So you have decided to start affiliate marketing, but what should you include in your affiliate marketing plan? As you may have read in How to Make Money Online With Affiliate Marketing, or Make Money Blogging with Affiliate Marketing, one of the first things you should do, is plan your strategy. Despite what you may have read, as easy as you may think making money online may be, you have to plan and have a solid business and marketing plan.
By mapping out your affiliate marketing plan, you can ensure your actions stay inline with your goal and keep you on the write track. Without a plan you may find yourself deviating from your intended path, or simply wasting time doing things or writing content that is just not productive to your online business.
Before you jump into selling products and promoting affiliate links you need to define your strategy. But what should you include in your affiliate marketing plan? Lets take a look:
Define Your Goal
The most important step is clearly defining what your goal is. For most it will simply be to make money online, but this isn’t specific enough to help you achieve financial freedom. It really isn’t enough to decide upon a dollar amount you need to achieve to retire, and a date you want to make it by.
Your goal should be more specific to your process, and clearly define your journey in a way that you can measure and track your process. For example your overall big goal may be to become a leading affiliate marketing authority blog and reach over 100,000 monthly views.
This is achievable, measurable and will also contribute to you earning the amount you wish to make. Now you have defined you ultimate goal, you need to then break it down into smaller more manageable milestones you wish to reach along the way.
For example you may want to achieve 1000 monthly views by X date. Or you may want to post 1 blog per day for 30 days. Each mini goal should contribute to your ultimate goal, and help you keep yourself accountable.
Getting to Know Your Market
In order to successfully market to your audience, you need to understand them intimately. What are their interests? What are they trying to achieve, and what products excite them? Without these key answers you can’t effectively market to them. Having a large audience is great, but not if none of them are interested at all in what you are promoting.
There are many different ways you can get to know your market, they all just require a little bit of time. First google the topic. This will enable you to find another niche blogs, where you can see what other influencers are saying. Lets not reinvent the wheel, others before you have done the research and know what the market wants, take their lead.
Secondly social media is a powerful research tool. Use hashtags to search for other users in the community posting content. Take note of what it is, and what it says. Then visit their accounts, if they are an authority in the industry follow them.
Finally you can visit forums, if your industry has them. For example if you are promoting supplements you could visit body building forums. Scrolling through the post topics will give you a strong indication on what people are asking, and the information they want.
Your research will heavily direct your content strategy. Which social media channel to use, what content to blog about and what posts to make.
Consider Traffic Generating Strategies
There are countless methods to generate traffic and promote your affiliate links. However it is unwise to try them all. It is far better to concentrate on the few you know you have the skills to master, and work them into your daily and weekly routine.
For example you may decide Instagram will be a key part of your affiliate marketing plan. Once you have established how often you should post, Social Media Posts – How Much Is Too Much?, you can map out your content and start posting. Your goal might be to post 2 posts a day.
It is important with any traffic generating strategy, to measure the outcomes. In Instagram you can view the analytics of each post, how many clicks you generated to your website, and when the most views were generated on your account. Experiment with different content, and posting times to identify the best strategies.
Regardless of what your strategies are, if you monitor them you can discover what the best method is, and which generates you the most sales. Traffic is one thing, but ensure you measure as well how much of that traffic converts. You may find the best method does not generate the most overall traffic, but results in the highest number of sales.
As you learn and grow, you may discover new traffic strategies. You simply add them to your affiliate marketing plan, monitor and measure your outcomes.
Use Affiliate Marketing Tools
Work smarter, not harder. Harness all the tools you can to make your affiliate marketing journey easier. If you are struggling with something, more than likely someone else has, and has created a tool to help automate it.
Recently I discussed the,Top 4 Bloggers Tools 2019 Before starting you should check it out, and get each of the tools I suggested on there. By using affiliate marketing tools and software you can ensure you stay organised, and key on top of your strategy.
Without it, you run the risk of falling behind and becoming overwhelmed. The number one killer of any affiliate marketing business is motivation, and consistency. When you become overwhelmed you will undoubtedly loose motivation. Which will then be a detriment to your consistency. Resulting in less success, less sales and less motivation. And the cycle continues.
Carefully Consider Your Market
Rather than focusing on a generic, highly competitive market, it may be better to consider a more specific niche market. Your competition may have been in the industry blogging, or promoting their products for years. If you choose a more specific niche within the bigger market, you can stand out from the competition.
With far less competition, it will be far easier and quicker to establish yours as the authority.
As you become more targeted into sub-niches you will find the community is more likely to be involved within the wider overarching niche, and thus more likely to buy.
When considering your market it is also worthwhile doing some research into the available keywords. You may find your niche, is not actually a niche at all. Before you begin if you do your keyword research, you will immediately have good targeted words to shape your content and blog posts.
Tools such as SEM Rush and Keyword Toolare incredibly helpful in finding long-tail keywords (very specific and less specific ways of searching for your topic) that you hadn’t even thought of.
I Have Completed My Affiliate Marketing Plan – What’s Next?
Great you have a plan, you have a niche. But you are still not sure how to take action, and the finer details of marketing. When I started Affiliated Success, I had one goal in mind. To find the best way to make money online.
Funnily enough in searching for opportunities to expand my knowledge and market my business the right one, I stumbled across the best affiliate program around. If you want to make money online, you need a real system, a good affiliate program, and training.
Fortunately through all my reviews and research I have found the perfect program that ticks all the boxes. If you understand that you need to work to make money online. You need to be committed to set up an online business to eventually earn you a passive income, then read on. If you want to make money fast, and lots of it, this isn’t for you.
Below is my number 1 recommendation for making money online. It will teach you the tools YOU NEED to make money online, and to be successful. Regardless of how you want to make money online you need to know how to sell it, where to sell it, and how to run your business. This is how I learnt ALL of that, and grew to the position I am in today.
If you are serious about making money online this is the program for you:
This simple program has made me the MOST money online.
>>>> Check Out My Number 1 Recommendation For Making Money Online <<<<