8 Affiliate Marketing Hacks [TO SKYROCKET CONVERSIONS]

Affiliate marketing is one of the best business models out there. The thing is that while it is easy to set-up, you are competing against thousands of other affiliate marketers, not to mention large ones that have millions of page or video views per month

So, what should you do to increase your conversion rate and get ahead of the rest?

Today, I will show you the top affiliate marketing hacks that will help you in your promotions and campaigns. Take note that since there are several ways to promote products online, I will cover different hacks that include YouTube, blogging, and others.

Our Top 8 Affiliate Marketing Hacks….

1. Promote your content on social media

One thing that many affiliate marketers do not take advantage of is social media. To them, it is just a waste of time.

Is it?

No, not really.

If you know what you are doing, you can drive a significant amount of traffic from social media. But how?

This hack is not about advertising. The goal here is to find people in social media—people who are interested in what you have to offer.

The social media sites I recommend are:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Pinterest
• Instagram

Before you can do this, you need to produce content that adds value. Many affiliate marketers rely solely on ads. And if their ads do not yield conversions, they get frustrated.

To make social media work, you need to produce either YouTube videos or blog posts that are helpful and run alongside.

Next, create social media pages for your site. Choose the right social media platform for your niche.

• Facebook – generally good for all niches
• Twitter – great for niches that are leaning towards discussions; use this to promote books, movie subscriptions, games, and such
• Instagram – awesome for eye candy such as health and fitness, cooking, and all other things that are good to the eyes
• Pinterest – great for product-oriented affiliate sites like those that promote jewelry, food supplements, Amazon affiliate program, etc.

Once you have created your pages, make sure you publish your content on these social media channels. Follow people, and do not ask people to buy your offer. Your goal must be to drive traffic to your website or YouTube channel.

What you want is to develop credibility, and then get that traffic to click on your links located in your content.

2. Offer a free course

A course is a valuable lead magnet. If you offer a course, you are impacting a person’s life. You are parting ways with key knowledge.

People love to learn. That is a fact. And if you offer a free course, it will be almost impossible for people not to take your offer 🙂 Or at least feel very tempted 🙂

So, how will this make you earn more money?

In your course, you recommend what products to use. Because they trust you, they will buy the same things.

Of course, you want them to click your affiliate link and then buy from there.

For example, let us say that you are an affiliate marketer of Shopify, a platform for building online stores.

What you can do is to create a course that teaches the person how to build an online store from start to finish. Of course, the platform you will use is Shopify because you are an affiliate marketer of Shopify.

Because your students learned how to build a store on Shopify, they will naturally use Shopify as their platform. As such, you must provide your Shopify link in your videos. Once they clicked on it, they will buy a Shopify subscription, and you will earn money from that.  

In my opinion, a great example of this is Miles Beckler. He now offers all his courses (that I know of) free, making money from the affiliate links inside. He probably makes more from that than he used to from selling the courses themselves (again, my opinion!).

3. Create product reviews and comparisons

Earlier, I mentioned something about creating value. One kind of valuable content that you can offer is a product review or product comparison.

Why?

Because people do not want to spend on items if they are not sure it is worth it. Part of human psychology is that they do not want to take the risk of losing money for a bad product.

And this is where you come in. If you can tell people what a product offers, how it works, and whether it is worth the money or not, they are more likely to buy.

This works great if you are an affiliate marketer of different software systems. You can use the free trial of these software programs to create your video and blog content.

From there, you can compare one product with another, and then let the audience decide. To make it work, you must be an affiliate of all the products you are reviewing—even for comparison purposes.

For example, you can be an affiliate of Instapages and ClickFunnels. In your comparison review, you will tell the audience what each can do, and then let them decide what to buy. Whether they decide to buy ClickFunnels or Instapages, you still earn money.

4. Ask for discount coupons

This discount coupon is something that you ask from the affiliate manager of the affiliate program. For example, if the product is sold for $29 a month, you can ask the affiliate manager to give you a discount code that people can only see from your content.

Let us say that the affiliate manager agreed to this, and said that your code is DISC20, and that this gives the buyer a discount of 20%.

Now, you can tell your audience that if they click on your affiliate link and use the DISC20 code upon checkout, they will get a 20% discount.

You can tell people that this discount is exclusive to you or your followers only.

You know what’s a better thing to do?

Ask them for their email address. In exchange, they get the 20% discount code. Once you have built an email list, you now have a list of people that you can market to for the other products that you are offering.

