Choosing the Best Affiliate Marketing Approach
Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn income from your website through potential customers who visit it. What is even better is that it requires only a small portion of your time and effort, or sometimes none at all. All you have to do to start is to sign up with an affiliate program for free, create a new website or develop an existing one, and choose the approach you think will work best for you – click, lead, or recommend.
Neutral Approach
This type of approach makes use of pay-per-click campaigns. In a nutshell, it is about baiting consumers into taking an interest in a certain product or service, and then hope that it will lead to something profitable, like a lead or a sale. Its main advantage is that you can get away with spending almost no time and effort in looking after how your website fares, and still expect to generate an income out of it.
What makes the neutral approach to an affiliate program so appealing to many is that they can do it without “being there” and without having to put their reputation on the line.
Partially Connected Approach
Compared to the neutral approach, this method requires a bit more involvement with your site visitors, which increases your chances for converting them into customers. The partially connected approach to affiliate marketing is about leading your visitors toward a product or service through your website. This is where setting up your virtual presence online is needed – through your podcasts, blog posts, or videos. These allow you to make your viewers realize that using a certain product or service related to your niche is beneficial for them, even though you have not really used it yourself.
What makes this type of affiliate program work is that you simply allow affiliate links to place their text ads or banner links at the end of your blog posts, or mention them in your videos or podcasts. You also get to increase your online reputation in the process of linking your site to them.
Personal Approach
This is the more involved type where you have actually used a product or service yourself, and this is what gives you the confidence, as well as the authority, to strongly recommend it to people who visit your website. It is about convincing your viewers that a product or service is great, not by baiting them into clicking on a link or leading them into visiting a related website, but because you have experienced using it yourself.
What makes this personal approach effective, especially for the long-term, is that your viewers will see that you are putting your reputation on the line, and this makes them trust you more. By sharing your story with them, you can build relationships that will ultimately turn your viewers into loyal followers and customers.
Choose the affiliate marketing approach that works best for you, and see your website reap the benefits.