How to Choose the Best Affiliate Marketing Program

WordPress is a free personal publishing platform. It is an easy to use, fast and flexible blog script. It comes with a great set of features, designed to make your experience as a publisher as pleasant as possible. With a WordPress blog you can easily:

• Publish and edit posts
• Search within your content
• Sort articles in categories
• Change your website themes etc.
• Manage users’ access

If you’ve decided to start up an affiliate marketing blog, your first steps will be to find your blogging niche and set up your site. After that, it’s time to choose your affiliate marketing programs. Though wrong programs can lead to low conversions and reduced sales, so your decisions are the most crucial when setting up an affiliate program. Choosing effective affiliate programs can enable you to monetize your blog and generate income. With the right affiliates, you’ll have the opportunity to build partnerships, join like-minded communities, and run a successful business.

Today, we’re going to discuss how to find the perfect affiliates, and integrate their programs with your content. So, let’s dive in!

What is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of program based on revenue sharing. You promote products through an affiliate network, and earn a commission based on sales generated from your site. This may be done by creating full-length reviews of the products, simply adding links to them in your content, and a variety of other processes.

As with any business, getting started with affiliate marketing requires time and effort. However, the benefits are many, including

• Low start-up costs: Getting your affiliate marketing blog off the ground will require some investment (here’s the real cost of starting a WordPress blog if you’re interested), but shouldn’t cost you too much.
• No product support required: As an affiliate marketer, you merely need to promote other people’s products. This means you don’t have to worry about the costs of creating and selling your own items.

A flexible schedule

An affiliate website is something you can manage and grow at your own pace, on your own schedule.

If these benefits sound tempting, an affiliate blog might be right for you. Of course, the key to running a successful affiliate business is choosing the right programs.

How to Identify the Perfect Affiliates for Your WordPress Blog

 While the benefits of being an affiliate marketer are plentiful, it’s important that you do your own research to find the best programs to join. Let’s dive right in and explain how to identify those programs.

• Understand Your Blog’s Niche

       Whether you plan to monetize your current blog or start a new one, you need to understand your site’s ‘niche’. This is another term for its focus – the topic your blog is about and that readers come to you to learn more about. For example, Justin Chung Studio fits snugly into the lifestyle photography niche.

• Conduct Research:

Conduct a Research and get to know your audience, to get to know what interests them, where their main focus lies, what questions they have regarding the service or products and what are the problems they’re trying to solve. This will help you choose the best affiliate products to pursue, since you can promote those that will meet your readers’ unique needs.

• Start with a List of Products You Currently Use

If you use a specific product, you already understand its pros and cons. Your familiarity with that product will enable you to write about it knowledgeably and truthfully. That’s why it’s important to start with products you have some experience with.

You can come up with a list of potential products by simply looking around your home (or your website) and assessing what has been valuable to you. Or you can take a look at your past online purchases to jog your memory. Then, ask yourself why you bought each item, and how it has been useful to you. Your audience will be made up of customers just like you, so you can use your personal experiences to figure out what products other people might be interested in. You can use your own shopping experiences to acknowledge your customers.

When you have a list of possibilities, your next step will be to decide which products are ideal affiliate candidates.

 It’s best to rely on products there is a common and consistent need for.

If there’s a product on your list you would not recommend to someone you care about, you shouldn’t offer it to your audience.

Does the product vendor value its affiliates? If your affiliate vendor doesn’t value its marketers, you can’t trust it to value your audience.

If a product meets all the above criteria, you have found it personally valuable, and it fits your blog’s niche, it’s a perfect candidate.

Research Your Potential Affiliates Using Popular Marketplaces

An affiliate marketplace or network is a middleman between you as a marketer, and your vendor as a program provider. You can use a marketplace to decide what programs are available, and determine if they are likely to be profitable.

Here are solid options to get you started:

Creative Tim Affiliate Program – They develop high-quality UI kits and templates that help people design and code faster. Creative Tim offers up to 50% commission on affiliate sales and anyone with a blog can become an affiliate.

Share Sale: This marketplace has more than 2,500 commission-based programs to choose from. Sorting through Share Sale’s offerings is a great starting place.

CJ Affiliate: CJ Affiliate offers more than 3,000 brands. Using this site to find the right affiliates requires a few extra steps, but is well worth your time.

Amazon: Not surprisingly Amazon is always a sure bet for any affiliate store. Not only are there millions of products to recommend, but you’ll make a commission on a customer’s entire purchase (not just the item you linked to).

Each marketplace offers valuable information for affiliate research. We recommend you give them all a try, to decide which works best for you.

How to Seamlessly Add Affiliate Links to Your Content?

Now that you’ve chosen your affiliate programs and products, it’s time to add their links to your content. Here are a few tips to get you started:

•      Don’t stuff multiple affiliate links into your post. Too many links will alienate readers looking for valuable content.
•      Strike a balance between user experience and money making. Minimize advertising within your content to keep it focused, and monetize strategically.
• Follow FTC Guidelines for product endorsements. Staying compliant keeps your business trustworthy (and luckily there are some awesome tools, like the free Affiliate Disclosure for WooCommerce plugin, that you can use to easily disclose affiliate relationships on your site).

There are also many tools that can help you integrate affiliate links with your content.

Easy Affiliate Links is a WordPress plugin you can use to manage every affiliate link on your website. You can track clicks, add short-links, and create link categories from the same location.

Seamlessly adding affiliate links takes practice. We recommend taking a minimalist approach at first, until you have some experience under your belt.

When you set out to generate income through your blog, you’ll want to do so as authentically as possible. If you aren’t upfront about your experience with a product, you risk your authority as a marketer. That’s why it’s so crucial to choose appropriate affiliates.

Author bio

Mashum Mollah is an entrepreneur, founder and CEO at the daily notes a digital marketing agency that drive visibility, engagement, and proven results. He is a passionate blogger and blogs at follow the fashion.