5. Use email advertising

One road less travelled by affiliate marketers is email advertising. What they usually focus on is building an email list.

Building an email list is great, but it takes a while.

Now, there are many people out there who already have a list. They have built their email lists for many years, and they want to cash in on their lists.

These are called email list sellers.

What you want to do is to create an ad, and then tell the email list seller to send it to his list. You will pay this seller, and then he will send your ad material to his list of email addresses.

You can find these sellers in platforms like UDIMI. In this platform, sellers post their services and they tell you what niche they serve.

This is good because if you are an affiliate marketer for blogging software and tools, you can look for sellers who have an email list of bloggers who may be interested in your offer.

The payment structure here is by email count. Typically, the cost is about $0.20 per email sent. So, if you ask a seller to send your marketing material to 100 people, you will pay 100 x $0.20 = $20.

You will often see this style of promotion referred to as solo ads.

6. Produce assets consistently

I can understand why many affiliate marketers want to earn quickly. After all, it is a business. What many people do not get is that affiliate marketing does not work like selling a hamburger.

Affiliate marketing is about patience—it is about building your authority and credibility.  

As such, you need to publish content regularly.

Be it a blog or a YouTube channel, you need to produce content that your audiences can consume.

There is no hard science proving that more content means more traffic. It just is the natural flow of things. If you publish more content, you are attracting all sorts of people.

Also, it is up to you to set your schedule. It is completely okay to publish content on a weekly basis. While many people will tell you that three blogs a week is great, you still have to decide if you can keep up with this schedule. The last thing that you want is to get burned out.

Choose a publishing schedule, and then stick to it. More importantly, you have to focus on the quality of your content. The better it is, the more likely your content will be shared. And if the readers like what you published, you will sound more credible, and thus they are more inclined to click your affiliate link.

7. Only promote items with recurring commissions

One of the best affiliate marketing hacks I can share with you is to only promote products that have recurring commissions.

Why is this important?

Because you produce the same effort and yet you make more money from one person.

Let us take two products as an example. Both are selling for $29. Let us say that both offer an affiliate commission of 20%. But one is a one-time payment and the second one is a recurring commission for 12 months.  

If you do the math, Product A pays you $5.8 for one customer. But if you choose Product B, you will get paid $5.8 for one customer for one year.

You see, you put in the same effort to write a blog post or record and edit a video. However, you are making more money from Product B than the first one. If the person likes the product and stays subscribed for many years, you will have a solid income for years rather than just a one off!

Most products that pay recurring commissions are software programs. This does not mean that there are no recurring commissions for physical products. There are, too, and most of these are food supplements.

8. Offer a book or an app

Earlier, we talked about giving away a free course. However, not all people can create a course. If you are on of these, then your alternative is to offer something else.

Here are some examples of the best lead magnets:

• eBooks
• Web applications, like calculators
• Quizzes
• Checklists
• Directories

There are so many other things that you can offer for free. Before you can do this, you need to understand what your target customers want—you need to identify what they find is valuable.

You see, lead magnets only work if you offer something that is of great value—one that they cannot possibly say no to.

If you manage to do this, you can offer it on your blog, and ask your readers to enter their email to be able to access your freebies.

If you are on YouTube, what you can do is to create a simple squeeze page, which you can do with autoresponders.

Now, do not just write an eBook. Your book must contain affiliate links to your affiliate marketing programs. You can ask an affordable freelance writer to write the book for you, but you have to tell the writer that you have specific products that he has to write about.

Once the book is submitted, you can add your affiliate links to where they belong. You can also create a section that tells the reader about your recommended tools.

Do these affiliate marketing hacks work?

Yes, they do work. However, you have to be patient, and you need to do them right. I know that this is a lot to digest now.

What I want you to do is to decide on one or two affiliate marketing hacks for now. Make sure that you can execute them. Start researching more abouy how you can make them work and create a plan. Execute your plan and always measure whether your actions yielded results. I also strongly advise you to listen to affiliate marketing podcasts so you can learn more.

In Summary

Affiliate marketing is not an easy journey to make a lot of money. You will make mistakes as you go along. The hacks that I discussed here can help you, but there is no such thing as a magic method to make sales from affiliate marketing.

You need to work hard, and then put your soul into your business. Affiliate marketers who earn tens of thousands of dollars a month have been doing so for at least five years. What I am trying to say here is that if you are not prepared to put in the work, you will not succeed in affiliate marketing.