The 9 Best Affiliate Marketing Tips That Will Earn You More Money

You’ve joined an affiliate program! That’s great news. With the affiliate marketing industry booming to a valuation of $15.7 billion in 2024, it’s evident that this digital marketing approach offers a lucrative opportunity for many. The right affiliate marketing tips can impact your bottom line.

Whether you’re looking to supplement your income or kick start a new career path, the journey of becoming a successful affiliate marketer requires not only a keen understanding of the market but also the agility to adapt to its evolving dynamics.

Let’s take a look at the ways you can succeed.

The Components of an Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategy

Before we get into the tips for success, make sure your approach to affiliate marketing has these core essentials.

9 Tips for Affiliate Marketing Success

1. Choose Your Affiliate Programs Wisely

Not every affiliate program is created equally, and not every affiliate program will make sense for your customer base. (We’ll cover that in more detail in section two). In addition to those factors, there are other considerations you’ll want to make:

• Choosing quality over money. Sure, you can probably make a higher commission if you sell a lower quality product, but people will probably be less likely to buy because most have wised up to cheap products. Plus, promoting junk can seriously damage your credibility.
• Consider promoting digital products. Some of the best affiliate programs to make money are online. These often have high conversion rates because they provide instant access and instant gratification to purchasers.
• Consider promoting products that renew monthly. It’s okay to promote products or services that generate a single commission, but receiving a monthly recurring commission makes your affiliate business more predictable and stable.
• Choose vendors that will negotiate. Find vendors who will renegotiate your commission if you start to consistently generate a lot of affiliate sales for them.

• Choose vendors with a good landing page. Reconsider partnership if landing pages have an outdated design, are full of ads, contain way too much text and spelling and grammatical errors, have too many calls to action, or contain a phone number (you probably won’t get commission if orders are placed on the phone). Remember, if a page turns you off, it will turn off your visitors too. 

• Look for programs with lifetime payouts. With these affiliate campaigns, you make money if a visitor continues to purchase from the affiliate vendor even if they never come back to your site again!

2. Understand Your Audience

One tip for affiliate marketing success? People don’t hate ads—they hate bad ads. One aspect of a bad ad is irrelevance. Let’s say you run a fishing website. It wouldn’t make sense to run affiliate ads for a computer just because almost everyone probably has a computer at home. 

Your customers aren’t there for this type of content; it will confuse them, annoy them, make them think you’ve run out of content or, worst of all, make them think you’re trying to sell something shoddy to make a quick buck. 

Successful affiliate marketing means promoting only items that match the immediate needs and wants of your audience. The more relevant the product or service, the more likely they are to buy; in addition, educating them on relevant products or services can be considered value-added content, not weird or unexpected advertising. 

So, always think about why people are coming to your site, joining your email marketing list, or following you on social media.

3. Be Trustworthy

Some people use affiliate marketing only for profit, not to benefit their customers. Some will even mislead their audience with spammy, dishonest affiliate ads and promotions, or they try to hide the fact that it’s an affiliate link. 

Our recommendation? Never try to hide affiliate links! If you don’t disclose them, your customers have reason to doubt your trustworthiness. This will impact their decision to buy from you. 

The Federal Trade Commission has also made it mandatory to disclose all affiliate links. While these guidelines can be a bit vague, here’s some good rules of thumb to follow:

• The disclosure needs to appear before your affiliate link.
• Just linking to your disclosure isn’t sufficient.
• Disclosures need to be clear and visible.
• Using a hashtag like #Affiliate does not count as a disclosure.

 

If the product or service you're promoting is relevant to your audience, they won’t mind the content. However, if they feel you are trying to scam them or take advantage of their readership with too many irrelevant ads, they’re liable to leave and not come back. 

Remember, it is your repeat visitors who are most valuable to you; they are the ones who will give you linkbacks and recommend your site, growing your customer base—not the ones you lured in one time by misleading them. 

Focusing on building a recurring customer base through your audience is a core tip to increase affiliate marketing sales. With recurring sales from an established base, you can spend more time optimizing existing efforts, rather than worrying about constantly attracting new buyers.

Most of all, however, You need to be honest and ethical with your customers, building relationships with genuine content. If all they see is a profit motive—that you don’t ultimately have their best interests at heart—they won’t be back.

4. Update Old Content

One often overlooked strategy that can significantly amplify your marketing reach and engage new followers is repurposing and updating old content. Not only does this approach breathe new life into your existing material, but it also presents an opportunity for new followers to discover and learn from your insights. 

