Affiliate marketers are finding it rather difficult to stay ahead of everyone in the game. This can be attributed to a variety of factors such as the ever tightening laws, Google’s crackdown on affiliate content and an overall increase in online competition.

However, smart entrepreneurs and enterprises continue to make millions simply through their effective affiliate marketing strategies.

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So, what does it take for affiliate marketers to succeed in the market?
Let’s find out by checking out some very helpful tips for successful affiliate marketing.

• Don’t lose focus
  Usually, first-time affiliate marketers commit a serious mistake by going one mile wide and one inch deep, which means they try to dominate forty niches within few years.
  This is probably a natural occurrence since hearing about other marketers’ success stories from Clickbank products and emerging niches, it becomes difficult to stay focused.

However, losing focus has its consequences, such as compiling a portfolio of 21 websites in unsystematic niches ignoring the fact that these niches come from a pitiful domain authority contributing nothing in sales.

You must experiment with different niches only after you have acquired a certain level of success on your website. However, initially just go one inch wide and at least a mile deep (meaning- be selective).

• Add Value to your Content
  Among the biggest challenges that affiliate marketers face today is the need to prove their worth in the value chain.
  On the other hand, the biggest advantage that affiliate marketers have over renowned brands and great opportunity to add value is their ability to be agile with content marketing.

Brands spend considerable amount of time approving a feasible looking content strategy and this decision-making is a fruit of countless unproductive meetings. Affiliates can create high standard content within short duration and can ensure that other established competitors find it difficult to compete with. Your content can drive traffic towards your website and others simply won’t find enough resources (as well as Google’s go-ahead) to copy your content. For instance, Qosy published an up to 8,000 words guide every 4-6 weeks to educate readers on tough buying decisions ranging from choosing the best wine to an engagement ring. Though all these posts do not contain affiliate links but these are often added while recommending a site such as, embedding a link to the best engagement ring guidelines. This definitely is a sound tactic to add value and acquire shares.

• Consumer centric brand building
  Google is constantly tweaking its brand-bias and therefore, for a majority of affiliates this is an issue of concern. Affiliate marketers never had to stress so much on brand building previously as they have to now.

Brand-bias can be understood with an example. When you search for the best websites in sectors like travel, insurance, personal finance, property and homeware, you will notice that various sites are affiliate sites as well as strong brands. For example, Compare.com, Moneysupermarket, Houzz and LastMinute.com are all highly successful affiliate website only because of their solid stature as brands, editorial integrity and consumer-centric values.

Therefore, for marketers it has become equally important to build brand and consider what kind of brand should be developed for their affiliate website in order to succeed.

• Preparing for recurrent affiliate revenue
  For affiliate marketing, it cannot be predicted with surety whether your current strategy will work after a few weeks or not. It could be Google’s continuous obsession with updating its ranking algorithm or rising media buying costs. Regardless of the reason, it is quite important to formulate strategies to counter the upcoming changes.
  This can be ensured by two different yet effective ways: by building recurring revenue and diversification.

Mostly, marketers focus on one-time expenses, which is a smart tactic given the inflation statistics and the ability to earn interest. Earning $100 today would be more productive than earning the same amount in over ten months.

However, one-time payouts cannot protect you against upcoming need to change strategy. This is why it is important to build-up a share of your affiliate revenue in recurring revenue.

This obviously depends upon your niche and the kind of products that you promote. Given the option, you must build a foundation of recurring affiliate revenue to attain peace of mind in case of any upset in the future.

• Traffic diversification
  Due to Google’s unannounced initial panda update in February 2011, numerous successful affiliate marketers had to suffer losses. The same thing was repeated when Google’s Penguin update was released in April 2012.

Brands that build organic Facebook page followers usually find themselves in a fix when these kinds of updates occur. This is why traffic diversification is so very important. You need to own your followers instead of renting them. However, if you have no other choice than renting your audience, then do it from multiple sources.

• Acknowledge the importance of mobile
  As per the November 2014 statistics, mobile accounted for around 46% of the total affiliate clicks and 26% of entire affiliate retail sales. Hence, if you are directing traffic to non-mobile-friendly websites then you are losing out on a large group of potential commissions.

It must be noted that the number of mobile users is increasing rapidly and in the near future certain niches, products and searching criteria will become highly important.
Google is also pushing webmasters to create mobile-friendly websites and even launched a mobile-friendliness checker in November. This means, it is about time you also acknowledge the significance of mobile if you want to succeed in affiliate marketing.

• Be Prepared for breakout and seasonal trends
  New trends will keep on coming and this will create hundreds of new and remarkable multi-million dollar niches such as the current breakout trend of selfie stick. So, you need to keep a sharp eye on the market trends to be prepared for them in advance. You need to differentiate between seasonal and breakout trends. Seasonal trends are predictable and recurring hence, it is easier to be prepared for them via Google Trends. Breakout trends are harder to predict and even experienced industry experts cannot predict about the change in trends in the next 6 months. This is the real deal here; you must research what sort of products would be worth promoting let’s say in the travel industry during 2016. Sites like trendwatching.com might come in handy.

• Select products wisely
  Always remember that true growth and success comes from high commission sales. Therefore, aspiring affiliates must find products that add value to the site visitors and has the potential to increase website’s revenue considerably.

• Forget keyword targeting focus on topic targeting
  Google is aiming to reduce SEO community’s excessive reliance on keyword targeting and this call for switching to topic-targeting to capture long tail traffic. Instead of ranking your content for the “best gardening tools” keyword you need to focus on the content and on creating an informative piece for the gardeners.

• Be experimental with content formats for endorsing products
  Let’s understand it with an example; imagine yourself creating a quiz or calculator using a series of criteria to automatically redirect visitors of your site to the most feasible product instead of writing a 1000 word review on each. This would be totally unusual and will prove to be attention-grabbing instantly.

The year 2017 would be all about being creative and thinking out-of-the-box. To prove their worth in the value chain, affiliates need to outdo the competition by experimenting with content formats.

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