How to identify the best affiliate offers

Once you have decided to use affiliate marketing as part of your business strategy, the next question is how to identify the best affiliate offers for you and for your audience? Those offers that fulfill the requirements of your niche, it’s a solution for the specific problems of your visitor but also provides you a significant income. That’s what we are going to discuss in this post.

Monetization of your business with third-party products or services

Monetization of your business, particularly of your website is one of the reasons why you started in this activity. The end results that everybody with an online business wants is when you get an income in your bank account as payment for your efforts, right?

But there are a lot of ways for monetizing your site, some of which involve investment, others need hard work to thrive, and some need mainly time. In any case, you need one of these assets if not all of them: time, money, and effort.

The best example where you have to invest your money to get some revenue in exchange is Pay Per Click advertising. Although this is a proven technique for considerable revenue to many people, almost all the experts will recommend you avoid it at the beginning because it also carries a high risk to lose your money before earning anything.

As many of us start an online business with little money to invest, we opt for those ways that don’t demand money but the other two assets, time, and effort.

Great examples of ways for monetizing your site that doesn’t require money but only time and effort are writing your own course or ebook to sell online. Having your own digital products it is a great way to build a stable business for a long time, nevertheless, in the beginning, there will be no high expectations for rapid and significant income until you make your way to the right audience who know about your work.

We can talk about other examples like adsense, email lists, leading to other companies, donations, etc., which can be profitable at a certain point but just after you have tons of visitors coming to your site.

For the reasons mentioned above and some other considerations, affiliate marketing has become the #1 choice for a vast amount of people who start an online business. Without any money, and devoting consistent time and effort, you can start earning some significant income at no time creating a progressive snowball for your business growth.

The advertiser has the reputed brand, it owns and stores the stock, it has designed and provides you the advertising materials, and it will track your leads to its site to credit the sales that generate commissions to you. It will pay you as well periodically. It will profit with the referrals you send, and you will earn with the commissions the sales generate. So, it’s a win-win process in short to medium term.

What is your niche about?

There are an endless amount of affiliate offers out there. Are you deciding to choose on one or many of those offers based on your personal preferences, the reputation of the brand, the rate of the commissions, or even the aesthetics of the imagery and the color palette of the advertising materials?

The answer to that question is your niche. The main criteria on choosing one or various affiliate offers should be determined by the window through which you see the market, and most importantly through the motivation and even passion with you are going to write about some topic. That’s the very core of your decisions on taking an affiliate offer or a different one.

Your niche, the one that most interest to you has its own realm of ideas, images, products, services, colors, and even sounds and movements through audio and video. It’s not the same the niche or beauty than one related to books or electronic devices. Each one of them has its particularities, its extension, volume, and specific features. You must immerse yourself with the essence of that niche to discover its very notes, those that can define the shape, strength, tone, and direction of a campaign.

Only then you are going to stay in a position on choosing the best affiliate offer.

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Focus on your audience

It is, not enough, though, having a well-defined niche to make your final decision on taking one or another affiliate offer. The most crucial piece of the whole game is your audience.

If you think in terms of a niche, even a very narrow one, there still will be a big space for diversity. Let’s talk of the niche of sports wrist watches for women, for instance. Apparently, you have delimited a broad niche as just watches into some smaller like wrist watches, then into wrist watches for women and finally only in those for sports.

At first, it seems like your niche is traced by a laser or surgical incision, and that is no doubt targeted to only people who want sports wrist watches for women. But the question is, your audience really wants this selection? Are you talking in your content to this specific segment of the population? Do you know by studying the demographics in tools like Google Analytics that women are interested in your content and if so, are the ones who prefer to run with a wristwatch.

My point here is that beyond your niche which evidently is of great importance there is another goal to accomplish, and that is the real intention of your content, the match between it and the interest of your audience and the right signals for that audience to become aware that you are giving them exactly what they want.

Following the natural flow of the content of your site

Writing the content of your website turns very easy when you have a well-defined niche, and sub-niches if it is the case and also when you are entirely focused on the interests and needs of your audience.

Your intention is communicating a whole message, developed for the logical progression of your thinking, and support for visual and audio materials. Within all this concatenation of ideas, your affiliate offer must fit like the piece of lego naturally. Should be a further step of a sentence that talks about a specific product or service, or the anticipated response to a question that your reader is going to make inevitably or the best option your visitor are waiting that you describe.

There should not be improvisations, impositions, or surprises.

Evaluation of the response to your affiliate link

Shiny objects lose eventually their bright when they don’t pass the test of time. That’s because the best way to evaluate the suitability of an affiliate offer to your business, your niche, and especially your audience is by knowing the response it has had over a certain period of exposure.

Obviously, if you are not getting enough visitors yet to your website who read the content where your affiliate link is located, you couldn’t blame that offer of not working because the problem could be in other parts. Maybe your site or your content is very new to have a right amount of visitors yet, or perhaps you need to improve some of the indicators of the search engine optimization for that content to get better rankings and therefore more visits, etc. Put simply, people are not even reaching your offer.

However, when you are getting the right amount of visitors to specific posts, and it is not getting clicks, something else is happening specifically with that affiliate offer. In this case, the problem doesn’t seem to be in your content but in the suitability of the affiliate offer within that context.

What to do in this case? Review in Google Analytics or other software which analyzes the stats of your site, who is coming in terms of demographics, to read your pages or posts? What are they looking for when they write a word in Google, Yahoo, or Bing search boxes? How long are they staying at your site? They might leave exactly when reaching your affiliate offer, for instance.

When you have an idea of what would happen with the behavior of your visitors regarding your affiliate link, then you can change it for a different one or even trying with another affiliate partner to see if engaging changes accordingly.