Some things you can do include:

• Make an infographic that distills key takeaways from a detailed article
• Break down lengthy Facebook videos into a captivating mini-series
• Share a thought-provoking line from an old article on Twitter
• Compile interconnected blog posts into an eBook

Make sure to also take a look at your top-performing affiliate content. This can be an opportunity to update your affiliate links and test CTAs to improve clickthrough rates.

5. Offer a Bonus

When you disclose an affiliate relationship—and you should, because as we already noted, building trust is a must—consumers will appreciate your honesty and won’t mind contributing to your bottom line by using your link.

(The opposite can be true; if they feel you’re not being honest about your affiliations, they may go directly to the vendor just to avoid giving you the referral credit!). 

Of course, by disclosing an affiliate, they still have the opportunity to go directly to the vendor (and they’ll know that other sites are probably hosting the affiliate link too). So, consider offering an incentive to use your affiliate link. This is a great way to give your affiliate sales a boost and differentiate yourself from the other competing affiliates out there! 

Bonuses can include:

• Complementary products or software: Providing an additional product or piece of software that complements the affiliate product can significantly increase the overall value of your buyer’s purchase, making the deal more attractive.
• Special discounts: Working out exclusive discounts with the product owner to offer your audience can serve as a powerful incentive.
• Coupon codes: Offering coupon codes for a discount on future purchases either for the same product, another product you own, or one you are affiliated with, encourages not only the initial purchase but also repeat business.

6. Create a Variety of Ads

Typically, a vendor will provide you with a variety of ads to use on your website, social channels, and through email. If they don’t, you’ll have to do all the work, so keep that in mind. However, even if they provide you with some assets, you’ll still want to create your own ads (if they allow it) so that you can stand apart from the affiliate competition. 

Once you have a good arsenal of ads, you’ll want to change them up frequently and test different versions to see which are most effective with your customers. It may take some time before you figure out the best formula, and you may also find that you need to continually rotate ads to attract more attention.

7. Keep Tabs on Trending Topics

One of the most effective tips to increase affiliate sales is to stay aligned with trending topics within your niche. The power of leveraging current trends significantly boosts audience engagement and, consequently, your visibility in search engine results. Trending topics act as a magnet, drawing in views, shares, and interactions organically.

To spot these trends, you can use tools like Google Trends. We also advise immersing yourself in industry news, engaging in online communities relevant to your niche, and keeping an eye on social media hashtags

By integrating trending topics into your content, you not only enrich your affiliate marketing campaigns but also ensure they remain fresh, relevant, and appealing.

8. Keep Your Ad Strategy Relevant

Don’t be complacent when it comes to your affiliate ad strategy. Keep up-to-date on the latest product and service offerings of your affiliate programs and swap out ads as soon as they become available (or create one yourself if you’re allowed). 

Also, stay on top of the current trends and always be willing to explore new opportunities. For example, if those hot weight-loss pills have cooled off, or a particular clothing trend has died out, replace that content with something new and popular to reflect your timeliness. 

Finally, you should always be on the lookout for new products that are useful and relevant to your audience—the more you can promote, the more you can earn.

9. Create Great Content

They say content is king, and it’s true! Content is what gets people to your site—and then take notice of your affiliate ads. There are some things to remember when it comes to content:

• Create timeless content that will always be valuable. You may occasionally update links, specific information or dates, etc., but for the most part, the content you create should be “evergreen.”
• Create new content on topics that are trending. If your platform allows it, this should appear in a “most recent” or “most popular” section.
• Create content around your affiliate products or services—but only if it’s relevant and may be entertaining, useful, and/or informative. 

You might consider a product or service review, a personal testimonial or case study, or even an interview with someone directly involved with the product or service. Just don’t compromise your content to cater to the affiliate programs or you will lose your customers.

Increase Affiliate Sales with The Fulfillment Lab

You've armed yourself with top-tier affiliate marketing strategies that set you up for success. But why stop there? With Fulfillment Lab, you can take your affiliate marketing efforts to the next level. Imagine offering your audience not just insights and tips but also exclusive deals and bonuses that make each click even more worthwhile.

Join Fulfillment Lab today and unlock a world of opportunities that complement your newly refined affiliate marketing tactics.

Why work with us?:

• Mass volume profit sharing: Enjoy a share of the profits from every shipment made by your referrals.
• Add value to your customers: By recommending a top-tier fulfillment service, you provide additional value to your customers.
• Leverage industry experience: Tap into our vast industry knowledge to boost your affiliate success.
• Zero up-front costs: Start without any initial investment and focus on earning.
• Quick sign-up process: Join our affiliate program in minutes and kickstart your journey.

Interested in getting started? Book a strategy call with us today.