Every affiliate marketer needs traffic otherwise you will never make any sales. If there are no human eyeballs on your offer, then the potential to earn an income from your affiliate marketing efforts will never materialise.

Of course there are great ways to promote your affiliate links and then there are not so great ways.

In this post I want to cover the best way you can promote your affiliate links, as well as giving you some insight into what to avoid as a beginner so you do not waste time, money and effort.

I am going to assume that you know about affiliate marketing, you have a product to promote and you know the link that you want to promote.

If you do not yet have a product to promote then check out my article Top 10 Affiliate Programs for Bloggers and Marketers. You can also read 6 Most Profitable Niche Markets For Affiliate Marketers And Bloggers which helps you discover different affiliate programs and networks and the most profitable niches.

In this blog post you will learn:

• How to use blogging to promote your affiliate links
• How to use product reviews to promote your affiliate links
• How to use SEO to promote your affiliate links
• How to use email marketing to promote your affiliate links
• How to use display banners to promote your affiliate links
• How to use PPC to promote your affiliate links
• What to avoid when promoting affiliate links

6 Great Ways To Promote Your Affiliate Links

How To Use Blogging To Promote Your Affiliate Links

Blogging is probably one of the best ways to promote your affiliate link, but it is one of the most time-consuming ways that take time to develop traction.

Why?

Because you have to build a blog, add content to it and then start promoting that content. When you start promoting that content you have to build a presence online as an authoritative figure so it will take time for people to trust your brand.

Whilst blogging has its downside, it is the best way because it is then easy to create a passive income stream from the blog.

As they say, spend time doing the work once and then it pays for itself over and over again later.

If you have not yet started a blog you can read my article on The Complete Beginner’s Guide To Starting A Successful Blog, ,where I take you through a step by step guide. You can start a blog for as little as $3.95 through Bluehost when you use my referral link.

The key to promoting your affiliate links with a blog is to create content that is valuable and useful for the reader.

Your content must seek to inform and educate the reader. So if you create a blog just to act as an affiliate blog where you place your links everywhere then you will hardly get any results.

The strategy to using affiliate links in a blog is to place them naturally within the content.

For example don’t do this:

This is an awesome training course that I would recommend you use. Here is the link www.awesometrainingcourse.com/affiliateID=no1wants2it

Instead do this:

This is an awesome training course that I would recommend you use. Here is the link.

What you are doing here is hyperlinking the text instead of exposing your affiliate link and this can be easily done from your WordPress editor.

Let’s say you are promoting one product with a blog. You should not stuff the blog content with affiliate links just for the sake of adding affiliate links.

For example, if you are writing a review article on the product, a good rule of thumb is to insert the affiliate link once every 500 words. You do not want to appear obvious to the reader by linking the keyword at every chance you get.

What I like to do is link in the introduction of my content and then create a specific call to action at the conclusion of my content.

You should also track your affiliate links to see which article or content is driving sales for you. This makes it easier to see what is working within your blog and where your focus should be.

A great place for help on tracking your affiliate links With Google Analytics is Matthew Woodward’s article on How To Track Anything With Google Analytics Event Tracking.

Another important point for you to know is that Google recommends that bloggers use the rel=”nofollow” tag attached to their affiliate link. This ensures that when you place a paid affiliate link in your blog post that it will not affect Google’s search results and consequently your site’s ranking in the search results.

Also if you are not sure about the content that you are linking to, it is good practise to use the rel=”nofollow” tag at the end of your link, so that the authority from your website page, known as link juice to Google, will not pass to the website where the content is questionable.

I use the Ultimate No Follow plug in from WordPress which easily integrates into your WordPress editor and allows you to add the rel=”nofollow” tag to every external link at the click of a button.

How To Use Product Reviews To Promote Your Affiliate Links

Product reviews can be done on many different platforms.

Niche Website

You can create a niche website where you only feature product reviews for many products to build a huge authority product reviews website.

Or you can do a very specific product reviews website where you focus on just one product.

Either one of these would be targeted towards Amazon customers and Amazon products using the affiliate program, Amazon Associates.

Each of these types of sites have their own advantages and disadvantages. For example if you want to create the larger site, it will require more time and content to build.

Whereas if you create the smaller specific site, it will be less time consuming as you are only focusing on one product.

With the smaller site however, you must do your research to ensure that you are reviewing a product that is in high demand but have low competition. I talk more about targeting niches that have this high demand, low competition in this article here.

Niche websites can be created in the same way as a blog, using WordPress and great web hosting. See my article The Complete Beginner’s Guide To Starting A Successful Website for step by step instructions.

Facebook

If you have a Facebook fan page with a lot of followers, you can write product review posts. Be careful with this method however as Facebook has reduced the opportunity for owners of fan pages to promote posts to their organic followers.

Fan page owners now need to pay to advertise to their own followers in Facebook’s recent algorithm update.

Another tip with Facebook is that you can try to take the customer off of the Facebook platform by directing them to your niche website review. So instead of creating a Facebook post that reviews the product, create a post with a short caption and direct the visitor to visit the niche website for more information.

When using Facebook, it is important to remember that it is not a place for promotional content. People do not go to Facebook to buy products but rather to hang out and socialise with friends.

So make your posts friendly and engaging.

If you are using this method, it is also a great idea to cloak your affiliate link using cloakers like Bitly, Goo.gl or Tiny URL. If you would like to cloak and track your affiliate sales then another great tool, although it is a paid option is the Clickmagick link tracker.

Facebook does not like affiliate links this is why using cloakers is a great tool for your business.

YouTube

You can also create a YouTube channel specifically for product reviews or as an educational platform where you recommend the affiliate product. Make sure to place the affiliate link within your description box and cloak the affiliate link as well using the cloaking tools I mentioned above.

The most important step when creating product reviews on YouTube is to ensure that the content of your video is of a high quality. Product reviews should be detailed and honest. These are two determining factors as to whether any viewer takes you seriously enough to buy your recommended product.

The biggest mistake you can do is to go on YouTube simply with the purpose of selling your product. So for example, creating a video which highlights the product and merely asking for a sale is not good enough.

I can almost guarantee that you will not get any visitors to your affiliate offers.

However if you take the time to provide content that is helpful, useful and honest, people would thank you for taking the time to show them more about the product by using your affiliate link.

How To Use Search Engine Optimisation To Promote Your Affiliate Links

SEO, blogging and niche websites all go together.  If you have a blog or website, your main goal should be to create content that is SEO friendly.

That means that the search engines can find your website and rank it within the search results. This makes it easy for people to find, read your content and eventually click on your affiliate link.

You should also make sure that there is a lot of search traffic for the product that you are promoting.

Therefore when choosing a product to promote, find one that has a lot of search volume. Want to know how to find those products that have a lot of search volume? Read this article here.

What to consider when creating an SEO friendly niche website/blog:    

Keywords

These are the words that people are searching for in the search engines that will show your website in the search results. If your website is for the purpose of making money, then you should focus on buyer intent keywords.

