Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing With WordPress

by Supriyadi in WordPress Marketing; Published on 13.06.2022 Last updated on 16.06.2022

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Running a blog is not as easy as it sounds. Like with any other activity, it takes a lot of time and effort to craft quality content for your audience. But when you put so much work into something you might think of ways to make money from it.

And here comes Affiliate marketing. It is one of the easiest and most profitable methods to monetize your blog nowadays. All you need is solid traffic to your website and niche companies to partner with.

In today’s article, our WordPress development agency will lead you to the world of Affiliate marketing and how you can benefit from it.

Affiliate Marketing Explained

Firstly, let’s clarify what Affiliate marketing actually is. In a nutshell, Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting the products or services of another person or company. This occurs when a user clicks on an affiliate link in your article and purchases the promoted product or service.

Assume you run a marketing blog and collaborate with companies who create social media tools. Your role in the relationship is to promote their products or services to your target audience to assist the third-party company in generating more leads.

After you sign for the affiliate marketing program of a company, you will receive a unique link or code, so the company could track a sale back to where and who it came from. Following that, you can add referral links to your blog content, share banner ads, etc.

Affiliate marketing has the advantage of requiring minimal effort, leveraging trust, costing little to nothing to set up, and being able to work part-time or full-time depending on how much time you have available. Furthermore, the buyer incurs no additional costs as a result of using your link; the price will remain the same for them regardless, and the merchant or seller pays your commission.

1. Keep the focus of your website

If you are already running a blog, you presumably have a good idea of what it’s about. You have a good understanding of the niche or industry you’re writing for, as well as the main topics your blog covers.

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If you’re still building up your blog or trying to be a jack of all trades in terms of your site’s subject matter, the first thing you need to do is figure that out. Start by looking at your company strategy and thinking about your talents and areas of experience to figure out what your objectives are and where you can make the biggest impact.

Consider your interests and find an affiliate category that corresponds to them. Ask yourself some questions. What are some topics about which you can write dozens or hundreds of blog pieces without running out of steam? Is there anything interesting about this niche’s services and products that you could talk about and promote?

After that, you’ll have a clear strategy for joining another company’s affiliate program.

Keep in mind that some niches are more lucrative and competitive than others when choosing a focus for your website. If you want to make your blog into a full-time money-making engine, you should focus on high-profit topics like software, travel, cryptocurrencies, finance, business, eCommerce, health, and fitness, to name a few.

2. Think about your audience first

No matter if a company offers a great affiliate marketing program if its products or services aren’t valuable or relevant to your target audience, you won’t get anything if your audience won’t click on the provided links.

Our WordPress development agency reminds you that you must be very careful when choosing an affiliate program. You should firstly keep your audience in mind and make sure the merchant’s products are in line with what they want or need.

You may achieve this by researching your target market and the audience thoroughly. Try to grasp the problems they’re having, how they feel about them, and what products or services might be able to assist them to address them.

Consider what interests your audience, what they think about before shopping, and any potential hurdles to completing a purchase, then tailor your content and product positioning to fit their wants and solve their problems.

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Talking to your audience and monitoring their dialogues through polls, forums, groups, social media, and blog comments are the best methods to get inside their heads.

3. Promote high-quality content

To be a successful affiliate depends on your ability to persuade your audience to click on the affiliate links. It’s not a secret that excellent content will increase your audience’s trust in your message and their likelihood of clicking through and converting.

Don’t get too much into the idea of making money from promoted products or services at the cost of your regular readers. You don’t get to create terrible, overly-promotional content and throw it in your readers’ faces. Prioritize teaching your audience by generating material that they will find valuable.

You may, for example, write comprehensive tutorials that teach your target audience how to use the products or services you’re selling.

By providing that type of content your audience will feel you have their best interests at heart and will be more inclined to take your recommendations seriously, and purchase the things you’re pushing, resulting in more affiliate sales and commissions for you.

4. Optimize your blog

Producing high-quality content, however, doesn’t mean you are done with affiliate marketing efforts. You must still ensure that your content is highly ranked in search engines. This can be accomplished by optimizing all aspects of your WordPress site that contribute to SEO, such as the site’s speed and responsiveness.

You must also generate content that is relevant to the issue and incorporate relevant keywords into your tags, meta descriptions, headers, and article body. Our WordPress development agency’s experts advise you to conduct keyword research to determine the most significant terms that people in your niche are searching for and then create evergreen content around them.

We want to also remind you that websites that are well-designed, easy to use, and full of useful content are prioritized by search engines. So, pay close attention to your tags, meta descriptions, and internal connections because these can affect how Google and other search engines see your site.

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5. Choose an affiliate program

After your website is optimized and you have high-quality content, you’ll be all set to start looking for the ideal affiliate marketing programs. Remember that your decision is crucial because it can affect how much money you make and how your audience perceives you.

If you advertise low-quality products or services, your audience’s trust in you, your thoughts, and your brand will be eroded, and they will turn to your competitors. When choosing an affiliate program and looking for products to advertise, you must first research and analyze the program’s terms to ensure they are appropriate for you.

6. Performance Monitoring

Last but not least, comes the monitoring. As a blog owner, you may already know the importance of regularly monitoring your website. The same remains when talking about affiliate marketing. Our WordPress company advises you to avoid vanity metrics and focus on the KPIs and figures that count, such as conversion rate, click-through rate, income by traffic source, and average time spent on-page, to correctly analyze the effectiveness of your affiliate marketing activity.

These metrics will show you which affiliate campaigns are functioning well, which ones need tweaking, and which ones aren’t producing any results. Having this information, you may alter your strategy to improve performance and increase sales.

Keep in mind that you might not get lucky with affiliate marketing in the first place. So, before you find something that really works, you may need to try out other partnerships and programs and mix up your approaches every now and then.

Wait no more, start your affiliate journey today!

Based on our experience, affiliate marketing can be a profitable business, but it’s not a get-rich-quick plan. Allow your strategies to take effect, continue to engage your audience, and learn from your results as you go.

Focus on helping your audience solve their problems first so they’ll be motivated to go the extra mile and click on your link, allowing you to earn commissions quickly.

For more WordPress-related content, keep reading our blog!