they start right now.
Catching headline. Everyone needs to know what will be discussed, so your task is to arrange even familiar topics in the most unconventional and intriguing way (to intrigue, but at the same time clearly explain what will be discussed now).
Introduction. When first attention is received, it is important to show that it was not in vain. The first lines of your post should make the reader laugh, get intrigued or sometimes even angry. In general, evoke an emotion corresponding to the topic of the publication and your goals.
The middle of the post. In drama, this would be called the climax, and in marketing, this is the time to clearly state your utp (unique selling proposition).
The end of the post – call-to-action. The more creative (but at the same time understandable for a potential customer) you design it, the better.

Implementing SEO in content creation

If you did not know it, SEO is optimization of a website for search engines (Google, Yandex, Yahoo, etc.) which helps to bring it to the first position in the search. We do not think it is worth clarifying that the more often your site is found, the more often it will be visited. And the more often it will be visited, the higher the chance to interest guests with your content and sell something to them.

So how do you make your website SEO friendly? Here is a checklist:

Choose the right keywords. To put it differently, collect search queries that accurately characterize the topic of your site or blog. And, most importantly, do not add keywords to the text that absolutely do not correspond to its meaning (for example, in a blog about ballet, you do not need to use the keyword “Latin American dance school”).
Determine the perfect text length for each content format – post, article, product review, etc.
Make sure your site is mobile-friendly. This will boost your search rankings a lot.
Optimize every element of the page. No one likes it when images are loaded for half an hour and the text jumps in different directions. You can check the resulting result using this service.
Add internal links. People are not inclined to search separately for what is mentioned in the text. The less effort they need to put in to get the answer to their question, the more likely they are to actually do it.

Tips for finding suitable affiliate sites

Now it is time to answer the most important question: where to find affiliate marketing sites and how to figure out who you can trust?

The main thing to understand is that affiliate programs are divided according to two criteria – topic and payment method. Everything is clear with the topic: it can be anything (for example, dating, beauty, trading, tourism, etc.). However, payment methods are divided into three types:

Pay per click – remuneration for each transition of a potential customer to the website or landing page of the seller (that is, your partner).
Pay per action – a fixed payment for each targeted action of potential customers. Please note that only unique actions are taken into account (for example, watching a video, registering for an open webinar, downloading free materials).
Pay per sale – receiving a fixed percentage of every sale made by the customer you refer.

Demand creates supply, so there is no shortage of affiliate programs. Here is what to look for when choosing it:

Reputation. There are now quite a few PPs offering tempting conditions. But not all of them are really who they say they are, so take the time to study the reviews of other affiliates about the option you like.
Possible earnings. Not all that glitters is gold and if the PP promises several times more payments than everyone else, most likely these are scammers who collect more traffic in order to disappear later.
Payment schedule and methods. Everything is clear here: a clear schedule of payments without delays is an absolute must-have. Beware of affiliates that promise daily income. With normal business processes and serious advertisers, this is simply not possible.
Support service which must quickly solve emerging problems. Before finally choosing a PP, we recommend that you contact their support and see how quickly and efficiently they answer your questions.
Stability of work. Crashing servers and freezing statistics are not ok, right? Before joining the PP, find out the uptime of its servers from the support for and draw conclusions.
Convenience of the account and statistics. Do not think that this factor can be “sacrificed” for other bonuses. The personal account is your main work environment and if it is inconvenient or even annoying, it says a lot about the attitude of the PP their webmasters.

Conclusions

Of course, it is impossible to reveal in one article as many details as possible and show all the secrets of flawless content for affiliate marketing (otherwise it would be a book). Nevertheless, we hope you have received the answers to the main questions and are ready to conquer the audience. We wish you success and will see you in new articles!