For example:

• Best weight loss pills
• Weight loss pills that work
• Best digital camera for video marketing
• Wooden wardrobe discount sale

You should distinguish buyer intent related keywords from informational keywords. For example, some informational keywords where the searcher does not have a buying intent are:

• Weight loss pills help
• Weight loss pills blog
• How to do video marketing
• Video marketing tutorial
• Wooden wardrobe pictures

Content

Google likes valuable content that is helpful and useful. The longer your content (some say more than 2000 words), the more authority Google attaches to your website.

Therefore when writing content for SEO related affiliate websites, your goal should be to over-deliver on content.

Try to also create unique content. Most websites touch on similar topics but to stand out from the rest you can take a piece of content that is great and either update it or add to it.

Backlinks

This is the most important thing that you can do for your affiliate website to work for you. Backlinking is simply the process of having authoritative websites link to yours. There are many good ways that you can achieve this:

• Guest posting writing blog posts or articles for authoritative websites in your niche and linking back to yours.
• Outreach link building editorial links from authoritative websites. This can also include simple roundup posts that link back to your site as an authority to consider.
• Social shares from your website to social media platforms.

How To Use Email Marketing To Promote Your Affiliate Links

The money is definitely in the list that is why you should be building your email list as an affiliate marketer.

If you don’t know how to start building your email list then check out my article The Ultimate Guide To Email Marketing which will take you through step by step how to start building your email list using email software like Aweber or GetResponse.

Communicating with your potential customers via email is one of the easiest traffic sources to tap into especially if you have cultivated, nurtured and added some type of value to your subscribers.

In the event that social media sites terminate your account for policy violations or Google penalises your website, you will always have your email list as a source of traffic.

Of course, the bigger your list, the more likely you are to make sales.

The rates go something like this. 30% of your email list will likely open your emails, 13% would likely read your email and click on your link and then 2% would likely buy something that you recommend.

So if you are selling a product where the affiliate commission is $25 per referral or sale and you have an email list of 10,000, then you have the potential to earn $5000 from one email blast.

That is the power of an email list.

A few things to remember when using your email list

• Don’t oversell your email list.

You do not want to sell products all the time to your list. No one likes to be sold to, so keep your emails more valuable then anything by following an 80/20 split. 80% more value 20% sales.

• Segment your list often for more opens, more click throughs and more sales.

You can even have subscribers that click on a certain link, opt in again in a special funnel. This tells you that these subscribers are more serious and therefore are more likely to buy your products.

• Split test subject lines and email content.

You will get more open rates when you do this. Some people may not resonate with one subject line, but will resonate with another. Don’t be afraid to test your subject lines.

• Clean your list.

Sometimes a list might go cold. You may notice that your open rates are getting lower and lower. If that is the case it is time to clean your email list and get rid of those subscribers who no longer open your emails. The way I like to do it, is like this:

1. I segment my email list with those people who have not opened my email within a month.
2. I send one email to that segment letting them know that I have noticed that they have not opened my emails and asking if they would like to stay. If they wish to stay on my list they should click on a special link within the email.
3. I give them 3 days to do that.
4. Anyone who does not open my email or click on the link will get deleted after 3 days.

It is a good idea to always keep your email list fresh because this affects your email account score and your ability to deliver emails to your subscriber’s inbox.

It also keeps your email software cost down so you will only be paying to have quality email subscribers on your list.

• Always cloak your affiliate links.

Email softwares do not like affiliate links. This is why it is important to cloak your affiliate links using link tracking software like Clickmagick or link shorteners like Goo.gl, Bit.ly or Tiny URL.

The best way that you can cloak affiliate links for email marketing is by using the Clickmagick software as it gives you the ability to track which email converted into sales.

It also lets you create your own custom domain and split test different landing pages to see which one produces better results.

Link shorteners like Goo.gl, Bit.ly or Tiny URL only cloak your affiliate link but do not allow you to analyse your clicks so you can optimise your marketing. This is something to be wary of. 

How To Use Display Banners To Promote Your Affiliate Link

Just like you would use a blog or website to promote affiliate links, you can also add banners to your website.

A banner looks like this and is a clickable image that takes the visitor off of your blog or website, onto the affiliate product page.

It is simply another method for attracting visitors to offers where text links may not prove effective.

When using banners a good idea is to have them at the side column of any website or blog. You can also have them within the content.

Banners should be consistent with and relevant to the content that is on the website. So for example, if your website or blog is in the photography niche you would not display a banner that is in the knitting niche.

Of course it makes sense because your visitors would probably only be interested in photography so your banners should be relevant to them.

As an affiliate, some companies do provide their own banners in your affiliate tools dashboard. So be sure to look out for them.

If you want to create your own banners you can do so as well. You can use design tools like PicMonkey or Canva.

Some best practices when it comes to creating banners:

Banners should be simple yet effective. Communicate one key message on your banner and ensure that you include a strong call to action like Click Here or Start Here

The smaller your banner in size, the more effectively it will load. Although banners can be any size, for horizontal banners I prefer to use a resolution of 728 pixels x 90 pixels. For vertical side column banners I prefer to use a resolution of 300 pixels x 600 pixels.

Clicks to banners should open in a new window if you want your visitor to remain on your website. Always be sure to select this option when customising your banner ads.

Don’t overload your website page with banners, especially the ones that flash. This can be distracting and lead to higher bounce rates.

How to use PPC Advertising To Promote Your Affiliate Link

The biggest names in PPC (pay per click) advertising are Google Adwords, Bing Ads and Facebook Ads.

With PPC you are only paying for the click to your link. How it works, is you bid a certain price for relevant keywords as with Google Adwords or Bing Ads and interests as with Facebook Ads.

The keywords are all related to the product that you are selling. If you win the bid then your ad may show up in the search results as in the below examples.

The key to having effective PPC ads is to ensure that you track your data using a tool like Clickmagick.

You will be able to track which keywords are giving you conversions on your website so you can optimise your ad for better results by focusing only on the converting keywords.

If you are using Facebook PPC ads to drive traffic to an affiliate offer, be sure that you are testing different interests within your ad sets and use tracking tools to measure your results.

If you are new to Facebook Ads I would recommend following the Social Traffic Blueprint course which walks you through how to use Facebook ads for your business so you can get profitable results. What I like about this course is that not only do they teach you Facebook Ads but you have lifetime access to the course with updated content throughout your lifetime.

So if Facebook changes their algorithm which affects how you run your ads, you will get access to that updated material ensuring that you are always using current strategies.

The creators of the course also give weekly group coaching calls which are invaluable as they can critique your ads and help you to optimise them. They are also pretty active in the private Facebook members group answering questions from their members.

As a bonus they allow you to promote their course to other potential students where you can earn $500 per affiliate sale.

To view a free webinar with the Social Traffic Blueprint, click here.

The #1 Strategy To Crush Facebook Ads

What To Avoid When Promoting Affiliate Links

Before I go, I wanted to touch on a few things that you should be aware of when promoting affiliate links.

