5 Underrated Affiliate Marketing Hacks The Real PROs Use

Wouldn’t it be great to trade in a 9-5 office job for making a passive income with minimal effort or while you sleep?

Passive income does exist, and it has a name – affiliate marketing. It benefits businesses by not having to be involved in the marketing and benefits affiliates by receiving a commission on the sales they generate.

But look before you leap and do not rush into it before knowing exactly how affiliate marketing works. Ready to learn some cool stuff on how to make some dough without breaking a sweat?

Take a look at these 5 marketing hacks to get you there. But before that, let’s get introduced to affiliate marketing first.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Affiliate marketing is based solely on achievements. In other words, you only pay for the outcome.

The process is quite simple: Businesses who sell products or services can approach affiliates, who are either individuals or a company to advertise their products on their blog, website, or social platforms in an appealing way to their audience and then receives a portion of sales they make.

Online stores or websites put a set of promotional tools at their affiliates’ disposal.

An affiliate, otherwise known as the publisher, then uses these instruments to direct a visitor toward the company’s website and is rewarded with either the value or the number of leads, sales, or actions taken by the visitors within a certain recurrent time frame.

5 Affiliate Marketing Hacks the Real Pros Use

Promote The Right Products

A good affiliate will provide you with exciting content and some nice promotions for your audience; all that plus the dough. Sweet, right?! Do you feel a ‘but’ coming? You’re on the ball.

Promote The Right Products

When choosing who to work with, consider this rule of thumb: as tempting as it might be, promoting ANY product regardless of the revenue it brings is not the best idea because you may damage your reputation and relationship with your audience.

If you have a blog on beauty trends, your audience is going to lose trust and interest in you and feel they are being ‘sold at’ if you start advertising lawnmowers.

Instead, promote products that you believe in and have tried and tested, go for services that are related to your niche and that consumers are already familiar with.

Promoting products that your audience is highly inclined to engage with means they are more likely to see the value and benefits of the product and make the purchase – meaning money in your pocket.

If you fail to deliver relevant products and brands and just promote any products to make money, you will lose credibility, and your audience won’t buy the products you promote as you will be perceived as untrustworthy.

What’s more, as a phony, they may just walk away completely from you – there goes your hard-earned followers.

Here are five examples of kick-ass affiliate programs that you can sign up for for free:

a). Fiverr Affiliates

Fiverr affiliates are the number one online freelance marketplace.

Fiverr Affiliates

For those who need content writing, design, graphics, voiceover, photography, programmers – you name it – Fiverr is the place to be, and it’s not just me saying that it’s the world’s biggest names in those industries that endorse Fiverr’s quality of service.

With two affiliate strategies, one hosted by Cellexpert, and the other by CJ Affiliate, Fiverr offers impressive share rates: 15 to 50 dollars CPA (click per action) for a first-time buyer and 10 dollars CPA + 10% revenue share for every purchase within 12 months.

To maximize your potential, you can use multiple channels like blogs, websites, Facebook, Instagram, and even YouTube.

b). Shopify Affiliates

The gigantic e-commerce platform offers their referees generous amounts, but you have to be a Shopify partner (it’s super easy to sign up). If you join the Shopify affiliate program, you can earn, on average, $58 for any visitor that subscribes to a standard plan and no less than $2000 for plus plans.

Shopify Affiliates

Besides the strong commissions, Shopify provides you with a live chat support service and a dedicated affiliate manager that make the whole process smoother and much more human-friendly.

c). Tripadvisor Affiliates

How about a partnership with the world’s biggest travel website? Partner with Tripadvisor and earn an average of 50% of the share. The referral window is pretty decent too – if your users return to Tripadvisor within 14 days and click on one of their partners, you’ll earn a commission.

Tripadvisor Affiliates

Tripadvisor allows a wide range of promotion options: badges, links, banners, widgets, or logos. You just have to make sure you put some relevant content alongside those advertisements.

As a side note, remember that in order to be eligible for becoming a Tripadvisor affiliate, you have to join CJ Affiliate, former Commission Junction first.

d). AVON Affiliates

There is a reason why Avon is one of the most appreciated MLM (multi-level-marketing) companies in the world. It was set up in 1886 and has developed into one of the largest beauty companies on the market.

AVON Affiliates

Avon is the partner of CJ Affiliate by Conversant, who are among the most trustworthy affiliate networks that many big brands use.

