How To Earn More Commissions As An Affiliate Marketer

Stuck With Your Affiliate Marketing? Raise your game using specialist content, affiliate software and link optimisation.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most profitable side hustles out there, providing regular income for millions of affiliate marketers.

It’s simple: you promote a company’s products, and then you get paid when someone makes a purchase thanks to your marketing work.

However, things get more complicated as you start to aim higher with your affiliate marketing. Factors such as your content strategy, software stack and choice of affiliate programmes will greatly affect your success and profitability over time.

This article will give you some tips and advice to overcome the challenges of affiliate marketing growth, and take your affiliate earnings to the next level.

Recap: The Affiliate Marketing Process

For those who are new to affiliate marketing, let’s quickly recap how this type of marketing works:

1. The marketer joins an affiliate programme or partners with a business.
2. The marketer promotes the business or product, typically using a unique web link or identifier. Ways to distribute affiliate links to an audience of potential customers include blog articles, social media, and emails or SMS sent to consenting recipients.
3. When an audience member follows the affiliate’s link and a conversion occurs (e.g. a purchase or sign-up), the affiliate programme or partner pays a commission to the affiliate marketer.

Do bear in mind: some affiliate programmes have added nuances that you’ll need to look out for, such as payment thresholds and restricted affiliate practices.

Communicate your expertise

People will be more inclined to trust your advice, follow your affiliate links, and ultimately earn you a commission payment if you can communicate your expertise in a certain subject area.

Let’s say you’re promoting an affiliate link using a review article. According to Bizrate Insights, 54.7% of online shoppers read at least four online product reviews before they make a purchase. So, your review needs to be the one that the reader trusts most of all – the decision-maker.

There are lots of factors that go into securing a super-high level of trust. Here are a few tried and tested tips to improve user trust for affiliate marketers:

• Be open about who you are. Most people trust the opinions of real human beings, better than the word of a faceless organisation or an AI. So, put yourself (or your content creators) in the spotlight by adding headshots, bylines and author biographies to your output. Bonus points for including photos or videos showing the research or evidence that went into your content!
• Also be open about what you do. Many readers will be aware that your embedded links earn you affiliate commissions. Be open about your revenue streams by adding a disclaimer which states that you may earn affiliate commissions when readers make a purchase via the links on the webpage, and that this does not prejudice the advice given in your content.
• State your niche specialisms. In most cases, specialist content will be better-trusted for specific queries than content published by a generalist source. If telecoms is your thing, put yourself out there as a telecoms specialist. Or if you’re a pizza chef, focus your content on topics like pizzas and pizza ovens. You get the idea.
• Professionalise your content. The quality of your content will affect your affiliate marketing outcomes in lots of ways, from search visibility to conversions. It’s also important to user trust – so make sure your content is well-designed, works effectively on a variety of device types including smartphones, and either meets or exceeds the standards of the best content published by competitors in your niche.
• Optimise your links. Consider using a link shortener tool to ‘tidy up’ your affiliate links. This means you take the long strings of characters which are often used for affiliate identification, and convert them into a shorter, less suspicious URL.

Create ‘best list’ content

‘Best lists’ are a popular vehicle for affiliate content. You’ll find them posted by a vast range of online publications, from the biggest newspaper and magazine websites to new, up-and-coming blogs.

Typically, best lists are made up of an introduction that explains the topic and answers some FAQs, and a numbered list of products or services in the relevant category. That could be ‘10 Best Waterproof Jackets’, ‘7 Best SEO Tools’, ‘50 Best Hotels in Naples’ – you name it. Each listed product is accompanied by an affiliate link that earns commission for the publisher, whenever a visitor clicks through and makes a purchase.

While online articles are the classic medium for best lists, we’ve also seen popular YouTube videos and Instagram posts that serve the same purpose.

The really clever thing about ‘best’ lists is that they attract visits from people who are already thinking about buying a specific type of product or service. The reader is only a few steps away from making a purchase.

Best lists aren’t the only form of online content used to host affiliate links. Other popular types include ‘how-to’ guides, product comparisons, and roundups of deals or promotions. Think about the questions that a customer might ask about relevant products or services, then design some high-quality content to provide the answers (and the affiliate links!)

Raise your game using affiliate marketing software

Like any other digital marketing activity, affiliate marketing can be enhanced using the right specialist software.

Affiliate marketing tools can help you to track the progress of your affiliate marketing campaigns, analyse your referrals and commissions earned, manage your relationships with affiliate partners and more.

In his Search Engine Journal guide to the best affiliate marketing software, the writer Loren Baker singles out the following tools as the best on the market:

• Refersion
• Tapfiliate
• LeadDyno

Before you get on-board with an affiliate marketing software provider, carefully consider which features would actually be useful to your affiliate marketing campaigns. Your main priority should be to have software in place that helps you to monitor your activity at scale, and enables you to identify which links are earning you the highest levels of commission.

Carefully choose the affiliate programmes you join

There are thousands of affiliate programmes out there, and some are certainly much better than others from the affiliate’s perspective.

When choosing affiliate programmes to work with, consider the following factors to ensure a good match and a profitable relationship:

• Brand fit: does the affiliate programme or partner advertise products or services that you are well positioned to promote?
• Commission rates and terms: are these fair, and do they provide enough profit margin for you?
• Contactability: can you easily contact the programme or partner to build a strong partnership?
• Data platform: does the partner provide you with access to data about your affiliate earnings?
• Earnings limit: ideally, there won’t be one.

A good place to start would be our Tamar Affiliates programme, which earns you £30 for every customer you refer. Find out more and start earning today.

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