Hey everyone! I hope you have had a really nice 2011 and are ready to crush it in 2012 as an affiliate marketer. The New Year brings a whole new set of circumstances and issues into peoples lives that affiliate marketers can target on their websites, blogs, Fan Pages, and Tweets. People will be searching for topics related to their New Years resolutions, so make sure to heavily focus on those niches to fully capitalize. I wanted to take a minute to discuss some ways Affiliate Marketers can take advantage of the New Year to earn more commissions. Here is a list of ways Affiliates can promote better and be more effectively during the Q1 time-frame:
1. Focus on New Years Resolution Products/Services – during the New Year time-frame, people are trying to do things like: lose weight, stop smoking, find love, get in shape, save money, get more organized, reduce debt, travel, and many other related types of things. So make sure to heavily promote “New Years Resolution” oriented products and services because they tend to covert really well during the Q1 time period. People will be flocking to Google to search for various information, strategies, and products related to their New Years resolutions, so if you have created content on your websites talking about that you could get that visitors to come to your site. Likewise, you should be posting on your Facebook Fan Page and tweeting helpful information and articles designed to help people and also save them money with great companies you are affiliating with.
2. Focus on Building Your Subscriber List – Make sure you are prominently displaying your newsletter sign-up, Twitter account, and Facebook Fan Page widget on your sites and blogs in order to increase the overall rate at which you gain new subscribers. This is always a good idea because you can re-market to your fans, followers, and subscribers during the year. Also, running a WildFire sweepstakes or contest is another great way to opt your site visitors and subscribers into your contest and capture their contact info so they can become part of your audience.
3. Syndicate Your Content Better – Once you have posted a new review or blog post, make sure you are “syndicating” your content by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, and your other favorite social bookmarking sites. By syndicating each page or blog post you are spreading it around for others to share or like it, which allows other people to be exposed to your content. Consider launching online press releases with ereleases.com which will build inbound links to your site and also get you additional organic search engine rankings depending on your release title and content. This is a very cost-effective way to spread the word about your site or company.
4. Increase Your Social Networking Presence – Always make sure to add new Facebook friends, Twitter followers, Foursquare friends, and connect with people on forums and other types of sites that allow you to build friends. Building more friends and followers is always a great idea because you can interact with them later and share your content and pages with them. You can never have too many friends, followers, and subscribers to your content. You should be focused on building all of these areas so you have more people overall to market to. Rapportive is an amazing tool that connects right in your gmail and allows you to invite anyone in your email box to connecting on all their social profiles.
5. Message Your Fans and Subscribers More Effectively – Now that you have fans and subscribers to your newsletter, what are you sending them? Make sure you are sending quality, purposeful messages that will be well-received. This is a process that should improve over time until you are sending really professional, effective messages to your subscriber base. Send timely types of promotions and balance your promotions with good content and articles so it will be better received. Try to enrich people’s lives with your content or articles for respected 3rd-party sources. Don’t forget to be super-friendly to your fans and followers and seek to engage them in discussion. Also, polling and surveying your fans is a great way to spur interaction on your Facebook Wall and get the sharing ramped up.
6. Build Your Social Networking Karma – Social networking is the most power tool there is and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Make sure you are proactively interacting with your friends and followers by Sharing, Commenting, Retweeting, and Liking their posts (where appropriate). By doing this you will build up a lot of good “social karma”, which increases the likelihood your connections will Share, Comment, Like, and Retweet your content, which helps it go viral and get more traffic.
7. Ask for Higher Payouts – Make sure to ask your Affiliate Advertisers for higher commission amounts, especially if you have produced for the company in the past. Most Advertisers hold back what they can payout, so there is room to go up with commission amounts. If they balk at your request tell them you will go to their competitor and I bet they change their tune quickly. Tell them you can produce more sales if you were at a higher commission rate.
8. Make Sure to Promote Deals from Your Advertisers – Make sure you are promoting current deals and coupon codes from your Advertisers because people like getting and using deals, and they increase the conversion rate on the click-though. If people come to your site and find no promotion they may go elsewhere looking and someone else will get the sale. Promotions and discounts tend to increase the likelihood a visitors will make a purchase, so make sure to offer people coupons and discounts when you share companies and offers.
9. Learn from other Affiliate Marketers – Making friends and learning from other affiliate marketers is a great way to further your own knowledge. Don’t be afraid to share what you know with others so you can get ahead together. Don’t get sucked into “make money online” courses and systems, as they usually are worthless and just want your money. There is plenty of free information out there to guide your online marketing efforts.
10. Ask for Products to Review/Samples- Reviewing products and services is a great way to provide valuable content for your readers and subscribers. Providing an actual product review can be very effective in selling the benefits of the company you are promoting. Also, you can ask for sponsored prizes to give away in your sweepstakes and contests. That way you can really ramp up the excitement level on your sites or fan page.
11. Produce More Content – Content is everything, so make sure to write until your little fingers get sore, or outsource your content writing to get more content written faster. Websites tend to rank better in the free traffic resultes when you post frequently to your site or blog, so don’t be afraid to post several times a day to your site. And make sure you are syndicating and sharing all of your new posts. The more pages of original content you have on your site the more free traffic you can bring in from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. So make sure to post like crazy so you can build your free traffic up over time. Look at your site like a house you build bigger and bigger until it’s a mansion that gets a ton of traffic!
These are some ways to improve your Affiliate Marketing efforts in the New Year. Let me know if you have any questions at all about these strategies, I would love to review them with you. Now get to it and build out the web with a bunch of great content and share it! Good luck in your 2012 Affiliate Marketing goals!
– Evan
