What holds the key to maximize your revenue flow with pay-for-performance is engaging your target group. Affiliates are paid only when a specific event takes place or a desired tangible action is performed like an actual purchase or a transaction, newsletter signing up etc. Until you have prompted users to act, the program won’t be successful. 

Let us acquaint yourself with some ideas for ensuring affiliate marketing success.

Understand your audience

• Anticipate and meet expectations as well specific needs of your target to make an affiliate program successful. Know why they’re visiting your page or site and whether you are being able to provide exactly what they’re searching for.
• The affiliate products that you are actively promoting must offer a holistic solution or fulfillment to your audience. A mismatch of interests won’t help.
• If you’re discussing sports and fitness, do not put up affiliate ads for a desktop, laptop accessories or a printer toner, thinking those programs invariably have a higher payout. The audience for your site at that point is probably not interested in knowing other things. This will cause a mismatch and drive them away.
• Keep the content and ads in sync so that the mix is relevant from your readers’ perspective.

Be fair and transparent

• Maintain honesty, trust and transparency. Readers are judicious. They would follow whether an affiliate link is deceitful, at some point of time.
• If you fail to win your readers’ confidence by making lofty promise, thus misleading them, your ads- catchy they might be- will fail to entice readers and in fact, might backfire as they might never revisit your page.
• Disclose your affiliations. People appreciate honesty, and will comfortable while dealing with you, and showing faith in your business. If they feel you’re hiding something from them about your affiliations, mostly they would skip your link, to directly approach the vendor, depriving you of referral credit. Full disclosure is a must to build a loyal user base.
• Try to build on your repeat visitors who essentially drive your site traffic, and they are the ones to give you meaningful linkbacks. They often inadvertently spread the word, and tend to recommend your products and content.
• Bank on genuine content to build a relationship. If your visitors do not see any value in your content offering, they won’t possibly be keen to explore the site further, hurting its stickiness. The information should be dynamic and user friendly, to increase the impact of your products and services. Make it helpful and informative. Treat affiliate ads as a value-add or an additional resources to complement your content and vice versa.

We shall know about more ideas to make optimum usage of your referral links in our next post.