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It’s All About Choosing Affiliate Products for Your Niche
Monetize your blog with affiliate marketing by promoting relevant, high-quality products that match your niche and solve your readers’ problems.
Affiliate marketing is a one way for bloggers and online entrepreneurs to monetize their websites. By promoting products or services from other companies, you can earn a commission on every sale that comes through your unique affiliate link.
But not all affiliate products are created equal. Should you go for high commission items, or try to build trust with your audience? Should you only promote products / services / SaaS you’ve tested?
Understand Your Audience
Who is your audience? What are their pain points and challenges? What solutions are they looking for? Answering these questions will help you know what products and services to promote.
For example, techies reading gadget reviews will expect you to have tested the products extensively. But a home decor site can get by with offering a list of the cutest welcome mats on the internet. Most people don’t care how a welcome mat performs.
Parents shopping for baby toys and products want testing. And they are sometimes willing to dig past the big corporate sites to find a blogger who really has used that product, so they’ll appreciate original photos and first person experiences.
All of this helps you determine what to promote. Because if you have to own it to promote it, that’s going to cost you money up front. If you have to invest time in testing it, that’s time you can’t spend on other work for your website.
In my experience, all audiences respond well to honesty. I believe people are starting to realize the big corporate sites that dominate Google results can’t be trusted to have tested products like they say, and they want to hear from you.
Just don’t claim to have owned or tested anything you haven’t. They may still click through and buy something.
Research Potential Affiliate Programs
Once you have a clear picture of your audience, it’s time to research potential affiliate programs. Look for programs that offer products or services relevant to your niche.
Consider the commission structure, cookie duration, and overall reputation of the affiliate program. Some popular affiliate networks to explore include Amazon Associates, ShareASale, and Commission Junction.
But don’t stop there – there are numerous more independent affiliate programs that can provide great profits in the right niche. Just a few examples:
High-Ticket Affiliate Programs
1. Semrush
- Commission: Up to $200 per sale, plus $10 for every free trial.
- Cookie Duration: 120 days.
- Ideal for: SEO and marketing content creators.
2. Tripadvisor
- Commission: At least 50% of the commission Tripadvisor receives from hotel booking partners.
- Cookie Duration: 14 days.
- Ideal for: Travel content creators.
3. FreshBooks
- Commission: Up to $200 per paying customer and $10 for free trials.
- Cookie Duration: 120 days.
- Ideal for: Business owners and accounting software users.
4. Kinsta
- Known for its managed WordPress hosting, offering substantial commissions.
- Ideal for: Web developers and WordPress users.
5. Shopify
- Commission: Varies depending on the product and service promoted.
- Ideal for: E-commerce businesses and marketers.
AI and Technology Affiliate Programs
1. CustomGPT.ai
- Commission Rate: Up to 22% recurring lifetime commission.
- Cookie Duration: 120 days.
- Ideal for: AI enthusiasts and developers.
2. Frase
- Commission Rate: Up to 30% recurring commission.
- Cookie Duration: 60 days.
- Ideal for: SEO professionals and content creators.
3. Murf AI
- Commission Rate: 20% recurring commission for 24 months.
- Cookie Duration: 90 days.
- Ideal for: Video producers and e-learning content creators.
Other Notable Affiliate Programs
1. Wahoo Fitness
- Offers high-ticket cycling gear ideal for fitness enthusiasts.
- Ideal for: Cycling and endurance sports influencers.
2. Liquid Web
- Commission Rate: 150% to 200% of the sale amount.
- Cookie Duration: 90 days.
- Ideal for: Web designers and developers.
3. MarketerHire
- Commission: $2,500 per new paying customer.
- Cookie Duration: 90 days.
- Ideal for: Digital marketing professionals seeking freelance opportunities.
Find Relevant Products
Choose products that make sense with your niche and provide some kind of value to your audience. Promoting random products that have no connection to your content can come off as inauthentic.
Focus on products that solve a problem or fulfill a need for your audience. If you’re part of the audience you’re writing for, this will be easy. If not, you may have to ask friends who are part of the audience or do other research to find out what your readers want.
Product Quality
Another important factor to consider is the quality of the affiliate products you plan to promote. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and ask yourself if the product is something you would personally use or recommend.
Again: you do not have to stick to only products you own and have tested. But at least read reviews to make sure the product seems to work well for most people. Think like a shopper.
High-quality products build trust with your audience and are more likely to give you conversions.
Analyze the Sales Funnel
Think about how you’ll build a sales funnel around a product. Are you just going to make a list of “best products for X” or are you going to review a product and promote it on relevant pages, or build a whole website around one product?
And when people click your affiliate link, are they going to be taken to an Amazon page, or a website about the product, or something in between?
Answering these questions can help you figure out which products are going to be profitable. Look at the product’s price point, conversion rate, and average customer lifetime value.
Products with a well-optimized sales funnel are more likely to convert visitors into customers.
Read Product Reviews and Feedback
Before committing to promoting a specific affiliate product, do some research on its reputation and customer feedback. Look for product reviews, testimonials, and social proof to gauge the overall satisfaction of previous customers.
Promoting products with positive reviews can enhance your credibility as an affiliate marketer. Promoting lousy products can drive away readers and ultimately crash your whole business model.
Test and Track Performance
Once you’ve started promoting affiliate products to promote, you’ll need to track sales and conversions and test your setup.
Some affiliate programs give you great insights. You can tell where clicks and sales are coming from, and delete links that aren’t performing, for example.
And then there’s Amazon, which is a black box and doesn’t even tell you which pages are getting clicks, let alone which links. They don’t have sub-IDs, so the only way to differentiate two links on the same page, for example, is to use two different tracking IDs. Then you end up with hundreds of those, which makes it hard to track per-site earnings if you own multiple sites.
Clicky is the best tool I’ve found for analyzing how Amazon is working for me, because it shows my outbound clicks without me having to do any setup. You can use Google Analytics as long as you learn how to set up the tracking.
Keep Testing, and Optimize!
As you get more experience with affiliate marketing, you can optimize your strategies and scale your efforts. Experiment with different promotional tactics, like email marketing, social media campaigns, and content optimization.
Also experiment with different products. Sometimes you’ve got the right promotion method, but the wrong product.
The best advice you can get with affiliate marketing is to keep trying things, and keep records of what you’ve done and how it worked out. I use Fusebase and Clickup to record what I’m doing and what’s working.
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