Ways To Use Inbound Marketing To Generate Higher Affiliate Commissions

Affiliate marketers can dramatically improve their ROI and market with greater ease than ever before by taking advantage of inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing generally produces a higher return on investment (ROI) than outbound marketing and offers more opportunities for fast market growth. This is because many people have not yet taken advantage of inbound marketing for their affiliate campaigns.

Inbound marketing for affiliates doesn’t have to be complicated provided you have a clear strategy for converting your visitors into buyers. For example, a plumbing company was able to generate a 620% increase in organic visits using inbound marketing.

FireFish was able to increase their leads by 190% using inbound marketing.

What inbound marketing enables affiliates to do?

• Lower their cost per lead
• Increase their return on investment
• Increase their positioning in the marketplace as a thought leader
• Strengthen their relationships with their customers

Overall inbound marketing means higher profits and easier marketing for you, provided you do it the right way.

Ways to Generate More Affiliate Commissions

1. Don’t sell but educate

Many affiliates make the mistake of trying to just pitch products in their inbound marketing communications. This is a serious mistake because it prevents you from achieving the success that you could.

Visitors are not very interested in reading scores of advertising, they are interested in solving their problems.

What you need to do as an affiliate is deliver useful and relevant information to your visitors, while also showing how the products you promote enhance their lives.

You can accomplish both with the following content model:

• Talk about the visitor’s problem,
• Help them to solve their problem through valuable tips, and
• Show them that they can get more help on their problem by purchasing a product you promote

In this way, you are able to provide value to your visitor while also getting the opportunity to promote your affiliate products. In general, we recommend an 80/20 approach to content/pitch.

• 80% Content
• 20% Pitch

This helps to ensure that both, Google and your website visitors, will be thrilled with what you have to offer.

2. Identify and give what people need

You want to identify what it is that your visitors are looking for. Fortunately, there are a wide variety of ways you can discover what your visitors want, and deliver it to them.

A. Conduct Surveys

Putting a survey on your site enables visitors to give you vital feedback about new content and how to better serve your website browsers. You can put small pop-ups in the corner of your site that request feedback, as well as placing a static link on your home page.

You should ask your visitors vital questions such as what:

• content do you wish we offered that we haven’t given you yet?
• are your biggest problems you want to solve?
• what were you looking for when you came to this site?
• questions have you been unable to answer that we might be able to help you with?

Asking these questions can give you a wealth of insight into new ways to market to your customers. You can gain an edge over your competition through better data and stronger marketing information.

B. Use Google Analytics

Check Google Analytics and see what exact match search phrases your visitors are using to discover your site. You may be surprised to discover that many browsers are using search terms you have not been targeting.

This can give you new content to write about, and opens up the opportunity for new keywords to target. You should also check out:

• Referring websites content for topics you haven’t covered on your site
• Most visited content pieces for ideas about what you can write more about

If you notice a few topics on your site are particularly popular, you may want to invest in more content surrounding those topics.

3. Encourage user-generated content on your site

In some cases, the creation of user-generated content has increased sales by 140%. You can allow users to post their reviews and ratings of the affiliate products you are promoting to create greater:

• Authority
• Trust
• Value

For those who are considering buying your affiliate products. Just look at the success of Amazon and it will be clear to you that user-generated content is not only the future but soon it will be a must for affiliate marketers.

With it comes the added advantage of higher conversions. Not only do you get more website content for your site, bringing more visitors and higher SERPs. You also get higher sales from the greater trust and transparency that user-generated content creates.

If your affiliate site is large enough you may also want to consider investing into:

• Website forums
• Creating discussion posts
• Viral content
• Controversial content

Generally, the more you can get your visitors to engage and interact with your website, the greater value you can deliver. User-generated content is the future of the internet, and facilitating it on your site is a must if your serious about succeeding with inbound marketing.

4. Test and track affiliate offers with your content

Using software such as Google Content Experiments (it’s free) you can test different affiliate products with your website content. This enables you to see which offers work best with your inbound marketing content.

This is a must-do for any affiliate marketer because it enables you to achieve higher profits through some simple testing. Here is how it works, let’s say you have two different offers that you are considering promoting with a piece of inbound marketing content:

Offer A – $40 earned per 100 visitors
Offer B – $60 earned per 100 visitors

Now we can clearly see that offer B is the better choice for our inbound marketing campaign. With a simple test, we have increased our ROI on this inbound marketing campaign by 50%. Imagine if we never ran that test, we never would have known which offer was more profitable.

In that case, we might have chosen offer A instead and made significantly less money for no good reason. This is why it is critical for affiliates to test their offers in conjunction with their inbound marketing content.

5. Provide useful and engaging content relevant to what your promoting

Engaging your website visitors becomes more important as the internet grows more competitive. Engagement is about turning on your visitor’s brains and getting them interested in what you have to say. One of the simplest ways to create greater visitor engagement is through greater sensory stimulation:

• Adding relevant images to your content
• Adding videos to your content or making videos of your content
• Turning blog posts into podcasts for users who prefer to listen to content

There are also a few more ways you can make your inbound marketing content itself more interesting:

• Ask your readers questions and engage their minds
• Talk in terms of what your readers are interested in
• Use headlines and sub-heads to keep readers attention from dropping
• Write an outline for each piece of content to keep the content on track
• Show real-world examples and application instead of just theory
• Take advantage of bold, underlines, and italics to keep the content moving forward
• Write shorter paragraphs and break up your content.

Ultimately if your readers don’t actually read what you have to say, your inbound marketing campaign is useless. Getting your inbound marketing content read means writing exciting and passionate information that people will enjoy.

