5 Tips for Affiliate Marketing Beginners

5 Tips for Affiliate Marketing Beginners

Reader Comments (23)

  1. Hey Sonia, Jessica, and Bob ;). I was particularly interested in this one because I’ve always wondered why Copyblogger, the blog, only rarely links out to other affiliate programs. Mind shedding some light?

    • We focus on selling our own products. The idea is that if we’re constantly trying to “monetize” every opportunity that comes by, we’re actually hurting ourselves on our core business. So a lot of times we’ll link out to books and other products with a direct link, even though an affiliate opportunity exists.

      But we love to pay our own affiliates lots of money. 😉

  2. Hey Guys,

    Great content and an excellent look at trust within content marketing. Building reputation is always going to sell more products.

    Thanks for sharing.

    Dan

  3. Great advice! I listened to the conversation and realized how much I still have to learn if I really want to succeed as an affiliate. It’s not as easy as it looks — it’s a constant learning experience — but once we know where to find information and learn things become clear. Thanks you all for sharing your knowledge with us.

  4. Sonia you were in Vegas “last week”… was this show recorded the week after Affiliate Summit? If yes, I was there too! I’ve been doing affiliate marketing primarily via PPC for a few years. That was a great explanation of the pros & cons of affiliate marketing via PPC vs. content marketing!

  5. A clarification question – when you were discussing the pros and cons of PPC vs affiliate marketing it seems like you were talking from the perspective of the advertiser, not the site where the ads appear. You mentioned the cost of PPC, needing to do A/B testing, etc. If that is indeed the perspective you were speaking from, what are your thoughts for the blog that “hosts” the ads? I respect the point that affiliate content is evergreen. For someone new to hosting ads, should I jump right in to AM or tip toe with PPC? Can you do both PPC and AM on the same blog?

  6. Using PPC purely for affiliate type sites is against Google’s TOS (if you are using AdWords) and risk having your URL and campaign suspended. There are other methods of driving paid traffic like direct CPV to get a flood of cheap traffic but good luck getting any conversions as majority of this is likely to be non targeted.

    Building high quality authority blogs combined with organic SEO is the best way forward for long term affiliate income, something I am re-modelling a lot of my niche sites around.

  7. Thanks for the great podcast. I think its really important to treat affiliate marketing as a business and look at the long term. Your quote really sums it up well “don’t take shortcuts, it takes too long!”

  8. Good point about content creation being important as a tool to communicate with potential buyers. Pay-Per-Click is a good way to drive traffic. But as with any type of traffic, free or paid, it’s what you do with that traffic that’s important. If you send people directly to a merchant’s website, you miss out on the opportunity to get subscribers onto a list, build relationships, and recommend multiple products and services that your readers need.

    I wrote an article on this subject and you can read it here if you’re interested in building a list:
    http://marketingwithderrick.com/the-truth-about-affiliate-marketing/

    Derrick

  9. Excellent affiliate marketing tips for beginners! I like your holistic content marketing approach and “do it right” attitude. In the end, we all want to build a solid online business that lasts for many years.

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