As far as affiliate marketing goes, there are two stages of marketing that you have to worry about: you first have to get your own name out there and convince people that you’re worth listening to, and once you’ve done so you can promote the products offered by your affiliate partners.
As such, while figuring out just the right way to bring up your partners is an important skill to learn, it’s even more important to learn how to market yourself.
That’s why the following list offers a few simple internet marketing strategies that can help you get started.
1. Clickbait
Look at the title of this article. Notice how it starts with a number and has a very insistent tone? And look at the format of the rest of this post, and how it separates all the information you’re reading into easily digestible chunks. Both of these points are widely used tactics associated with clickbait, which refers to any sort of web page that encourages people to click on the link to visit it. Another common tactic is to add an image that’s either so strange or so alluring that it tempts people to click on it.
By creating a few clickbait articles and then using internet ads and social media to spread the links around, you can potentially draw a lot of traffic to your site. However, it also needs to be said that many clickbait tactics are already wearing out their welcome and this is starting to fade as one of the more popular internet marketing strategies. When was the last time you saw the phrase, “Doctors hate this!” for instance? To really make use of clickbait, it’s just as important to avoid the clichés as it is to appeal to curious internet users.
2. Sharebait
Sharebait is less widely known or appreciated than clickbait, but in the long run it’s even more important. It’s particularly more important to an affiliate marketer, because while some websites only want higher page counts and more ad views, as an affiliate you only get paid when someone actually buys the products linked by your ads. To get to that point, your visitor needs to stick around for a while and maybe read a few blog posts about how great the product is and why they should buy it.
Sharebait goes beyond clickbait by being something that visitors will want to share with their friends and family (hence the name). In this case, the whole article needs to be catchy and well-written, because most people don’t spam their friends with links just because of a good title. It needs to be engaging enough to pin down the typically flighty internet user, and if it’s particularly good, it might encourage visitors to explore what else your website has to offer.
3. Online Advertisements
It may seem a little recursive to put out ads for a website created specifically to provide ad space, but nobody is going to visit your site in the first place unless people know it exists. To offer an analogy, an affiliate marketing program, one of the most widely used internet marketing strategies, can give you a billboard and offer you plenty of help to set it up, but you also need to build a road that goes past your sign so that people will see it. Online ads are the highway exits that drop travelers off on your road.
One thing you need to remember when it comes to ads is that more money doesn’t always translate to more site visitors. If you choose a target demographic that isn’t interested in what you have to offer, you’re wasting your time and money. As such, you should do some research on who tends to find your topic interesting and adjust both the sites you advertise on and the demographics you target accordingly.
Also, you should make sure the quality of your ads is as good as you can get. Targeting the wrong demographics may be a waste of money, but a high-quality ad reassures people that what you have to offer is worth the expense.
4. SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the key internet marketing strategies no matter which other approaches you choose. After all, search engines are widely considered impartial and the best way to find what you’re looking for. You can “cheat” by placing search page ads for certain terms, but the best way to get someone to visit your site is to be one of the first-page results to pop up on a search related to your website’s topic.
For instance, in addition to having a clickbait title, this article also repeats the exact phrase “internet marketing strategies” several times in order to show up as more relevant to search engine web crawlers. Keywords and key phrases are important to any SEO effort, but it’s also important to avoid applying them too heavily and to make sure that you only use them in a way that’s relevant to the actual text. After all, you want people to stick around and continue reading, plus modern web crawlers are catching on to obvious black-hat tactics like filling a web page with keywords.
To be an effective affiliate marketer, you need to learn how to use the tools that are internet marketing strategies, both to promote your affiliates and to promote yourself. After all, while you can stick to doing one or the other, you won’t be able to make any real money until you can get the hang of doing both.
