Affiliate marketing with blog or website seems a rather simple thing. You build a website where you write all kinds of stuff, you add banners, some links and this is it. Things work by themselves, you get traffic and commissions. Isn’t it?

Surprisingly enough, it is not. Things are a bit more complex for an affiliate who wants to do affiliate marketing with blog or website, without investing money in extra traffic.

This article is meant for people who have or want to have a blog about a certain niche or a website that aggregates a certain type of products or services.

As a former super-affiliate (I am now part of the 2Performant team), with an extensive experience in content writing and content optimization, I figured I should share a few useful things that I have learned during these last years.

So I have prepared for you a short list of things you should consider if you are doing affiliate marketing with blog or website:

1. Create competition between the stores you are promoting on your affiliate websites

Create competition between the stores for the same product category, do not attempt to make the decision for your user. You don’t know which are the stores your visitors trust – if you show them 2 or 3 good deals for the same product category they take interest in, but from different stores, you raise your conversion chances.

2. Make sure your affiliate blog includes a cheap store ad aside a more expensive store one

Do the same for similar products (hats, T shirts, red shoes, etc.) – you don’t know your visitor’s budget (not in general and not for this particular moment or product category that you are promoting). You can only catch their interest – always offer shopping options for similar products.

3. Optimize your affiliate content for common words or phrases your visitors might look up

Optimize your content for words or phrases the store you are promoting can’t or doesn’t have time or is just not interested in. The buyer is not searching for formal phrases, but most likely for things like “cool hustler baseball hat”, “skater T shirts”.

4. Put yourself in the shoes of the common online ignorant user

Think like a common person, not like one with online shopping or surfing experience. People don’t know how to use browsers, they don’t always scroll down, they have different toolbars installed so they see less on the first screen, they have unfit screen resolutions, they don’t always use filters or search bars and sometimes don’t check stocks or delivery terms. For a higher click rate on the affiliate links, try not to overload your affiliate content with irrelevant stuff.

5. Asses a store by the revenue/unique user indicator.

Rate the value that a store brings you by figuring out how much income is brought in by one unique user on your affiliate website, not only by click, conversion or commission value. Organic traffic for a blog or website has a mostly constant and limited level, therefore you need to capitalize it as much as possible, offering your users links to stores that are not only relevant to them, but also bring the highest revenue for one single user.

6. Create interest or take advantage of a need

A client who MUST buy something right now (school clothes, Christmas toys or Valentine’s gifts) reacts completely different from a customer for whom you could build a need (fashion trends recommend flowery dresses this summer, don’t miss out this huge discount, limited stock, the biggest price discount for these shoes in the last year, etc.). Make the difference between these two categories and create your messages accordingly.

If I was to sum up the 6 things above, I could say that whatever you are doing on your affiliate site, what pictures, banners, links or products and stores you are promoting, you need to focus on your visitor, on how he/she might see things, the pictures, products and messages and of course, what kind of revenue he/she can bring you.

May the force of conversions be with you!

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