For that to happen, you need to put your recommendation in front of your audience. Even more importantly, you need to make your recommendation trustworthy.
This is where a lot of affiliate marketers slip up. They think slapping a banner ad up on their blog that links to affiliate products is all they need to do.
But take a look at this:
Create trustworthy affiliate links.
Does that look trustworthy to you? Nowhere close, right?
Well, here’s a little secret:
The most successful affiliate marketing offers look nothing like that. No PPC or veiled recommendations on social media.
Here’s what to do instead (and what marketing channels to use):
Option #1: Create a Resource Page on Your Blog
Our own resources page is a good example:
It promotes lots of different products, but it also explains why those products would be helpful to them.
In other words, it’s not just a sales pitch. It’s educational. Because it contains a lot of quality content, plus it’s well optimized for SEO, it also ranks well in Google search results and gets organic traffic. It gets good conversion rates too.
Chances are, you can put together a landing page like this within a few hours. Your readers will also appreciate you putting all of your recommendations in one place for easy reference.
Option #2: Create and Promote Custom Content
This content marketing strategy will be the backbone of your affiliate promotional efforts.
Use as many of the following different techniques as make sense for your blog and audience.
Note: All of these strategies assume that you are already sending traffic to the latest content you’re creating by emailing your list on a regular basis (at least two to four times per month) to let them know what’s new.
A) Write Reviews
You can write detailed reviews of products, courses, books, or software products you promote as an affiliate. For example, here’s our review of Siteground:
affiliate marketing smart blogger siteground review
And here’s our ConvertKit review:
affiliate marketing smart blogger convertkit review
And our Elementor review:
affiliate marketing smart blogger elementor review
Your reviews can focus on a single product or compare competing products side-by-side.
The second approach arguably builds more trust, but it also distracts people by giving them a lot of different recommendations.
If you would like to review multiple products, one option is to create a review site where all the content is simply reviews and affiliate offers. It becomes a “one-stop-shop” for your niche.
MarketingB) Write Definitive Content on a Related Topic
You can write a definitive, comprehensive post on your site to educate your readers and “soft sell” your products and then work to get it ranking in the search engines.
For instance, you could write an ultimate guide to setting up a WordPress blog and include your affiliate links to your favorite hosting providers.
One example here at Smart Blogger is our post on freelance writing jobs. It’s a detailed, definitive guide for freelancers looking to find online jobs, but it also allows us to feature one of our courses for writers.
Whatever the topic, make sure that it’s evergreen content — information that’s likely to be useful and valuable for years to come.
You can create blog posts, videos, infographics or anything similar — but whatever you do, it should not be a sales page. Focus on building trust and authority.
Finally, you should pay a lot of attention to SEO — make sure to optimize for the right keywords, keep WordPress running fast, and build links to your content to get a constant flow of traffic from Google.
C) Create Valuable Bonus Content
Assuming it’s allowed by your affiliate agreement (sometimes it’s not), you can create bonus content, exclusive to your readers, that helps people get even more value from the affiliate product.
People love bonuses! You can create many types of bonuses fairly quickly and easily while still giving your readers excellent value.
By the way, this is a fantastic way to differentiate yourself from other bloggers representing the same products.
Here are some example bonuses you could offer:
Step-by-step checklists
Quick-start guides
Video overviews or demos
Complimentary or discounted services (e.g., coaching calls)