There are many ways that you can promote affiliate links but there are also a few things that as an affiliate marketer you should avoid.

When you are placing affiliate links on the internet, it is crucial that you track everything that you do. Avoid using affiliate links without some type of tracking software.

The reason for this is because you want to understand what traffic converts better so you can place more attention and effort on that traffic source. This can ultimately help you save money.

I would therefore recommend using a tracking tool like Clickmagick.

Avoid using as many traffic sources as you can when promoting your affiliate links. The above are some suggestions to you, but if you want to perfect your advertising, choose one or two traffic sources and learn to master them. Each of the methods are effective but you only become really good at it when you focus on understanding how they work.

When promoting affiliate products it is a good idea to use lead capture pages to attract leads, then send your leads onto the affiliate product page. This way you’re also building your email list for retargeting and monetisation.

Final Thoughts

Promoting affiliate offers requires commitment and a skill set that involves targeting, advertising, email list building and knowing your product.

It is not a simple thing to choose a product, put up some advertisements and hope they convert. It takes a lot more effort and the right tools to make affiliate marketing work.

If you are excited about affiliate marketing or need more training, you should check out my guide on How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without A Huge Blog or Website 

It’s the perfect solution for those who are looking to promote an affiliate or network marketing product, but really don’t want to create a traditional blog. This guide teaches you how to do affiliate marketing or promote any product with small valuable blog posts.

Plus it comes with a bonus freelancing guide that teaches you how to get other people to pay for your business costs and how to use free traffic methods to promote your content fast for incredible results.

You can check it out by clicking here!

Remember that the most difficult part of any business is showing up. Make sure and show up today to get the best chance at success.

Don’t wait too long to invest in you.

Cheers,

The post 6 Great Ways To Promote Your Affiliate Links appeared first on I Am Dawn-Marie.

One of the reasons why I like Facebook ads is because you can quickly launch a campaign and get sufficient data to help you decide whether a campaign will be profitable in a short space of time.

It is also easy to scale an advertising campaign once you have found one that is profitable. By scaling it, I mean you can add more money to your advertising spend and then make more money on the output from your affiliate offer.

Whilst Facebook ads has powerful data points to help you identify your target market which makes it a very popular platform amongst advertisers, with the recent Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal it is also difficult to have your ads approved if you are promoting an affiliate offer.

This is because Facebook does not permit certain types of advertising campaigns and if it does, you must be very careful the angle that you’re taking when promoting the offer.

For that reason I thought it would be helpful to you guys to understand different angles that you can use to promote your affiliate offers using Facebook ads.

Here’s What You Will Learn:

• How to know whether your affiliate offer is compliant with Facebook Ads
• How to promote your affiliate offer via a blog post
• How to promote your affiliate offer via a bridge page
• How to promote your affiliate offer via a sales funnel
• How to do direct linking of your affiliate link without getting in trouble
• How to set up your Facebook ad

How To Know Whether Your Affiliate Offer Is Compliant With Facebook Ads

One reason why new affiliates get their ad account banned or suspended on Facebook, is because their affiliate offer is not permitted on Facebook.

Like any advertising platform, Facebook has rules and guidelines that assist advertisers in understanding what Facebook does and does not accept.

Therefore before you even start an advertising campaign on Facebook, take the time to read their Advertising Policies to see whether your affiliate offer or product is accepted on the platform.

When reading the policies, pay attention to the restricted and prohibited content.

Prohibited content means that the product or service is not allowed on Facebook. Restricted content means that whilst the product or service may be allowed on Facebook, there are additional requirements that must be met for the ad to be approved.

Therefore although your product or service may fall under the prohibited content category, there is still a chance that your ad could be disapproved if it does not fully comply with Facebook’s requirements.

So let’s look at an example.

|Supplements

Most offers promote some type of supplement – hair supplements, weight loss supplements, skin supplements. If you have decided that this is a product you’d like to promote, this is a restricted product on Facebook.

Their advertising rules say that “adverts that promote acceptable dietary and herbal supplements may only target people who are at least 18 years of age.”

Now whilst you may think that all you have to do is set your targeting to persons over the age of 18 years, closely consider that the product must also be “acceptable” to Facebook.

How Facebook defines the word “acceptable”, it is not quite clear. You will see from the above screenshot that they have merely listed examples of supplements that are not permitted but this is not an exhaustive list.

For this reason and because of the ambiguity and uncertainty over the type of supplements that can and cannot be promoted, it is best to avoid this product in your Facebook ads to avoid your ad account from being suspended.

If you are convinced that your product is allowed and safe to be promoted on Facebook, you can also reach out to a member of the Facebook support team with your proposal before you start your ad.

You should note however, at least from my experience, that some of the support team merely repeat what is included in the Advertising Policies and offer nothing different than what is already stated there.

How To Promote Your Affiliate Offer Via A Blog Post

Once you have decided on a Facebook compliant product or service let’s talk about how you can promote that offer.

Most people do not want to do the extra work of creating content to sell a product so they link directly to the site. There are a few instances when direct linking may be the best and I shall discuss that later.

I find that the best way to promote any product, whether it is an affiliate product or not, is by a blog post.

A blog post helps to deliver value to your reader and gives them insight into the product that you’re offering.

With a blog post, you are taking the Facebook user from off of Facebook and directly to your blog. This is a great strategy because you own the blog, you are free to include as many affiliate links as you want. You can also hyperlink text on your blog so that your affiliate link is not easily identifiable.

Whilst the Federal Trade Commission mandates that bloggers must prominently disclose their affiliate relationship, the ad to blog post method removes any suspicion from the Facebook user that they are being directed to an affiliate site.

As an affiliate another reason why the ad to blog post method is attractive, is because you can write compelling content that encourages Facebook visitors to click on your affiliate link thereby leading to more sales conversions.

I particularly like this method and have used it in many of my Facebook ad campaigns. In fact in my latest eBook, Make Money With Small Blogs, I provide a step-by-step breakdown of how this strategy earned me a return on investment of x2.7 with an affiliate product.

To use this method you will need to set up your own blog. You can start a small blog with Bluehost for as little as $3.95 per month.

If this interests you, then be sure to follow my step-by-step tutorial on how to start a blog with WordPress.

You can also use other content management software like LeadPages or Clickfunnels. I use LeadPages to create my small blogs for Facebook advertisements.

How To Promote Your Affiliate Offer Via A Bridge Page

If writing content in the form of a blog post is not your thing, then a more simple method is to use a bridge page.

A bridge page, is any page where you take the visitor to a single website before directing them to the affiliate offer.

Your bridge page can have content on it if you want to, such as an image, text explaining to the user why they arrived at the page and a call to action button.

Here are two examples of simple bridge pages used for affiliate offers.

When the user lands on the black mask bridge page, the affiliate link is embedded in the call to action button “Yes! Instantly Apply My 65% Discount”. On clicking that button they are directed to the affiliate product.

