Affiliate Marketing Ideas - How to Increase Revenues

[KevinU]

There are many good affiliate marketing ideas you can use on your website or blog to increase revenues and leave your competitors in the dust. Many of them are very easy to do while others will require a little work. Let’s look at a few of them:

Write Reviews
One of the most popular means of earning referral income is to write unique reviews of the products or services you’re linking to. This only works for positive reviews, of course, since you’ll be writing at length about the benefits of the product and “pre-selling” it to interested consumers. At the end of the review, you’ll add your affiliate link to the product.

Get Indexed in Google
If you know just a little bit about internet search engines, you know that your site must first be indexed so that people can find it. You can go directly to Google and enter your site’s URL at the “Add a Site” feature, but it can take several weeks for the Bot to drop by and crawl your site. A better option -- and one of the most phenomenal of all affiliate marketing ideas you can use for getting indexed quickly -- is to have a blog.

Since the function of blogs as social commentary is to be relevant for only a short time, Google and the other search engines rush around looking for the bestest, fastest, and oh-so-latest blog postings, and they get indexed quickly. And for that matter, blogs with feeds tend to get indexed even faster.

Insert The Affiliate’s Code in the Text
You’ve probably got some affiliate ad banners and Adsense in the side column of your webpage or blog already and that’s fine. But to really increase your revenue it’s a good idea to incorporate or embed the affiliate link right into your text. This is one of the best affiliate marketing ideas you can learn and start using today. Studies show consumers are more likely to click on a link they encounter in text than click on an ad banner off to the side.

Use E-Mail Campaigns
If you do e-mail campaigns and send out newsletters, paste your affiliate links into the body of the text or at the bottom of the e-mail. Just remember you should never put affiliate promotional materials in an attachment and never use spamming techniques. You can also simply direct email recipients to your website’s page where they can view an article (with your affiliate product link) you’re writing about.

PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising has launched many a new website to the top of the search engines and is one of the more well-known affiliate marketing ideas. It has the most immediate results and it’s easy to monitor and adjust. You’ll know in days if an advertising campaign is working or not. To buy PPC ads, for example, using Google Adwords, you pay for a 3-line advertisement to appear on the right side of Google’s SERPS when a certain keyword phrase has been entered in the search field by a user. You pay only when users click on the ad and visit your site.

The trick of course, is to turn those visitors that you’ve just bought into paying customers. Unfortunately, too many PPC amateurs end up spending more money buying clicks than they make on commissions from the merchant. If you’re going to increase traffic to your website immediately using PPC, you’d better have a well-written site that pre-sells (with a conversion rate of 2% or better), as well as the funds to support the PPC campaign.

Use Google Analytics
Another favorite in affiliate marketing ideas is to use Google Analytics. This webmaster tool is located in your Google account (don’t have one? Get it, it’s free!). It will show you the various keywords and keyword combinations that visitors used to find your site. You’ll be surprised at what you find; mainly odd keywords that don’t represent your site’s content but obviously ones which don’t have a lot of competition if people follow the SERP link to your page.

Content, Content, and More Content
You’ve read about this in every article of research you’ve done and it still remains at the top of all affiliate marketing ideas: you must keep adding fresh content. Always. Either write a new blog every day or several new web pages every week and keep growing your site. Content is king on the internet and sites that offer the most relevant and most unique information will win the traffic wars every time. And more traffic translates into more commissions and sales for the affiliate marketer.