Although PPC can be considered one of, if not the, most used advertising platform online, affiliate marketing is still a great platform to make money from. Affiliate marketing works by directing traffic to buying products or services, for which the person who sent the traffic that ended up buying the product/service gains comission on every sale. This can range from very small (less than 1%) to very high (over 50%) commissions depending on what affiliate marketing network you use and what type of product you promote.

However, unlike PPC advertising, there needs to be a strategy with affiliate marketing. You can’t just place links and adverts on pages with traffic and hope that it will make you money. For this reason, here are some tips you can use you to help maximise your revenue stream when using affiliate marketing,

#1 Display Related Products/Services to Your Content

This is, by far, the best tip and, probably, the most obvious tip to give anyone who was thinking of using affiliate marketing.

As already mentioned, affiliate marketing works by getting people to buy something. With this, a web user is far more likely to purchase something such as a camera after a review of a camera than bluetooth headphones after a review of a camera. You need to make sure that whatever product or service you are advertising on your articles/website that they relate closely to the content. Without this, there is no contextuality, for which powers advertising online as we know it.

#2 Don’t Oversell

An inherent problem of affiliate marketing is the fact that the blogger has a financial incentive to promote something as being good and worth buying. Therefore, there will be some that will purposely say things are worth buying, even if that person doesn’t actually think that, just to get the commission from web user’s purchases.

This is wrong.

Affiliate advertising very much is based around reviews. Therefore, if you continually oversell products and services, your opinion is going to seem less and less important to web users simply because they will not trust your opinion. The more honest you are with things, the more trust you will gain with the web user and the more sales you will get (and, therefore, commission) when you do finally come across something that is worth promoting because it is good.

#3 Be Transparent

Going on the same point as above, trust is everything with affiliate advertising. When I read and watch reviews, I take note of the review based on how much I trust the reviewer. With this, a good way to increase the level of trust with the web user is to tell them, straight up, whether the links to the products you have included in the review are affiliate links or not.

Honesty is key to affiliate advertising. For that matter, it could even work in your favour such that your affiliate link offers the web user some sort of discount – in this situation, it is worth mentioning this as it has the potential to increase the number of sales your affiliate link achieves.