The same for the Gentleman’s Beard affiliate product. The affiliate link is embedded in the “learn more” button.

By using this method you are using a simple way to introduce the Facebook user to your affiliate product instead of sending them directly to the affiliate offer.

This bridge page is useful for many purposes:

• You can track individual campaigns using a tracking link provided by Clickmagick. Clickmagick is a tracking tool that all affiliate marketers should have in their arsenal to track their campaigns and make it profitable.
• The tracking link can be installed on the bridge page’s call to action button if you’re trying to understand which Facebook audience interest clicks on the call to action button to learn more.
• You can track the performance of the bridge page which can result in higher conversions. If people are not clicking on the call to action button, then it means your bridge page is not effective and so you can work on improving it.
• You can pre-sell the affiliate product on the bridge page if you want to. You will notice on the Black Mask bridge page a video is included. This video can be used to pre-frame the visitor for what they can expect when they visit the affiliate page.

To create your bridge page you can use many content management sites. I use LeadPages to build my bridge pages. You can also use Clickfunnels or WordPress.

How To Promote Your Affiliate Offer Via A Sales Funnel

In addition to a blog post, sales funnels are an excellent way to promote an affiliate product. This may take some creativity and time from you but it is worth it.

To use this method you will need the following:

A lead magnet – a product that you can give away that is relevant to the affiliate product and which is considered to be of a high perceived value.

A sales funnel which can comprise two or three pages. So you may have a lead capture page that takes the lead to the affiliate offer or a lead capture page that takes the lead to a pre-sell page then the affiliate offer.

An email autoresponder. Because you are building an email list using this method, you will need an email follow up sequence. Most affiliate offers provide you with affiliate tools which include email scripts.

Keep in mind that by using this method, the prospect’s journey is longer so any sales conversion can be delayed and may require more advertising spend to test whether the affiliate offer converts.

By using a sales funnel in your Facebook Ads you keep your affiliate link off of the Facebook platform and if you are strategic enough with your content, you can promote affiliate products that are likely to be disapproved on Facebook.

For example, let’s say you want to promote diet supplements but you are not sure whether it is permitted on Facebook. You can create a sales funnel that gives away a lead magnet promoting healthy living then only when the lead enters your email list you can start promoting the affiliate offer.

I would like to add as well, that this method can also be risky as some advertisers claim that Facebook inspects your funnel as well as your emails by opting into them, to keep out prohibited business models.

In my opinion this is quite an extreme level of safeguarding their platform, but I thought I would mention it so you are aware of it.

How To Do Direct Linking Of Your Affiliate Link Without Getting In Trouble

Sometimes writing a blog post, using a bridge page or building a sales funnel, does not convert your traffic.

It happens.

You may think that you have the best content but for whatever reason Facebook users are not converting with it.

This is where direct linking may be an option and I would recommend that this is used as a last resort.

Why should it be a last resort?

Because  you can lose a lot of money if there are very little affiliate tools to properly track your marketing efforts.

If your affiliate tools enable you to track your affiliate campaigns and add pixels to the sales page, then it can be to your benefit as you can then use the data you gather to retarget your visitors.

If not then you are likely to lose a lot of money and diminish your chances of securing a return on your investment.

Also, because links are long and appear ugly, they can be seen as spammy and Facebook does not like this. If many affiliates are using direct links in their Facebook ads, Facebook tracks the link and blacklists it. When the link is blacklisted, Facebook can suspend your ad account. 

As long as you are aware of this and understand the risk, here is a pretty good hack that I use to link my ad directly to an affiliate offer.

To tell whether an affiliate link can be directly linked to an ad, include the link in a Facebook chat or try and post it on your Facebook personal profile.

If you get the error that the link is blocked, then you should not use it directly in your ad as you run the risk of your ad account being suspended for using malicious and suspicious content.

If the link is blocked on Facebook, even masking the link using a tracking link or a domain forwarding service can still prevent you from promoting the product as Facebook has a robust system where they scrape data from your landing page and look for trigger words that can cause your account to be suspended.

Therefore this is a warning that you should not take that risk. Before putting an affiliate link in your ad, use the method that I teach you above to determine whether it is blacklisted or not.

If the link is not blacklisted, be sure to review Facebook’s Advertising Policies to ensure that the product you’re promoting is permitted by Facebook and if it is, consider masking the link using a link shortener like Bit.ly or a custom domain link tracker by Clickmagick.

To hide the link completely from Facebook’s users, when building your ad, you can include the link in the website URL field only instead of the text box along with your ad’s content.

How To Set Up Your Facebook Ad

Now that you are familiar with the number of ways that you can promote your affiliate link with Facebook Ads, I will quickly show you how to create your first Facebook Ad.

It’s really simple and takes less than 10 minutes.

Watch the video below.

Wrapping Up       

You can become successful as an affiliate marketer with Facebook advertising as your traffic source.

Facebook Ads is a high quality platform for driving targeted visitors to your offers and if you play your cards right, you can end up earning a lot of affiliate commissions.

As an affiliate if I were you and you wish to master Facebook ads, I would recommend spending a small budget like $100 to $300 per month testing various affiliate offers.

When you find an offer that converts well, cut the losing ad campaigns and scale the winning ad campaigns.

Whilst I have given you a small overview of the Facebook ads and affiliate marketing process, there is so much more to learn about using Facebooks ads for your affiliate marketing campaigns.

My latest eBook, How To Make Money With Small Blogs is a useful and helpful resource that teaches you how to promote small niche affiliate blogs using Facebook Ads.

I give away my Facebook Ads strategy that I continue to use over and over to get visitors to click on my link and check out my offer for sometimes less than $0.25.

With other traffic sources like Bing Ads or Google Ads you could pay up to $1.50 or even $6 per click. So if you’d like to see how you can save money using Facebook Ads, then the information that you will learn in my eBook will be a valuable outlet.

Click here to check out the eBook.

The post Facebook Ads Guide And Affiliate Marketing Strategies appeared first on I Am Dawn-Marie.

He tried everything. From teaching English online, to launching and selling merchandise but never had momentum to make enough money to replace his full time job income.

He was looking for the ultimate side hustle and kept seeing many people talk about affiliate marketing.

Related Articles: 

• 10 Step Blueprint For A Profitable Affiliate Marketing Campaign
• How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without A Website Or Blog
• How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

It was mind blowing the type of money people were talking about so he decided to dive right into it in January.

One night, while talking to a friend, Justin was introduced to the CB Passive Income which is an internet marketing training that allows people to copy a proven internet business system so they can create their own income using automation.

When CB Passive Income launched, Justin had already been doing affiliate marketing for six months and was getting the hang of it.

What attracted him to CB Passive Income however was the hands off approach to earning an income online. The done for you model made it possible to simply share the program and courses with his audience and the marketing is done by the system.

Before he was earning somewhere close to $1500 a month but wanted to see how far he could push it and thought this was the best vehicle for him to test that.

