How to Increase Affiliate Marketing Conversions in 2020

Affiliate marketing can be a great source of passive income for any marketer and publisher. In fact, some content marketers and entrepreneurs have even made full-time incomes just from engaging in affiliate marketing alone.

But like any income stream for your business, you need to know how to get the best results you want with actionable, effective tactics and strategies.

In this post, we’ll show you 9 highly actionable tips to get you started on making more affiliate conversions this year and beyond.

9 Tips to Increase Your Affiliate Marketing Conversions in 2020

1. Make sure your website is at peak performance
2. Create product tutorials and walkthroughs
3. Write a unique resource list, a detailed review, or an honest comparison
4. Add CTAs and links wherever possible
5. Include personal notes in your emails
6. Add images to your affiliate promotions
7. Develop strong relationships with affiliate managers
8. Use an exit intent pop-up
9. Optimize pages and posts for SEO

Make sure your website is at peak performance

First and foremost, make sure your website is performing at tip-top shape. Keep it running blazing fast with excellent hosting so any pages, posts, images, and videos can load right away.

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High bounce rates and low session times may be caused by a slow-loading website. Remember that people expect a web page to load in under 3 seconds – so if you’d already had a visitor who might have been a potential affiliate sale, then you’d lose them if your site didn’t load quickly.

Create product tutorials and walkthroughs

Value is the name of the game of any content marketing strategy – the same goes for affiliate marketing. If you can give your users compelling content, they may be encouraged to use your links to purchase.

One of the ways you can provide that value is by giving a product tutorial or walkthrough. These are great ways to show users a behind-the-scenes look at your processes step-by-step, while giving them access to the actual tools you use.

Write a unique resource list, a detailed review, or an honest comparison

Another way to generate more affiliate conversion-centric content is to create high-value resource lists or vaults, reviews, or comparisons.

Now, it’s important to note that there may already be several reviews or comparisons or resource lists in your niche. So this makes it integral to your strategy to make these posts unique.

Don’t be afraid to be honest about any pros and cons. Inspire users with some use cases they might not have considered. And talk about your personal experiences using these products.

Add CTAs and links wherever possible

If you’re promoting an affiliate product, it may not be enough to only link to it once or twice in an entire blog post.

One best practice to increase your affiliate conversions is to make sure you’re linking to the product whenever it’s mentioned. But another high-performing tactic is to include very clear CTAs to let visitors take action.

Include action words and phrases like “try This Product for free” or “sign up for your Y free trial” to help encourage readers to click through to your links. Here’s where you can read more about more copywriting tips to increase conversions.

These CTAs can even be displayed via buttons or CTA boxes so they catch readers’ attention.

Include personal notes in your emails

If you have an email list full of nurtured leads, then they might be most primed and willing to purchase affiliate products from you. Consider sending high-value newsletters that include your affiliate marketing products, then add a very personal note that mentions you’re using affiliate links.

Tell your readers how much you’d appreciate their support by purchasing through your links, and how that helps you to keep creating valuable content for them. You can even add a quick note to say they can purchase through your links if they found any of your posts valuable.

Don’t underestimate the power of the personal touch – many subscribers will appreciate your honesty and may be encouraged to use your links as a thank you for the resources and tips you share.

Add images to your affiliate promotions

Another way to make your affiliate products stand out and get more conversions is including images wherever applicable.

For example, if you’re reviewing physical products, you can include high-resolution photos of them across your blog post. If you’re talking about or doing a tutorial for software, include images of each step or the end result.

Be sure to link these images with your affiliate links, as visitors may click on the images in order to make a purchase.

Develop strong relationships with affiliate managers

You might be able to leverage your relationships with brands who have affiliate programs. Instead of focusing on breadth, you can instead dive deep and focus on increasing your commission rates per affiliate manager over increasing the number of your affiliate products.

Most affiliate marketers choose to market between 1-10 products as is, and there’s a reason for that: you can focus on creating very valuable resources that feature these products and become the go-to third-party expert for readers.

It also increases your chances to get affiliate conversions for visitors looking for specific results or processes related to a particular product.

If you focus on nurturing your relationship with your affiliate manager, you can ask to increase your affiliate commissions. Even a 5% increase can add up in the long run.

Consider pitching mutually beneficial campaigns you might be able to do together. For example, offer to host a jam-packed webinar about a particular topic for their audience.

Check out this list of some of the best affiliate programs you can join today.

Use an exit intent pop-up

On posts or pages that talk about a specific product or service, you can create a custom exit intent pop-up that is also a CTA for users to either purchase or sign up for a trial of the affiliate product you’re promoting.

Set it up to appear on very specific pages that explicitly talk about these products, so users don’t feel like you’re pushing something that’s irrelevant.

See the image below for an exit intent popup for a Grammarly sign-up. This pop-up would be a great CTA on either a Grammarly review or a better-copywriting blog post, for example.

Optimize pages and posts for SEO

Last but not least, put your efforts into creating evergreen content that’s search engine-optimized. Pair SEO with your content marketing campaign, and then you can start to see more affiliate marketing conversions over time.

To make the most of this, you might want to focus on products that are readily available or never go out of season.

Optimize for different keywords, be it product-centric keywords or niche topic keywords. For example, if you decide to a step-by-step guide to designing a high-converting landing page with Leadpages, you can optimize for keywords like “Leadpages step by step guide” or “how to design high-converting landing pages.”

Key Takeaways

Affiliate marketing takes work in order to make it work. But have no fear; refer to this list of the best tips to increase your affiliate conversions. Soon, you’ll be making enough affiliate commissions to help you shoulder other marketing and operational costs – all on autopilot.