You want to focus on building content that is:

1. Innovative
2. Unique
3. Exciting
4. Passionate

Furthermore, you should try to avoid any content that:

• Just rehash what’s already been said
• Is boring
• Lacks passion
• Doesn’t provide new or interesting information

Your readers are looking for the latest, newest, most up-to-date solutions to their problems. Your job as an affiliate marketer is to provide that to them through inbound marketing content. When you do that, getting affiliate sales becomes simple and easy.

Stages of Inbound Marketing

We can break inbound marketing into a number of different stages. At each stage, a few crucial activities take place that brings you one step closer to affiliate profits. Inbound marketing isn’t hard or complicated, you just need to know the steps and follow them.

When you understand the process your readers need to go through, then you have everything you need to profit from inbound marketing. It’s broken into 5 steps:

1. Attraction
2. Leads
3. Sales
4. Value
5. Referral

1. Attraction

The first step in the affiliate conversion process is to attract the right visitors to your inbound content. You can do this by keyword research and tailoring your content for those keywords. Then you want to distribute your inbound marketing content on your site and on a variety of related sites in your market.

The attraction stage is all about building valuable content that your target customer would want to read. This means creating new and informative content that they haven’t read elsewhere. It is critical that your content is exceptional or it will be very hard to achieve fantastic results.

2. Leads

Once you have your target customers visiting your website, you need to convert them into a leads in your sales funnel. Usually, the easiest way to do this is by offering something for free in exchange for their email address.

Then once you have their email address you can make offers to them for your affiliate products and give them more great content.

You can offer a free report about something that is of interest to your target customer or provide a free email-based course to them. The idea is to offer something of value that your target customer wants in exchange for their email.

3. Sales

Once you have someone in your sales funnel as a lead, it is time to convert them into a sale for one of your affiliate products. Remember to test out different affiliate offers on your leads to see which produces the highest profit for you.

You should also track:

• Which keyword your lead used to visit your site
• Which referring sites your lead has been to before coming to your site
• Where they come from

You want all of this information because it helps you to improve your ROI. For example, if you know that your best customers come from Sweden and search for “dog training collars for cold countries” then you know to focus your efforts on that criteria.

However, if you do not know where your best customers are coming from or why then you won’t be able to optimize your marketing for maximum ROI.

• Transforming your leads into sales is a simple process:
• Identify and know your lead’s problems
• Promote affiliate offers that solve their problems
• Build trust and authority with your lead to strengthen the power of your recommendations

Ultimately if you are offering a great product with good marketing, that solves a big problem in your lead’s life, you cannot help but make sales. Most people experience problems when they:

• Don’t solve serious problems in their prospective customer’s lives
• Promote products that are not top-notch
• Fail to establish a strong relationship with their leads before recommending products.

You should see yourself as an educator and advisor in your leads life. You wouldn’t recommend your best friend buys a low-quality product, and the same is true for people in your sales process.

Ultimately if the product is good and you are targetting the right people, making sales is simple.

4. Value

Once you have converted a lead into a sale the next step is to increase the average value of each customer in your database. You may have customers now or in the future, you will have them.

Each of those customers has spent a specific amount of money with your company. You want to find new ways of increasing the amount of money your customers spend at your business by:

• Recommending new products which complement the ones your customer has already bought
• Solving new problems your customer is experiencing
• Offering premium versions of products your customer already has

Marketing statistics show that it is 10 times easier to sell to an existing customer instead of a new one. That’s why it’s in your best interest to focus your marketing efforts on selling more products to your existing customers.

It’s been proven to be more profitable, and easier to sell to existing customers.

5. Optimization

Ultimately the internet is constantly changing and what is profitable today may be unprofitable tomorrow. With the rapid evolution of the internet, it is vital that you have your business constantly adapt and change for higher profits.

You want to continually optimize:

• Average visitor length on site
• Average purchase value
• Conversion rates
• Lifetime customer value
• Cost per lead
• Cost per sale

By continually improving the above statistics your website will experience consistent, steady, and reliable growth that you can count on. Follow these tips for inbound marketing and watch as your affiliate profits soar.

Real-World Example

This article wouldn’t be complete without showing you how this all works in action. We are going to take a look at someone you may already know, John Reese.

• John Reese is a famous former internet marketing guru who now owns a game development company.
• He was famous for being one of the first internet marketers to make a million dollars in one day.
• John has a product called Traffic Secrets 2.0.

To market his product he did a lot of inbound marketing for his sales funnel. John created:

• High-quality blog posts for 1 year
• Developed a huge following via email, Twitter, and blogging
• Created high quality, informative videos

With these three things together John was able to launch a hugely successful product. He also promoted a wide range of affiliate products such as “World Wide Brands” and experienced huge success because of his strong relationship with his following.

Here are the key elements he used to make millions of dollars through inbound marketing:

1. Produced extremely high quality, innovative, new content
2. Promoted that content through email, social marketing, and the blogosphere
3. Got his blog visitors to sign up for his email newsletter
4. Built a strong relationship with his list through great content and personal stories
5. Promoted great products that genuinely helped his followers as an affiliate marketer
6. Launched his own products

As we can see the creation of great content and the promotion of that content are the key elements of John Reese’s strategy. You can replicate his results by:

• Building a great blog
• Promoting that blog
• Converting blog visitors into email newsletter subscribers
• Promoting affiliate products via your blog and email newsletter

Okay, now you have everything you need. It’s time to get to work and start marking money! Stop reading and start implementing what you have learned now.