His income goal was to earn $10,000 a month and the way that CB Passive Income was being promoted he felt that it could be the one.

Here is how the conversation went:

Jason: I’m promoting this program which is helping business owners learn how to set up their businesses online.

It’s a brand new platform and we’re actually looking for affiliates to promote it as well.

Justin: I have been doing affiliate marketing for a while and I’m actually looking for something new. Tell me more.

This is exactly how it all started for Justin.

As an affiliate marketer what you need to realise is that once you understand how to sell a product on the internet, getting future sales for a product is no secret.

All it takes is showing your offer to the right number of people with the expectation that some of those people will convert to sales at a percentage.

So if you show your product to 300 people and 3% of those people convert into sales, then it is simple mathematics to find out how much you can make from the sale of that product.

But no doubt there are strategies that each marketer can use to get more effective results and this is what Justin did.

He stepped outside of the box and did things a little bit differently. Everything involves strategy and these are the exact steps he took.

Education

Justin first of all purchased the CB Passive Income product so he could see for himself what it was and whether he could promote it.

He followed up with Jason and according to Jason it had many tutorials within the program that taught you step by step how to set up the program and automate it.

Justin was intrigued by the material within the program and studied each video and realised how powerful the lessons were.

He also saw that they had several different products to promote and tested each one of them to make sure that the steps that were being taught were simple to follow.

After all if he is putting his name to a product he has to be assured that it does what it says so as not to mislead his audience.

Justin also looked at the compensation plan.

He had to make sure that it was worth his time promoting a product and that he would get rewardly generously.

The CB Passive Income pays 50% – 70% on the front end in commissions but as an affiliate and provided he was able to get his referrals to set up their internet business using the tools recommended by the program, he could earn recurring commissions on the backend without doing any additional work.

Planning

Justin did not start promoting the CB Passive Income by posting everywhere on his social media networks.

This is what average affiliates do.

Most affiliates only think about the money aspect of an affiliate product but what they fail to understand is that if they took a little bit more time to add value to their audience, they could build that know, like and trust factor and convert their audience into sales quicker.

Justin therefore created a strategy which was set to put him as the authority in his field and build a relationship with his audience from day one.

Here are the planning steps that Justin took before he launched his affiliate marketing campaign:

1. Create a blog post that had nothing to do with CB Passive Income
2. Create an email list with a follow up sequence of five emails
3. Research his target audience
4. Reach out to influential bloggers for guest blog opportunities

The planning stage took about three weeks as it took some time for the bloggers to get back to him.

In all he was able to secure two guest blog opportunities with high traffic blogs so that took care of some of the traffic that he was looking to generate back to his original blog post.

Justin was in no hurry to make money fast. After being an affiliate for six months he understood that to get the best results, he had to strategically place himself in the best position to get massive results.

Execution

Create A Blog 

Justin did not have a website and did not plan to start one. He decided to set up a quick webpage using a web page builder by LeadPages.

He did not have to buy a domain as LeadPages hosts webpages on behalf of marketers.

So all he had to do was select a pre-designed template and create a blog post from there.

Justin also did not write a blog post about CB Passive Income. Instead he wrote an educational post about how offline businesses could turn fledgling businesses into profitable ones by using the internet and coming online.

He structured his blog post in a way that it gave the reader ideas on how they could use the same concept of consumer generation offline and apply that to online methods.

He also made sure that the blog post mentioned a few of the tools recommended by CB Passive Income as a way of pre-framing them.

He knew that anyone who was interested in reading a blog post like this, would be interested in CB Passive Income

He made sure to add a pixel to the webpage so that the visitors could be re-targeted later through Facebook Ads and Adroll website ads.

By taking this measure, Justin does not appear as a salesman. Rather the first impression his readers will get of him is that he is an expert and can be trusted.

After all he is giving them free advice on something that they want anyway. This way he has allowed his readers to know him, like his work and therefore trust him.

Landing Page 

Next he created a landing page offer with LeadPages as well. This was to be shown to the visitors who first of all visited his blog post and then redirected to the landing page through re-targeting.

The landing page would have an opt in field where visitors could enter their email address to learn more about how they could use the CB Passive Income program to help them grow a profitable online business.

From the landing page, he created a bridge page which had a mini video tutorial introducing the CB Passive Income program. On the video he explained the concept of how an online business worked and then offered the leads to learn more about that with CB Passive Income.

On the bridge page there was a strong call to action where if the visitor clicked it, it went straight to his affiliate link and then onto the CB Passive Income sales page.

Email Marketing 

Thirdly he set up his email list using Aweber. The email series that he created were for those who did not purchase a subscription with  CB Passive Income.

Within the emails he took prospective users on a journey introducing them to CB Passive Income again. Talked about the benefits of the training program, included testimonials of other users and did a walkthrough of what they would get when they joined the CB Passive Income program.

He tracked his progress by looking at who opened his emails and clicked on his link within the emails.

Anyone who clicked on his link, he segmented and sent them a further email with a stronger call to action but this time offering three super bonuses which included a worksheet, additional training to get their business set up and a video tutorial showing the business owners how to earn their first $10,000 online.

The bonuses were all free and he made sure to highlight the value of the bonus compared to the price they would pay to subscribe to CB Passive Income.

He felt that by offering these bonuses would make the prospects more inclined to take the offer seriously and see the benefit they would get when they joined CB Passive Income through Justin’s affiliate link.

That strategy seemed to work as he was able to get a few signups in the follow up process.

Personal Contact

Justin made sure to make himself available to those people who initially signed up for CB Passive Income as a monthly subscriber.

He included several weekly training Google Hangouts and added more value by offering his monthly subscribers free training on how to grow their online business.

To get more value out of each subscriber he would talk about the benefits of upgrading to a Pro Annual member so they could eliminate monthly payments.

This seemed to be received well by a a few prospects and he was able to earn a few $47 commissions from people who liked his training and rewarded his efforts.

Justin knew that personal contact allowed his subscribers to see that he was a real person and was invested in their success.

Every affiliate marketer knows that the relationship between a prospect and them is valuable. If you help your prospect make money, you as the affiliate make money too.

It’s a win win and both parties are happy. So having the weekly training increased the value of his subscribers and therefore earned him more money in his pocket.

The Results     

Only after three months of marketing CB Passive Income Justin added up his affiliate commissions and it totalled $12519 which was $4173 per month. With CB Passive Income he was able to almost triple what he earned from other affiliate products when he started affiliate marketing in January. 

Through his efforts he was able to generate the following:

3100 leads which is 1033 leads each month

82 paid monthly members of CB Passive Income earning him commissions of $1804

25 paid annual members of the CB Passive Income earning him commissions of $1700

73 Clickfunnels members which gave him $5767.00

30 Clickmagick members $788

43 Aweber members $2292

34 GetResponse members $168

These additional products are what he introduced to his members to help them promote their own internet business with CB Passive Income. Each product had their own affiliate program attached to it.

