Even if you have failed with affiliate marketing in the past, this simple process will help you change your approach to finally earn passive income now.
Step 1: Identify Your Audience's Needs
The first thing you need to focus on is figuring out what your audience is interested in, and what information they were seeking.
This is extremely important.
You don’t want to waste your time writing a lengthy blog post if it is something your audience doesn’t care for, or won’t even read.
Plus, your blog should be targeting a specific audience so that you are attracting the right readers with your site’s content. By identifying your target audience and figuring out their needs and interests, you can become very niche specific with your blog content.
Honing in on their needs and producing content that will help solve their problems, or answer their questions, is the key to making money from this post you are going to write.
Do not skip this step.
One way to do this is by checking out the top posts on your site that get the most amount of traffic.
Go into your Google Analytics account and click on:
Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
This will pull up a report with the blog posts that get the highest amount of traffic. You can then edit the date range to go back as far as you want, to see which posts are receiving the highest amount of traffic.
Looking at this report will show you what your readers are interested in. If you are getting a lot of traffic to particular types of posts, or certain topics, you can start there by writing new content that is related to these articles.
Step 2: Select Affiliate Partner
The next step of the process is to include a relevant affiliate offer. Right now, you should have the topic you are going to write about, now see what affiliate products or services you can include in this article.
Here are 3 affiliate marketing rules that I follow:
1. Only recommend products that you use
2. Don’t recommend anything that isn’t helpful to your audience
3. Never come right out and say BUY NOW
You do not want to just pepper your post with random affiliate links.
They need to be products or services that you use, recommend, and can show your readers why they need it.
Only choose 1 product or service to recommend in this post, and make sure it will be relevant to the topic you chose above.
This will help your audience stay focused on what you are talking about and recommending. You don’t want to include different affiliate products, because it can become overwhelming to your readers and they won’t know what to click on.
If you are not already an affiliate for any kind of product or service, you will need to do that before moving on.
Step 3: Write an actionable tutorial post
The next step is to write a lengthy tutorial or guide post that is actionable for your reader.
I recommend doing this because it will allow you to show your reader how you use the affiliate product rather than just telling them.
It will also help to position you as the expert, or the authority, on the topic. If you can provide a valuable tutorial showing your audience exactly how and why you use the affiliate product, you are building up their trust and not coming off as being salesy.
If you can help your audience easily achieve a result, or provide a quick actionable guide with your blog post, you have a better chance of making money from it.
The important part is to focus on the value of the post first, not the affiliate links.
I hear a lot of people complain that affiliate marketing doesn’t work for them, but it isn’t working because they only focus on the money they will make.
They forget about helping their audience or fulfilling their needs first. This should always be your number one priority. You can’t expect to make money from a post that isn’t providing some kind of value upfront.
This is why I say to write a tutorial post; because you can walk them through each step of the process as you recommend the affiliate product.
Step 4: Pinnable image
Once you have written the tutorial post and included a relevant affiliate product, it is time to drive more traffic to this post.
One of the best ways to drive traffic to this post is by using Pinterest. I talk a lot about Pinterest on my site because it was a game-changer for my business.
Pinterest is a visual search engine that can help you to get in front of your target audience easily.
Here’s what you need to do:
● Create a pin-worthy graphic for this post to promote on Pinterest
● Pin it to your relevant group boards and personal boards
● Develop a pinning schedule to pin this image to your boards several times throughout the month
I create all of my images using Canva. It is a free design software that has a TON of different options to help you quickly create this graphic for your post.
I do recommend using a Pinterest scheduling service to help you pin more frequently and promote this post as often as you can.
The important part is having a pinnable image in this post so that you can drive traffic from Pinterest to the tutorial post you created.