9 Killer Affiliate Marketing Tips That No One Tells You About

Affiliate marketing is a great way for anyone to generate additional income and for vendors to expand their reach and increase conversion rates. It’s simple, cost-effective, and low-risk.

It sounds like you’d be foolish not to get into affiliate marketing, doesn’t it? It’s a piece of cake – until you face the competition!

But that’s something few affiliate networks, companies, or managers will tell you. The truth is, some aren’t aware of themselves.

In this post, we reveal affiliate marketing tips and tricks many successful affiliates wish they’d known earlier. Implementing them can give you a competitive advantage and put you ahead in the traffic race.

9 secret affiliate marketing tips and tricks

The temptation is big, and opportunities are plenty in affiliate marketing. Most sites offering tips for affiliate marketing success tell you that anyone can do it; it’s effortless, risk-free income. When you finish reading, you’re sure you can’t go wrong. You feel you’ve found the key to guaranteed success.

Unfortunately, that’s only half the truth. The two most important affiliate marketing tips for beginners – vendors and publishers – are these:

• Don’t get involved in something you know nothing about.
• Get to know the parties involved before you start.

Affiliate marketing is ongoing work for all parties and involves building relationships. That’s why these tips and tricks for affiliate marketing beginners are also valuable for veterans.

Tip no. 1: Hand-pick who you work with

As an affiliate beginner, familiarize yourself with the relevant industry and its players. Compare affiliate programs and conditions and choose the best option for you. Affiliate marketing is often portrayed as a passive income, but to get to the stage where the money flows without you doing anything, you need to set it up correctly and pick the right vendors. Most successful affiliates continue putting in the work to grow the business.

As a vendor, you need to make sure your affiliates perform and keep performing well. Investigate their activities and results before you commit. There are enough affiliates out there to choose from, and there’s no reason you should compromise on businesses or individuals that don’t completely meet your expectations. Keep tracking and evaluating their performance to make sure they continue to provide you with what you need.

Tip no. 2: Work with competing vendors

Here’s an affiliate tip vendors don’t want you to hear. But sooner or later, you’ll understand it anyway. (Affiliate Managers, don’t worry, we have one for you as well).

Your vendor’s competition is a fantastic resource for finding additional opportunities. Affiliates promote a variety of vendors and vendors partner with many affiliates. Get to know the affiliate landscape in your industry, region, or niche and the top advertisers and which affiliates promote them.

Identify your vendor’s top competitors and see if they have an affiliate program. This is an excellent opportunity for you to expand your business. In the incoming traffic view, as seen below, you can see where your vendor’s competitors get traffic from. Are they affiliates? Then analyze their sites and traffic to see if they are relevant to you.

Additionally, you can analyze a potential vendor’s website traffic to see where their referral traffic comes from and assess the competition you’ll be up against if you choose to work with this site.

Tip no. 3: Reach out to competitors’ affiliates

For merchants, the competition is an excellent place to investigate affiliate potential. You can learn a ton from competitors’ data with a bit of affiliate competitive research

The Find Affiliates tool is one of Similarwebs traffic analysis features with which you can analyze your competitors’ performance. Discover affiliates your competitors partner with, but you don’t. Then, try to find out how valuable these partners are to your competitors. See how much traffic your rival gets from them and how engaged the audience is.

You want to identify high-performing affiliates that you can reach out to. Have them drive some of their traffic to your site. This way you increase your traffic and grab some of the traffic your competitors would be getting.

Also, find out if the competition uses a different type of affiliate than you. Evaluate what it takes to get into that niche and if it’s worth it for you. Chances are, the strong affiliates for your competition will be a good traffic source for you as well.

But here’s the true secret: Your competition may be doing just that, which means, they know exactly who your affiliates are and how they perform. With Similarweb affiliate research you can quickly identify competitors’ affiliates and track their performance to maximize affiliate marketing benefits.

Tip no. 4: Drive more traffic with competitive keyword research

Affiliates compete for traffic, and vendors compete for the affiliates that drive the most traffic. About 69% of affiliate traffic is based on SEO. Competitive keyword research helps you understand who gets traffic for relevant keywords and where it comes from. In the keyword feature under acquisition channels in Similarweb, you can select the competitors that interest you. View their traffic side-by-side per keyword to understand how well they perform.

You can leverage this knowledge and adapt your strategy by using the keywords that are most effective in generating the right traffic, and a variety of filters for in-depth competitive keyword analysis.