Key Takeaways

For some affiliates they enrol in as many affiliate programs as they can but that only leads to burnout and sometimes confusion as trying to remember all your affiliate programs takes some serious memory skills.

All Justin had to do was promote the CB Passive Income system and the commissions for the other programs like Clickfunnels, Clickmagick, Aweber and GetResponse all happened automatically when they were activated by his members.

So he did not have to waste his time promoting any of the other marketing tools and that was less of a hassle for him because it saved on his ad spend.

By putting his focus on one done for you affiliate program and adding extra value to his members by helping them build their own business with relevant marketing tools, Justin was able to generate a five figure income with CB Passive Income within three months.

Also whilst everyone was sending traffic directly to the affiliate offer, Justin’s approach by using a blog post helped position himself as an authority.

That way when the visitors saw his offer a second time through his landing page, it was a no-brainer to opt into his landing page to get the free training that he was offering on his bridge page.

Justin did not need to know anything about web design or web programming. LeadPages took care of everything for him. He also automated the entire process with the email marketing platform.

Justin’s results show that there is more than one way to get results with affiliate marketing. There are some people who are still trying to get results but when you think outside of the box Justin shows how doing that can pay off big time.

The post [CASE STUDY] How This Affiliate Marketing Expert Made $12500 In Three Months appeared first on I Am Dawn-Marie.

I have news for you. This is not exactly how it works.

Affiliate marketing is like any other job or business. You need the skills and you should learn the skills before you start it.

So this is where you get lucky and where I will take you through the ten steps that you should be considering when launching and running an affiliate marketing campaign.

These steps are all crucial and it is important that you understand each one of them and why you need to do them.

Affiliate marketing is not easy if you do not know what you are doing but today I want to take you by the hand and give you an idea of what you should be doing.

Hopefully by the end of this post you should have some education to at least get you started with your first affiliate marketing campaign.

Here’s what you will learn:

• Research and choose your product
• Decide how you are going to promote your product
• Get your marketing tools
• Design your landing page
• Prepare your email sequence
• Add your tracking pixels
• Create your ad, decide who your target audience is and launch your ad
• Split testing your ad creative and landing pages
• Analyse your data
• Scale

Before I continue I would like to point out that whilst I will give you a guide, there is so much more depth that you need to go into to understand and apply these concepts.

I would therefore recommend taking an affiliate marketing course to give you more value and show you everything that you need to do to be successful.

Also if you are going to read these principles you will never get any results if you do not take action.

So once you have gone through this guide be sure to implement it immediately. Apply it to whatever product you are promoting and remember everything will not happen overnight. It’s a matter of failing a few times before your success appears.

With that little motivation out of the way, let’s get right to it.

Research And Choose Your Product

You can choose whatever product you want to promote but if you want to promote a product that is likely to convert well, read my article 6 Most Profitable Niche Markets For Bloggers and Marketers for ideas.

There are three ways that you can decide whether a product is worth promoting:

• Popularity
• Reviews
• Your intuition

But I will tell you this. Once your intuition tells you go for it, do just that. Go for it!.

Don’t spend a lot of time deciding whether to promote a product or not. You will only waste time.

Let’s go a bit further with each point.

Popularity

Some affiliate networks will tell you how popular a product is. For example Clickbank helps you judge the popularity of a product by giving you a gravity score

The higher the gravity score, the more popular it is.

Related Article: 

• Make Money With Clickbank – The Ultimate Clickbank Affiliate Guide 

Amazon Affiliates tell you about the popularity of a product based on the number of sales or reviews it has.

Share A Sale uses Power Ranks to categorise the popularity of a product.

So whatever affiliate network you decide to join be sure to look out for its popularity points to help you decide on which product is the best to promote.

Reviews

You can also decide on whether a product is worth your time by looking at reviews. Look at both positive and negative reviews.

You can easily do a Google or YouTube search for the product you want to promote. See what other people are saying about it.

Here’s a quick Google review search I did on the Fat Burning Kitchen product from Clickbank.

Click Here To Learn How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

If you do not trust internet reviews then you can purchase the product, test it and review it yourself. This is the best way as it lets you see the product firsthand, it allows you to try the product for yourself and helps you make a good decision as to whether you want to promote the product or not.

Sometimes it may not be practical to buy the product yourself but this is the safest way to decide whether it’s a product that you will be happy promoting and attaching to your brand.

At the end of the day, people trust other people’s judgements so if you promote a product that you have not yet reviewed which then leads to a bad customer experience, you can lose the trust of your audience and your own credibility.    

Your Intuition

Finally your gut instinct will tell you what to do.

Sometimes people overthink an idea when their thoughts are speaking to them and telling them to go for it.

This only leads to procrastination.

So once you have chosen a product and something inside you makes you feel good about it, then just promote it.  

Decide How You Are Going To Promote The Product

There are many ways to promote a product but you must decide exactly where you are going to promote it.

This usually involves looking at traffic sources such as YouTube, Facebook, Bing Ads or Google Ads.

There are other traffic sources like Pinterest, solo ads or ad networks that you can try and it will be up to you to research which traffic source is best for your offer and provides the best results.

The only way you can really do that is by testing each traffic source.

I would however highly recommend using Facebook as your first attempt. Facebook is a very intelligent and super powerful platform that allows you to promote the right product (see Facebook’s Advertising Policies for confirmation that your type of product is allowed on its network) to its audience.

Facebook can produce successful campaigns because of the overwhelming amount of data it collects about its users.

But producing a successful campaign takes time and patience because you have to test different demographics, see how the ad performs on different devices, placements, which country the ad performs better in and other variables.

Split testing all these variables play an important role in determining whether you will have a successful campaign.

It will also be useful and helpful to you if you learn how to use Facebook Ads before you start any ad campaign so you can get better results.

Right now the best Facebook Ads course that I have seen on the market today is by Jon Penberthy and Jubril Agoro who have made millions of dollars with Facebook Ads. They have a free webinar where they teach you the number one strategy that can help you increase conversions in your ad and boost your business.

Click here to view the webinar.

If you do not want to use Facebook then you can use other platforms like YouTube Ads and Google Ads.

Sometimes an offer works better on video so you can trial your efforts to see how it works with video marketing.

Sometimes your target audience may not actually be on Facebook, but may be on YouTube.

You may also get better results by putting an ad in front of people who are actually searching for your product as with Google.

Wherever you decide to promote your offer remember that your goal is to get as many people as possible to see your offer.

The more people that see your offer, the more profit you can make.

Related Article: 

• 6 Great Ways To Promote Your Affiliate Links

Get Your Marketing Tools In Order

To promote any affiliate product you need marketing tools. Marketing tools will help automate your affiliate marketing campaign and streamline the process so you can accurately track whether the campaign is successful or not.

The most essential marketing tools are: 

• Landing Page
• Email marketing software
• Tracking software

|Landing Page

The first thing you will need is a website that will talk to your audience about the offer.

You can either have a large website like mine where you promote many different affiliate products or you can have a small website solely for the purpose of promoting a single affiliate product.

