Master Affiliate Marketing in 6 Steps

Posted: 2^nd January 2017

By: WiRE Team

Have you considered unlocking the potential of your website to make money? Liz Walsh from Topdogdays uses her own experience of affiliate marketing to provide a few handy hints for those interested in exploring new avenues for their current business.

You’ve probably been providing interesting & engaging content on your site for some time. Heck, it takes passion to set up & sustain a business! With persistence, you’ve acquired skills & expertise in your field and affiliate marketing can provide you with the opportunity to apply this knowledge and convert it into actual sales.

Affiliate Window reports that website publishers are already providing £15 billion in sales for the advertisers they promote. Whilst the larger name companies take the lion’s share, it is the content specialist sites with a passion for what they do, that makes up the rest.

So for those with an interest in developing their business into pastures new, we’ve put together a few handy hints to help you explore if affiliate marketing could work for you too.

Handy Hints For Those Considering Affiliate Marketing

1. Unlock the potential of your website to make money by adding a further stream of income to your business portfolio. Use your acquired skills & expertise to tap into affiliate marketing where you can be rewarded for your selling or promoting someone else’s product.
2. Sign up for free with a range of different affiliate marketing sites such as Affiliate Window & Commission Junction.Worth exploring the range of merchants available under each affiliate marketing site. Find products and services that will fit well within your field of interest.
3. Never dilute your message for a quick sale on a product that isn’t well suited to your site. It’s better to slowly integrate like-minded products befitting your niche market.
4. Take a good look at the terms & conditions for each affiliate marketing programme you join to ensure compliance.Businesses looking to build affiliate sales will require an engaging and effective website that ranks well on google and other search-based sites. This takes time and effort to achieve but you’ll find that persistence and hard work will ultimately pay off.
5. With affiliate marketing sites, you tend to find a significant delay between achieving actual sales and receiving payment, that can cause cash flow problems. Try to achieve a range of distinct revenue strands that will help you balance the books.
6. Write for the reader! Whilst this maybe a little controversial in these times of SEO, it seems to me that you can’t go wrong with good quality, engaging & original content.

About TopDogDays

Like MoneySavingExpert we have been using affiliate marketing to generate income for a number of years. Whilst we don’t claim to be on the same standing as the mighty Martin Lewis, we’ve found it to be an effective way to monetising our website. Let’s face it, there can’t be many jobs where you get paid to enjoy days out around the UK!

Affiliate marketing rewards you for selling or promoting someone else’s product and the crazy thing about it is that practically anyone with a website can get a piece of the action. Our story began back in 2009 with a half baked idea and pinch of magic so it’s worth considering if you too can tap into this potential money spinner.

Having previously run a daycare business in Staffordshire, we became renowned for our unusual days out, but trying to find new places to visit on a budget was becoming ever more challenging. Topdogdays stepped into the gap to provide information on days out on a budget and now receives in excess of 1.2 million visitors a year.

However back at the beginning, in 2009, it all seemed a little different. With limited IT skills that hadn’t developed further than a game of pac-man, we used a basic word press template to create the first version of the site. Seeing those first visitors trickling in was simply astonishing – who needs reality TV when you’ve got google analytics!

However the beauty of affiliate marketing is that it doesn’t require a huge set of IT skills just an ability to provide original, good quality & engaging content and haven’t we all heard that before! In this Google-led age, most of us are already providing such-minded articles on interests that inspire us.

Fast forward a couple of years and our visitor numbers at Topdogdays had continued to climb as we began to rank highly for particular key terms. Whilst the business had previously relied upon building relationships with individual visitor attractions, we decided it was time to dip our toe into the affiliate world.

Once we took the plunge we saw sales coming in practically overnight, (remember we had been up & running for some time already). Affiliate marketing allowed us to reach a wider number of businesses in a quicker space of time. With a loyal following and a range of web pages primed for key terms, it was an easy move to include affiliate marketing within the business mix.