Keyword research tips for affiliate marketing success:

• Focus on your industry and your top competitors within that industry, and find additional keywords using a keyword generator.
• Then evaluate the potential of the terms for your business or the vendor’s business.
• Consider keyword seasonality because in many commercial industries keywords are related to the time of year, holidays, or special sales periods.
• If you already have a keyword strategy, use a keyword gap tool to determine which terms competitors get more traffic for and where you are strong.

Keyword research should be an ongoing process to help you stay on top of trends and changes in keyword popularity and performance. You can create lists to monitor and track.

Tip no. 5: Consider search intent in your keyword research

Ranking high on Google is one thing. Getting the right traffic is another. An essential factor to consider when selecting keywords to target is search intent. Google’s algorithms assess search intent to provide the content that best answers the query in the user’s mind.

A single word in a long-tail keyword can alter the search intent. Let’s look at an example: “computer repair technician near me” vs. “computer repair technician job”. The first person searching likely has a computer issue that needs fixing. The intent is commercial because the searcher seeks options to purchase a service.

In the second case, we can assume that the person typing this keyword is looking for job openings. The intent here is a job search and, therefore, not relevant for businesses offering computer repair services.

Use the Similarweb keyword research tool that provides reliable and accurate keyword data and also identifies different search intents that help you target the exact keywords that will drive traffic the right traffic to you.

Tip no. 6: Find merchants your affiliate competition partners with

Did we mention that the competition is a great place to find opportunities? Investigate your affiliate competitors and benchmark your performance against them. A bit of competitive analysis of website traffic and engagement can help you assess how you’re doing and optimize. Examine what more successful affiliates do and learn from them.

Also, look at your affiliate competitors to see who they promote that you don’t. The Similarweb Digital Marketing Platform provides the relevant data. These may be good vendors to reach out to as well. When your business grows and you become known in your field, you have something to offer multiple sites in your industry.

It’s critical to do some research and get reliable data. Use Similarweb’s web traffic analytics tool that allows you to dig into the stats of different industries and sites.

Tip no. 7: Offer discount codes

This affiliate marketing idea is something to consider for both affiliate managers and publishers. Regardless of who produces the content and creatives (either the merchant or the affiliate) adding a code makes it more attractive to the consumer.

Discounts provide a powerful incentive to the target audience and the affiliate. Audiences love to get things at reduced prices or special conditions, and for affiliates, it’s an effective technique to offer real value.

Why are codes and coupons a potent affiliate marketing trick? Affiliates generally produce and publish content, create relationships and build links. Content is information that may or may not be valuable for the target audience; however, doesn’t offer them any financial advantages. Adding a promo code to the affiliate content provides actual financial value to the potential customer. The audience gets a discount when they arrive at your site through the affiliate.

Tip no. 8: Promote what the audience wants

Knowing your market means understanding the audience. Identify where your audience is located, the age group, and where and how they like to browse the web. Discover what content they engage with and what type of shopping behavior is prevalent.

This helps you fine-tune your strategy for better targeting. But there’s another benefit. When you hang around where your audience does, you’ll quickly become part of the crowd and see what they’re looking for in products. You can identify trends.

This is where you get inspiration on where to put your efforts. Discover the products your audience loves and promote them.

Also, find ways to engage with the audience directly. Get feedback on your content or offers and use that to optimize and adapt. Find out what they like and produce more of that. Find out what they miss and find it for them.

Tip no. 9: Earn the audience’s trust

Last but not least of our tips: build real relationships. Most starting affiliates believe that it’s all about traffic. Many newbies make the mistake of looking at volume only. But your success will be short-lived unless you can build credibility and trust.

Put some thought into trust-building elements on your site and in your content. When the audience trusts you, they’ll return and even recommend you to others. In the long run, this is more profitable.

For example, people only listen to influencers who give product information that proves reliable and truthful. After all, that’s why people follow influencers. Instead of doing the hard work of evaluating, comparing, and choosing, consumers follow the recommendation of someone who does that for them.

There are many ways of building that trust. The most important is honesty. Don’t make a product look better than you think it is. Present the advantages but also mention potential downsides. Disclose that you are affiliated with the product owner and get a commission. You may think this will put people off, but if followers find out, they’ll feel betrayed. A betrayed customer won’t return and make sure their friends don’t either.

One last secret before you go

OK, we’ve spilled some industry secrets and probably made ourselves unpopular with some competitors. That’s fine, as long as you get something out of this and put the affiliate marketing success tips and tricks to good use.

There’s one detail we haven’t disclosed yet. You can do all the keyword research, competitive analysis, and affiliate evaluation with Similarweb Digital Marketing Intelligence.

by Ruth Trucks

Senior Marketing Writer

Ruth, with 15 years in marketing, transforms complex data into engaging content. She enjoys gardening, motorcycle tours, and family time.