For the purposes of this post, I am going to speak about using a small website to promote your product. This website is what is called a landing page but to promote the product you will be building a sales funnel.

The sales funnel is simply a series of website pages that introduces the product to your audience. It starts with a landing page, goes to a bridge page then the affiliate product sales page.

There are many landing page builders that you can use to design your website and which help you build sales funnels.

I prefer LeadPages because of the ease of creating standalone websites and building sales funnels. It also has drag and drop features and awesome customer service. LeadPages offers a free 14 day trial so you can check them out if it interests you.

Other landing page builders are Clickfunnels which also has a free 14 day trial. I recently discovered BuilderAll which is actually new to the market. I have tested it but I did not like its usability. You may decide otherwise so feel free to check them out by using this link. They offer a free 7 day trial.

Related Articles: 

• 4 Awesome Landing Page Builders You Must Use For Marketing or Blogging  

|Email Marketing

Email marketing software helps you to grow your email list and communicate with your leads to remind and educate them about your product.

This software helps take out the human element meaning that you don’t have to personally follow up with your leads.

The automated sequence of email marketing does that on your behalf.

For your email marketing you can try MailChimp which allows you to store 2000 leads for free before you are upgraded to the paid option.

I use Aweber because it is the only software that helped improve my email deliverability. This ensures that my emails get to my leads’ inbox instead of to their junk mail. Aweber offers a 14 day trial which you can access by Aweber.

Another email marketing software is GetResponse.

Related Article: 

• The Ultimate Email Marketing Strategy For Marketers And Bloggers 
• How To Build An Email List From Scratch 
• How To Get Email Subscribers As A Newbie

|Tracking

It is very important that when you are running any affiliate marketing campaign, that you track your progress.

The reason why you want to do this is because it helps you to see what is working and what is not.

For example if you are testing how two landing pages perform against each other, you can use a tracking software to tell you which landing page your audience prefers.

You can also use tracking software to help you understand which demographic resonates with your ad and consequently which ad is performing well.

This will help you save money so you can cut any ads that are wasting money and save those which are producing results.

Most Ad platforms like Facebook, Google and Bing have pixels which is a piece of code that you can place on your website to track data. This tracking helps you to optimise your ad.

You must also optimise your website and so a tracking tool like Clickmagick helps you to do that by giving you a piece of code to place on your website so you can track which landing page performs better if you are split testing.

Design Your Landing Page

This is where most people get stuck because they do not know what to put on their landing page.

And this is what I tell most people. Stop trying to figure things out on your own.

There are people who have already figured out what works so why not use their success and imitate what they have done?

For example, Sue is promoting a law of attraction affiliate marketing product on Facebook but does not know what to say on her landing page to attract her audience.

The first advice I would give to Sue is to see whether there are any affiliate tools for the product. Most affiliate programs provide already-made landing pages for their affiliates.

So instead of reinventing the wheel, use those landing pages for inspiration. Here’s the affiliate tools page for a program that I am promoting.

Here’s a pro tip! Do not use the actual landing page provided by the affiliate company, because there are many, many amateur affiliates who are already using those landing pages.

As a smarter affiliate you want to stand out. Therefore create your own landing page but model after the one you are given.

For example, change the background image, text and call to action of the landing page.

If the affiliate program does not offer done-for-you landing pages then spy on your competitors. See what is already working and try to produce similar but improved content.

Never, ever copy your competitor’s content as you will lose your credibility.

Going back to Sue’s example, to spy on your competitors you can use a tool like AdEspresso. AdEspresso helps you to create and optimise your Facebook ads easily, but it also helps you to see what ads are already performing well on Facebook.

So by using AdEspresso together with my keyword, law of attraction, these are the results I come up with.

I can take this a step further by honing on the ad and seeing what links the advertisers have in their ads.

If I click on the link I am directed to their landing page and this is the landing page that I can model after.

To make this work successfully pay attention to how much engagement the ad gets. If the ad has a lot of engagement it means it was successful so you can model after the ad creative.

If there is little to no engagement, it means that the ad was not successful and therefore will not be one that you should model after.

Keep searching until you find one that satisfies the above criteria.

Prepare Your Email Sequence

After you have designed your landing page you need to create your email sequence. Plan your email sequence strategically so you can build a relationship with your leads sufficiently to turn them into customers.

When writing my email sequences I keep a few things in mind:

• Length of sequence
• Value
• Pitch
• Bonus

|Length of sequence

When preparing your sequence you want to it to be long enough to get across your point but short enough to keep your leads engaged.

I always find that an automatic sequence of five to six daily emails is good enough to make an attempt to convert the lead to a buyer. When I have sent my sixth daily email I switch to broadcast emails where I follow up with my leads weekly.

By following up with my leads weekly I make sure that they still have that reminder about the product.

You can also keep track of those leads who are no longer engaged and remove them from your list.

|Value

Every email that you send to your leads should be filled with value where you teach your lead something about the product that will help them.

For example, you may do a product review, you may show how the product can help them solve a problem or you may write a blog post about other products like it but still include yours in the post.

This shows the lead that they have options instead of always shoving your product down their throat.

|Pitch

Sometimes it’s ok to sell to your leads.

If you don’t you will never make money and when promoting a product that is the ultimate aim.

But there are ways that you can sell to your leads.

Do it in a way that promotes value. Explain the benefits and features of the product. What’s in it for your lead?

Include a strong call to action in your email pitch and tell the lead what to do.

For example “click here to get 60% off the product” or “click here to join this limited time offer today”.

|Bonus

Bonuses are additional strategies that you can use to entice your lead to take an action.

This makes you stand out from your competitor.

Tell your lead what you will give them or help them with if they place an order through your link.

Your email sequence will determine the number of sales that you can make on the back end and should be carefully thought through to ensure the best conversions.

Here is what my email sequence for one of my products looks like.

Want to see exactly what I write? Then opt into my list here and check it out.

Add Your Tracking Pixels

Depending on your landing page provider, you should be able to add tracking pixels to your website.

To add tracking pixels sign up for Clickmagick. Clickmagick offers a free 14 day trial.

Once you’re in Clickmagick click on Links then Create New Link.

A tracking link lets you measure the number of visitors that are going to your website where TC means total clicks or visitors and UC means unique clicks or visitors.

It also tells you whether any robots have tried to access your site where FC means fake clicks or visitors.

As a marketer this is important for you if there are any disputes about whether your ad network provides human visitors to your websites or robots. If you have run an ad campaign and there are no unique clicks but plenty of fake clicks, this tells you that the type of traffic provided was not genuine.

You will then be able to use this as proof to file a complaint or seek a refund of money for any purchased advertising.

After clicking on Create New Link complete the required fields by naming your tracking link and adding a link ID. This helps identify the tracking link for your reference only.

Add the URL of the landing page that you have created then click Create Link.

If you are split testing two landing pages then click on the gear icon.

Next click on Split Testing.