Now let’s speak money: while promoting thousands of products from Avon’s portfolio, you can end up earning a commission of about 10%. Not bad at all!

e). BLUEHOST Affiliates

One of the most efficient, money-making, and in-demand affiliate programs. Bluehost only takes minutes to join, has no cap on commissions earned, and is one of the highest paying ways to monetize your blogs, website, and social platforms.

BLUEHOST Affiliates

Used by more than 2 million websites worldwide, Bluehost is hosting VPS, WooCommerce, and is recommended by WordPress.

Bringing in a successful sign up will bring you 65 USD, but the more users you bring, the more your share grows so that you can get to win 150 USD per sale if you bring about 40-50 clients per month.

Build Up Your Platform

You absolutely must have quality content. You have to attract and engage people to be able to sell them something. Your content has to be unique, relevant, and it has to deal with something helpful for the visitor.

Build Up Your Platform

Ideally speaking, the uniqueness of the content defines the niche or the direction of a website, the relevancy sets down the expectancies of the visitor, while the third criterion examines if the visitor has reached his target when clicking the affiliated link. If you are close to meeting those three goals, it means you are even closer to generating a lead, which means money is on the way.

OK, so here are some top-notch SEO rules to propel your content toward the first places in search engines:

  • Choosing a title very much related to the content, no more than 60-70 characters
  • Structuring the content in subtitles and paragraphs
  • Using varied keywords but without losing the naturalness of the language
  • Internal linking to relevant content
  • Writing compelling, straight-to-the-point, articles; readers are unlikely to scroll through a very long article

Many people search the internet for a solution to one of their problems. Well, affiliation can be an answer to any problem, and this is not an overstatement.

Let me give you an example: say a user wants to buy themselves a brand new TV; if you have established yourself as a trusted source, your recommendation and the link you provide to a product will definitely be considered and will persuade them to buy what you’re promoting. This is applicable to any industry, to any client, and to any business.

Link Building

In addition to widgets, link building is the most performing instrument in affiliate marketing; use it wisely and remember to stick to the word of reference in this field: relevancy.

Thinking about taking your shot? Here are some ways to obtain link building:

  • Ask someone familiar who owns a blog or a website for a link
  • Add your website to local service lists
  • Add your articles to portals and directories
  • Search and repair broken links
  • Forum link building
  • Social media link building
  • Guest posting

Leverage Your Newsletter Subscribers

Another meaningful asset in affiliate marketing is newsletters. Not only are they efficient because you can reach a number of people with minimum effort, but they also help you develop a strong, durable relationship with your users.

In order to build trust, you should consider contacting an email marketing agency to help you out or try adding interesting information to your emails alone, like a sort of user’s guide, maybe a background of the brand, or some positive reviews to complement the product.

Leverage Your Newsletter Subscribers

When using a newsletter as a tool for affiliate marketing, you can also add social share links. Social sharing brings more subscribers, leverages sales, and delivers income.

But before you do this, you need a way to actually get a visitor’s email – which can be challenging at best. Using a form builder is a great way to capture emails; one such builder, Paperform, allows you to create interactive, customizable, and stunning landing pages and forms that attract people to subscribe.

Paperform automates your emails so you can enjoy maximum subscriber satisfaction with minimal effort and has integrations with companies like Mailchimp and Gmail so you can conveniently manage your subscribers and send your whole mailing list your newsletter with a click of a button.

As part of the content, here is what you can include in your newsletters:

  • Videos
  • Reviews
  • MFAQs
  • The story behind the product

Be Genuine & Add Value

OK, so everybody wants to make money, and that’s a fact, but everybody is a client too; and clients appreciate honesty and authenticity. So remember to always put yourself in the client’s shoes and do not overdo it. Manipulation is out of the question, while subtle persuasion builds up trust and mutual respect.

Remember that prospects are generally demanding and extremely cautious with their money, so stepping on their toes means losing their interest in you at the very least. You might also get some negative publicity, with good reason. There’s a saying that goes pretty well here: You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.

Here is how a genuine marketer should carry out an affiliate marketing program:

  • Caring for what they promote
  • Writing honest reviews
  • Providing value
  • Avoiding spamming
  • Using storytelling

Final Words

Are you ready to kick-start your business with affiliate marketing? You have some essential information in this mini-guide to help you take off.

Whether you’re a business looking for affiliates to advertise your products or you’re someone wanting to earn some extra cash by promoting businesses on your platforms, affiliate marketing is a win-win situation for everyone.

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