Producing content is the one of the most important tasks for a successful affiliate marketing campaign.
Whether it’s new blog posts, pages on your site, reviews, videos, articles, graphics, images or social media posts, fresh content feeds your affiliate marketing machine the new visitors it needs to be successful.
But you’ve got a lot to do, right? Between research, site building and maintenance, optimization and your marketing activities, time isn’t exactly something you’ve got tons of.
And that’s before the “outside world” comes calling!
Maybe being an affiliate marketer isn’t your full-time gig and you have the stresses and responsibilities of another job. Maybe you have an unhealthy addiction to fantasy football and “have to” spend hours pouring over player stats in your 20 different leagues. Maybe you even have a significant other or a family. I hear they want to hang out all the time.
So how does the busy affiliate marketer stay on top of everything and keep the content factory churning out material?
We’ve come up with a few easy to follow tips that will simplify your content marketing and let you focus your time and energy on growing your affiliate empire (or spending time with loved ones, drinking heavily or whatever it is you really care about).
Tip No. 1: Curate Like a Boss
When you’re running an affiliate marketing campaign and trying to create a constant flow of content, eventually you’re going to hit a wall.
You only have so much time, energy and creativity. At some point you’re going to reach the limit of interesting, informative and new content you can create all by your lonesome. This is where curation comes into play.
If you’re not hip to this style of content marketing, curating content is where you take a piece of content that someone else created and build your own content around that.
For example, say a political blogger writes a great piece on the government’s latest attempts to keep digital tabs on everyone in the world. Now, if you are running an affiliate marketing campaign targeting mobile phone apps, you could create content that talks about this piece and how that information relates to your niche.
You’re not stealing someone else’s content. Let’s repeat and emphasize that: You’re not stealing someone else’s content. You are creating original content that properly links to and attributes the original content’s creator. You’re just expanding on what they wrote, and showing how it affects customers in your niche.
Curating content allows you quickly and easily crank out new material to fuel your marketing engine because you’re simply adding onto something that someone else already took the time to research, create, tweak and publish.
Tip No. 2: Be Ruthlessly Efficient with Information
Think of your content marketing system like a giant funnel. In order to find the best content to curate and inspire your own ideas, there will be tons of information going in at the top.
As the funnel tightens you will need to quickly and efficiently sort out the losers from the winners. If not done correctly, this can be a giant time suck and will bog down your content marketing activities.
You need to be as efficient and ruthless as a ninja assassin when it comes to what content you spend your time and energy on. Here’s what you need to do:
- Centralize the Inputs: Create an email you only use for your affiliate marketing efforts and make sure all information is sent there. Every time you subscribe to a blog, sign up for a newsletter, or do anything else that will get you someone else’s content make sure it’s all coming to a limited amount of places. Use platforms like Google Alerts and Feedly to funnel related information into as few places as possible.
- Three Strikes and You’re Out: If you’ve read three emails, articles or posts from a source and have gotten nothing from them, then it’s time to cut them. You can’t have dead weight bloating your inbox. If the sales pitches won’t stop, unsubscribe and move on. You don’t have time to waste.
- Gather in the Cloud: As content ideas are coming into your system, classify them in 1 of 3 ways: Yes, Maybe Later and No. Delete the “Nos.” Create a spreadsheet or list on a cloud-based platform like Google Docs or Evernote for the “Yes” and “Maybe Later” pieces. This way no matter where you are or what you’re doing you can add something to your content idea list. Now you have a handy list of content that is ready to go and when you run out of that, you have a list of interesting content that you can research more.
Tip No. 3: Add Value
All of the content in the world, curated or created by you, isn’t going to matter if you’re not adding value to your readers' lives in some fashion.
Look, you don’t need to create life-altering content that is going to inspire people to change the world in order to make these strategies to work. But you also have to show your visitors and potential customers what spending their precious time on your content is going to do for them.
If you offer up fluff and filler, you will quickly become a victim of Tip No. 2 yourself, getting axed from inboxes and losing readers.
There is plenty of value you can create with minimal work. When creating something ask yourself, “Is this information I would want or be interested in if I was the reader OR am I just creating this because I need to post something this week?”
Strive to add value to your visitors' lives in some fashion and you’ll be successful. If you’re not delivering enough value, the numbers will tell you.
Go Forth and Create
Keep your eye on the content marketing prize and don’t get bogged down with the sea of information out there. It’s easy to get swallowed up and spend way too much time and energy consuming other people’s content instead of creating your own.
Be ruthlessly strategic with how you spend your time gathering, researching and creating your content and fueling your affiliate marketing engine won’t be an issue. Add in some value for your end users and you’ll be golden.