Add the second URL of your landing page in the space provided. You can split test up to three landing pages with Clickmagick.

Once your tracking link is finalised click the gear icon again then this time select Track Conversions.

This is where you will build your pixel to add to your landing page.

Select Conversion Tracking Method #1 then select Step 2 to use the Pixel Builder.

For a generic pixel follow the selections as in the below image. Your pixel will be built for you and is the final HTML code that you see in the green bar below.

Copy and then place this code within the opening and closing body tags (<body></body>) of your landing page.

Create Your Ad, Decide Who Your Target Audience Is And Launch Your Ad

Creating an ad is the easy part.

You can use any of the platforms I mentioned before to get your product in front of people but I would strongly recommend starting with Facebook because that is where I believe you can reasonably get a ton of success if you play your cards right.

If you already have a Facebook personal profile you will need a Facebook Business Account to get started.

Never run Facebook ads on a personal account as you risk having your personal profile being disabled. If your personal profile is disabled then think of all your friends, posts and pictures being lost into nothingness!

To start a business account click on Create Account.

Click Here To Learn How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

If you already have a Facebook profile simply log in. If you do not have a Facebook profile then create a new one.

Once you have logged in click on Create Account and go through the steps of providing a Business Name and Business Email Address.

You will then come to a screen that looks like this.

Click on Create Ad Account as to run an ad on Facebook you must use an Ad Account. You can create up to five ad accounts in advance.

Complete the required fields by naming your Ad Account, time zone and the currency you want your ad account to be in.

Click Create Ad Account to finalise the process.

When you have created all ad accounts it is time to start running ads. But before you do that, if you have absolutely no idea how to run an ad on Facebook, how to optimise your ad and analyse the data then I would strongly recommend learning from someone who has had success with Facebook Ads.

I learnt everything I know about Facebook Ads from the Social Traffic Blueprint course by Jon Penberthy and Jubril Agoro. So if you would like to master this before you place an ad on Facebook this is where I would suggest you start.

If you don’t want to use Facebook Ads for whatever reason then your options does not stop there. I have tried Bing Ads before and gotten great results.

There is also Google.

But the number one advice I would give you before you start any type of advertising, is to learn how to use them by taking an appropriate course. Do not be selfish with yourself. Invest in yourself and your education. 

Deciding Who Your Target Audience Is 

Your target audience will depend on the product you are promoting.

To find out who your target audience is with your product in mind, there are a few tools that you can use to identify who your ad should be directed to.

The first tool if you’re using Facebook is their Facebook Audience Insights tool.

This tool gives a breakdown of Facebook’s users according to their interests. So let’s say you’re promoting a weight loss product.

From within your Business Manager account click on the three lines in the top left hand corner, then All Tools then under Plans click on Audience Insights.

When you get to Audience Insights select Everyone On Facebook.

Then pay attention to the left column where you will enter your search criteria.

If you are promoting your product to the USA then leave the location as is. Other countries like United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand have less data available so I would recommend leaving the country as USA for every product that you promote.

Next go to the Interests tab.

This is where you need to think about the type of interests that your potential customers like.

I have used the keyword weight loss as I am using a weight loss product example.

When I type in weight loss Facebook gives me the demographic of my audience on Facebook.

As you can see from the results my target audience is predominantly men and women aged 25-54 who live in the US. I usually choose an audience where the percentage of people are over 20.

If you are using Google Ads then you can use their Think With Google Insights Tool.

From there scroll down and click on Shopping Insights.

This insights tool will allow you to see the shopping behaviour of consumers on Google.

Enter your search term. In this case we are searching for weight loss and I have selected the most searched for item related to weight loss which is weight loss pills.

Google will then provide us with data and we can look at our demographics to see who our potential consumers are.

From here you can see that the average age for shoppers who purchase weight loss pills are 37.4 and are both men and women with a 1% difference.

Whilst you can target both men and women on Google, you may get better results when you target only women or only men. It will be up to you to test which ad directed to which target audience converts the best.

Launch Your Ad

Once you have created your ad and researched your target audience you only need to launch your ad and wait for the results.

Here are a few expectations that you should have:

• Your first ad probably will not work
• You have to test many different ads before you get a winner. That may involve launching 10 different ads and studying the results to see which one gives better sales conversions.
• You have to let your ad run for at least 2 to 3 days to get some data. So be patient.
• You have to allocate a decent budget to your ad in order to be successful with your affiliate campaign. How much this budget is depends on the ad network you are using as some networks are more expensive than others.

Split Testing Your Ad Creative And Landing Pages

Split testing is the best thing that a marketer can do because it helps them save money.

The reason why you want to split test your ads and landing pages is because your audience may resonate with one ad over another.

You may also get better responses on one landing page over another.

It is therefore imperative that to run a successful affiliate marketing campaign, that you have to do as many of these tests to see what works.

This is the frustrating part because it takes time, it takes focus and a lot of creative thought.

Some things that you can split test include:

• Your ad content
• The image on your ad
• Whether the ad is a video ad or image ad
• The headline on your ad
• Your affiliate product
• Your landing page background image
• Your landing page headline
• Your landing page text
• The call to action on your landing page.

If you are not prepared to split test, then prepare to fail. It’s that simple.

And this is where newbies give up the fastest, because they do not understand that split testing is part of the process.

And with split testing you are bound to lose money. Again it is all part of the process.

The good thing is however, by split testing you are improving your ad campaigns which will eventually lead to brilliant results. 

Analyse Your Data

As I mentioned before allow at least 2 to 3 days to accumulate data from your campaigns and study them.

See who is responding to your ads. What age groups and which gender.

When you do that you can start optimising your ads.

So for example you can run an ad only to the age groups or gender groups that are engaging with your ads.

Study the click through rates of each ad. Here you will look at those ads that are getting high click through rates at a low price point.

Which ad is making you money. Although an ad is making you money you still need to consider whether it is profitable, most important.

There are so many variables to consider when analysing your ads in order to make your campaign better.

Scale

Once you have analysed your data and know what is working, by now you should have a profitable ad campaign.

From here you now need to scale your campaign to make more money.

Scaling your campaign will involve:

• Scaling out to different countries.
• Increasing your budget
• Using different traffic sources. So if you are using Facebook can you use Google or Bing? (they may not perform better but go for it and test).
• Get an increase in your affiliate commission. Do you think you can approach your affiliate manager and ask for an increase in your commission rate? Of course you can.

Wrapping Up

So I have laid out for you the basics of creating and launching an affiliate campaign. These are the skeletal parts of what an average affiliate campaign looks like but like everything it may appear simple on paper but there is a lot more fine detail that is involved which you can only uncover when you actually start doing it.

At least you have a bare bones blueprint to follow when you decide to take massive action and implement.

You learn the best by always doing and then seeing what works.

If you have any questions be sure to leave them in the comments.

Cheers,

The post 10 Step Blueprint For A Profitable Affiliate Marketing Campaign appeared first on I Am Dawn-Marie.