Going back to the basics of affiliate marketing, it all comes down to traffic. The more people you have coming to the website, the greater are the chances for making a sale. However, it goes a bit deeper than that. The type of content you create will influence clicks.

Don’t assume that just because you have a banner on your site that visitors will instantly click and make a purchase.

Essentially, you need to give them a reason to do so.

What Kind of Content Do I Need for Affiliate Marketing?

In reality, you are advertising a product or service when you use affiliate links and banners on your website. And to get the most out of these elements, they need to make sense in comparison to the content.

In other words, you can’t expect an affiliate for living green to generate a ton of sales if your blog is about the benefits of fossil fuels.

In the near future, I’m going to start creating landing pages for the affiliates I actually use. I have an issue trying to promote brands and products that I’ve never used myself.

Writing to Match the Intended Affiliate

So, I already have an idea about writing content to match the affiliate. This is because visitors are already interested in the topic. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be reading the post.

This creates a more focused audience with a higher degree of click-through rate. And the more clicks an affiliate banner or link gets, the more likely a purchase is made.

A lot of my posts, though, have a more generalized layout for affiliate banners. For example, in my WordPress tutorials, I add affiliates for anything related to WordPress.

Although the topic matches, it’s not as effective if it’s no a focused article.

For example, the Grammarly review I have should use only the Grammarly affiliate link. Which, I think it does, to be honest.

Promoting Links within the Content

At the moment, all of my affiliate links are in the form of banner ads. While these still generate clicks, they also might be getting flagged by a visitor’s ad blocker.

This means some of the links are probably not even showing to people who might be truly interested in the product or service.

In other words, I think I need to add more actual links to the text for the affiliates.  After all, I do see a lot of clicks coming from the websites that have brand links already.

And since I use Advanced Ads, I can easily add a mixture of both banner and text links within the content.

Capitalizing on Popular Content

One of the first steps I need to implement is adding affiliates to the most popular content on each blog. Now, I’ve done this already to an extent, but probably not as much as I need to.

I mean, the audience is already there. It’s time to capitalize on the volume.

What Kind of Affiliate Matches the Intent?

The hardest part is finding affiliate opportunities for the products and services I use. For the most part, I write reviews and such because I think it might be useful for my audience.

It never once dawns on me that I could be writing for affiliate sales.

Unfortunately, most of my popular articles don’t have focused affiliates. Meaning the brands or products I feature don’t have affiliate marketing campaigns of their own.

Still, my Buy Me a Coffee review has generated a great deal of interest. And each time someone signs up using my link, I earn between $3 and $5. In fact, I recently cashed out $52 just from last year alone.

That’s not enough to retire on, but it’s something that is added to the pot.

Perhaps I need to buy a few services just so I can write more reviews and potentially earn commissions. At least on CrossingColorado.com, a lot of the reviews are for exercise equipment.

Hello, Amazon!

What is More Effective, Links or Banners?

Because I have Advanced Ads, I can track the click-through rate of any affiliate link or banner I use. This will help me figure out which is more effective in certain areas of the website.

I’m a fan of banners, but that doesn’t mean they’re the most effective. I guess I’ll have to bit the bullet and run a few tests. If just using links along is an improvement, then that’s what it needs to be.

I’ll start a few test runs ASAP on WriterSanctuary.com. It gets the most consistent and interested traffic out of the five blogs.

This is Only the Beginning

I’m kind of excited about putting more effort into affiliate marketing. Although I know this is just the beginning, and it may take a few months before I actually see a sale, it’s still got me jazzed.

I think the hardest part so far, though, is making sure I can keep up writing content people want to read.