Affiliate Marketing Experts Share Their Strategies for 2013

Affiliate marketing has been one of the most profitable online business models for the past decade and a half, and there’s no doubt about that. It’s a very efficient business model for many, as it doesn’t necessarily require a high-cost investment to start with. 

However, the web and its users are constantly maturing, and this aspect of the online commerce industry makes affiliate marketing harder each day. Making money through commissions from promoting other businesses’ products may not require a high budget, but it will definitely need a right game plan.

So we’ve asked some of the experts in the field to share the strategies that they’ll be focusing on implementing this year in continuously growing their affiliate sites – in terms of traffic and revenue.

John Chow

Author of the book “Make Money Online: Roadmap of a Dot Com Mogul”. You can visit his blog at JohnChow.com and follow on Twitter @johnchow.

Q1: What is your affiliate marketing strategy for 2013?

My affiliate strategy for 2013 is to create products that enhance the experiences for both my customers and affiliates. A win-win situation is the only way to ensure a long-term viable business.

Q2: How is this different from your approach last year?

In the past, I have been a traditional affiliate by promoting offers from networks. I started offering my own products to affiliates towards the end of the year and it has done really well. I will continue doing that in 2013.

Zac Johnson

Zac Johnson is a super affiliate and he blogs at ZacJohnson.com. You can also follow him on Twitter @moneyreign.

Q1: What is your affiliate marketing strategy for 2013?

My focus for 2013 will be to continually grow out my personal brand and portfolio of web sites and blogs. The importance of growing out your own brand and products is extremely crucial for bringing your business to the next level, and not simply relying on affiliate marketing commissions and sales to drive 100% of your revenues.

Q2: How is this different from your approach last year?

The difference between this and last year is that I will be focusing more efforts on creating actual services and products that people can use and learn from, versus static content. Through the user of customer interaction and participation you can scale your business and reach at a much faster pace.

Tricia Meyer

Tricia Meyer is a seasoned affiliate marketer, blogger and consultant. She blogs at Tricia.me and you can also follow her on Twitter @sunshinetricia.

Q1: What is your affiliate marketing strategy for 2013?

This year I am going to focus more on where I fall in the marketing funnel and attempt to increase my earnings on both sides. This means better combining both the review content as well as the last push to the consumer to make a purchase (coupons, last minute deals, etc.). I'll be working on this across both my content sites and deal sites but from completely different angles to achieve the results.

Q2: How is this different from your approach last year?

We have not had a lot of data on this in the past, but networks are providing more of it now. In the past I could only rely on keywords and know whether people were visiting my sites for the content or the coupons. Now I can talk to my merchants and find out when the cookies are being set and whether people are visiting other affiliates before or after me. As more networks make this data available and more merchants are willing to talk about it, I am able to change my strategy to better increase my conversions and overall revenue.

Matt Carter

Matt Carter is a full-time super affiliate and the publisher of the popular blog Mattsmarketingblog.com

Q1: What is your affiliate marketing strategy for 2013?

I am doing more lead generation affiliate marketing for 2013 which also involves more Adwords

Q2: How is this different from your approach last year?

This is different in that it is not traditional affiliate marketing, as you are selling leads to businesses, and also I have moved away from focusing on SEO only and introducing more paid traffic

Miles Baker

Miles Baker is a ClickBank expert, internet marketer since 1999 and owner of Clickscoop.com. You can follow him on Twitter @clickscoop

Q1: What is your affiliate marketing strategy for 2013?

"Our affiliate marketing strategy is to create more opportunities for affiliate sales. This includes creating more resource lists, additional blog posts and reviews, custom email offers that include free value, and partnering up with other existing product vendors to create special offers for their products."

Q2: How is this different from your approach last year?

Last year we did not create many joint venture special offers as an affiliate. However, we noticed the few we did were the most successful offers as they create a strong sense of urgency. Creating a special offer with a limited time and price makes all the difference. We'll be partnering up with more vendors in 2013 to create more of these effective offers.

Bonus: My strategies for 2013 and beyond

I’ve been helping out a friend this past month in optimizing and in developing promotional strategies for her blog (you’ll notice the blog is using AffiloTheme and its affiliate model is based on AffiloJetpack’s guide).

The blog is already generating traffic and substantial newsletter subscribers on its own on a daily basis, with just the high quality content that it has published last year (without link building done and other web marketing methods).

But this time, we’ll be using the strategies that I’ve suggested to improve its traffic and lead generation processes.

I’ll be sharing the results of the strategies on my next post here as a case study. But anyway, here are the methods that we’ll be focusing on working on to build up the site’s web presence and revenue.

Publish new content on a regular basis

It’s important to continuously create useful content that will be published within the site/blog. Few known advantages of being consistent with content production are:

• Helps build a strong readership for the site (which can help you generate more leads).
• Allows you to target more long-tail keywords, especially if you’ll be covering topics that are frequently searched in your space.
• The more you provide useful content, the better chances of attracting more natural links to the site.

Authorship Markup

Implementing authorship markup is vital these days, especially for content publishers. Given that Google’s Eric Schmidt has been straightforward with how verified authors will affect search rankings in the future (or the metric better known as AuthorRank).

Regular contribution on other strong publications in your industry

Guest blogging on hundreds of different domains would really be hard to implement for small affiliate sites or blogs. Choose 3 – 5 popular online publications in your industry where you can be a regular contributor or columnist, instead of pitching to hundreds or thousands of blogs.

It will be more effective, especially if you’ll be accepted as a contributor on high traffic blogs, as this can also help you continuously absorb readership, targeted traffic and leads from them. Other benefits are:

• It can improve your AuthorRank, particularly if you have implemented authorship markups
• Can create strong brand signals for your site, seeing that you’ll be more visible on these channels, especially if you’re contributing content to them on a weekly basis.
• It can be a channel where you can promote the content that you’re providing on your blog, through contextual linking.

Invite guest authors

Having good guest authors (that have substantial following base and readership) contribute content on your blog is also a great way to absorb traffic (from them) and to also attract more natural links to your site.

It will be a lot easier to attract good guest bloggers when you’re providing useful content on a regular basis. For more extensive tips, you can check out my recent post on using this method as a link baiting strategy.

Monthly keyword audit and on-site optimization

I’ve written a post last month on how I’ve increased my search traffic through keyword audit and on-site optimization, which received a lot of positive response. I highly recommend checking the post out for the detailed tutorial on how to implement the strategy.

The core concept of the strategy is to determine long-tail keywords that have high engagement rate (through your Google Analytics data) and to optimize the posts/pages on your site where these keywords are sending highly qualified traffic (to increase their search rankings for those query variations).

Get involved on relevant online communities

Actively participate on discussions from popular forums and blogs in your industry, because it’s an effective way to attract more traffic to your site as well as to indirectly promote your site’s useful content.

Making this part of your weekly tasks will enhance the signals that you are able to send out for search engines to recrawl your site. This activity will be very beneficial for the entire process, since you are also making changes on the site and continuously adding new content, wherein search engines can recalculate the site’s search rankings.

If you have more questions about how to efficiently promote and grow your affiliate sites this year, I would love to answer them on the comment section below.