3 Tips For Bloggers: How To Pick The Right Affiliate Products And Promote Them

As a blogger, it’s pretty likely that from time to time you will mention products and services in your writing. When you do this you have the opportunity to link to places that sell that particular product or service.

A fantastic way to make money on your blog is by using affiliate marketing which basically means that when you mention a product like this, you earn a commission if someone buys the product via your link.

Recently I’ve seen a lot of bloggers taking this approach to monetizing their websites and while it’s good to see affiliate marketing taking off in this way I’m also worried about how many bloggers get it wrong.

There’s a good and bad way to do affiliate marketing and today I want to give you 3 tips, based on my experience as an affiliate marketer, on how to pick the right affiliate products and promote them to your audience.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
3 Tips For Bloggers How To Pick The Right Affiliate Products And Promote Them

Tip #1: Make Sure Your Audience Wants It

Knowing Your Blog AudienceThis is an affiliate marketing 101, the customer has to have the desire to purchase the product or service you’re recommending.

Even better is when they’re just about falling over themselves to buy the product. Nothing helps your conversion rate more than motivated buyers and a better conversion rate means less traffic to make the same money (or making more money for the same traffic if you prefer to look at it that way).

When selecting products to promote your audience’s desires should be top of mind.

As bloggers, we have a certain duty to maintain the implicit trust that our audiences grant us.

You don’t want to erode that trust by picking products that aren’t related to your niche and trying to ram them down their throats.

 

Tip #2: Make It Un-boring

Depending on your niche, your range of products to promote might be quite boring. It’s your job to make them un-boring, so what can you do to jazz it up?

Sometimes if you put on a bit of a show it can make even the most boring product sound exciting to potential customers.

Here are four tips you can use to make your affiliate offers un-boring:

Do a great killer demo – nothing gets peoples attention more in the pre-purchase phase than a demo of the product or service in action. Why do you think those 5-minute infomercials do so well? When you select products to promote thinking about how you could possible demo it so that it’s more likely to keep people’s attention.

Collect and report on statistics – when someone is doing research to buy a product they are collecting all sorts of information. Can you make a comprehensive report on every bit of statistics you can find about that product? These kinds of things really help with the buying decision and it’s a great way to attract people that are nearly ready to buy.

Film a video review – videos are a great way to add a new dimension to your review. It could simply be a great way to demo the product or service, but I say take it one step further and either make it into a second review to post on your blog or even a video version of your text review.

Show various use cases – if you can show people how they can use the product or service before they buy it you’re helping them discover the benefits of it. This is a very powerful motivator.

 

Tip #3: Always Reinforce Trust

Trusting in Your Blogging TeamA blogger survives by their audience having reinforced trust in their recommendations. Is the product you are promoting trustworthy?

Here’s a quick test you can use:

Ask yourself, would you be happy to genuinely recommend these products to your audience under your own name?

If the answer is no in any way or you have a gut feeling that it might sound a bit scammy then it’s better to not promote it as an affiliate (by the way, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t review it). If you’re not willing to put your name on it, then steer clear.

 

Trust is a fickle thing and one poor recommendation can mean your audience loses faith in your ethics as a blogger. It’s better to promote products and services that you know your audience will love and that you love to promote.

Conclusion

Picking the right products and knowing how to promote them is something you need to practice over and over.

While it’s good to have the above tips as a guide the reality is that you need to test different affiliate offers and get feedback from your audience. Every blog audience is different and will respond differently.

I hope these tips have really helped you monetize your blogs. As a blogger, you have an amazing opportunity to use affiliate marketing to make a real difference in people’s lives and line your pockets at the same time.