7 Ways to Make More Money Affiliate Marketing

Have you gotten started in affiliate marketing, but you’re not seeing the results you want? Do you want to make more money with affiliate marketing? Here are 7 tips that you can use to get better at affiliate marketing!

7 Ways to Make More Money in Affiliate Marketing

Learn SEO

Honestly this one goes first because it’s the most important one of all. If you can get good at Search Engine Optimization, your affiliate marketing results are going to take off! Affiliate marketing and SEO go together like peanut butter and jelly, because SEO allows you to capture someone right when they’re in the buying process.

What is SEO? It’s basically the process of helping search engines understand what questions your content answers. So when someone searches a question, Google sorts through perhaps millions of results, and determines that your content is the best answer to the question that person asked.

Usually, these questions are things people are already interested in:

“Best camera for photography”
“Bookkeeping for small businesses”
“How to start a stationery business”
Etc. 

So if you are an affiliate for cameras, or a bookkeeping company, or a course about starting a stationery business – and you can capture more people who are searching these things, then you’ll make more money. Simple as that.

How to learn SEO? Here’s a video to get you started:

Simplify Your Partnerships

I’m a partner with over 40 different companies…but most of them I’m not actively working with on a regular basis. That would just be confusing to my audience, and frankly, to me. There are a few things that I’m known for, and that people reach out to ask me about all the time.

Sure, I can share an affiliate link for another product if someone asks me about it. But keeping things simplified will allow you to stay more on message, and you will make more money that way. In general stick with products that:

1. You love the most
2. You use the most
3. You’re the most knowledgeable about

Track Your Results More Closely

The biggest mistake people make with affiliate marketing is not tracking their results. You have to understand how the funnel works if you’re going to improve yours. Unfortunately, every affiliate program uses different methods of tracking, and provides different information – making this a very difficult thing to do. But if you aren’t aware of where your issues are, then how can you fix them?

Generally, affiliate sales only allow you to track 2 metrics: Clicks and Conversions. If your clicks are low, then that’s a sign that people aren’t super interested in what you’re selling (or at least…the way that you’re selling it is not “hitting” with them). Re-evaluate how you’re sharing the product and what could make someone excited about it! If your clicks are good but conversions are not great, that would suggest that there’s a mismatch between the value of the product shown in the content you share, and the value of the product they see when they actually go to buy. This could be an issue with price, or you might simply be hyping it up in a way that the product doesn’t actually live up to (AKA trying too hard!).

In Clicks to Cash, we’ll talk about a ton of strategies for increasing both of these metrics, and I’ll share my tracking spreadsheet that will help you track results across platforms.

Talk About Negatives

If you’re doing that thing where you’re trying too hard, or hyping up a product too much, then you probably won’t see great sales. A wonderful way to combat this is to talk about the negatives of a product. You don’t have to focus on it 100%, but mentioning a con in the midst of all the pros gives you so much credibility and helps people trust you.

Every product has flaws. Or people it’s not great for. Or features that do one thing but not another thing. This doesn’t mean the product sucks, it just means that it’s not perfect for every single person in the universe. But just by mentioning that, you’ll gain trust and authority with your audience. This will make them more likely to believe you when you say something good about the product too.

Say The Same Thing…But Different

If you’re not making as much money as you want to be, you’re honestly probably not sharing your products enough. I know, it probably feels like you’re being so annoying. But you’re the only one who’s seeing every single thing that you do. I promise, even your most devoted fans are missing out on some of your shares every now and again.

Maybe creating more content feels daunting, but it doesn’t have to be super complex or unique every time. You’d be surprised how easy it is to say the same thing, but in a slightly different way. And you never know which way is going to be the one that really “hits” with certain people.

Here’s an example involving a course about Starting a Stationery Business. I could post the following 10 Reels, which are all basically saying the same thing, but in different ways:

• 7 Things I love about Being a Stationery Designer
• You might enjoy being a stationery designer if…
• You should definitely not be a stationery designer if…
• What it Takes to Become a Stationery Designer
• 5 Skills You Need to be an Invitation Designer
• Everything I do in a Day as an Invitation Designer
• POV: You finally found a stationery designer who… (list the qualities)
• Are you ____, ____ and ____? You might love designing stationery
• POV: You started an invitation business because you love…
• You’re a stationery designer. Of course… (we’ve all seen this trending TikTok format, right?)

I bet if you challenge yourself to come up with 10 ways to say the same thing – you’ll come up with some really wonderful new ideas!

Repurpose Your Content

Now that I’ve got you thinking about sharing MORE, let’s make all that content work harder too! Are you repurposing your content? Here are a few of my favorite ways:

• Sharing Reels to TikTok (and YouTube Shorts. And Pinterest.)
• Sharing Carousel posts to Pinterest
• Turning Long-form content (blogs) into Carousel posts and/or emails
• Creating podcast episodes from long-form video content
• Pinning all static Instagram posts and blogs
• Adding YouTube Videos into blog posts

On that last note…here’s a video I filmed about the service I use to repurpose all of my content automatically. It can’t do everything on this list, but it can sure make a dent (and did I mention it’s automatic???).

Be Something Else Too

We’ve all been hearing about the “downfall of the influencer” lately. I don’t necessarily believe that’s true, but I do believe people are starting to become immune to the influencer schtick. So as someone who makes money from affiliate partnerships, you need to be…something else too.

It doesn’t really matter what. You can be an educator, a blogger, a gym rat, a photographer, a political activist, whatever you want. But people are starting to see through influencers who exist only to shill products. If you imagine your favorite influencers – they probably all have something else going for them than just coming on to sell, sell, sell all the time.

The second part of this tip is to keep your affiliate partnerships strictly in line with that other thing that you are. If you’re a stationery designer, I don’t want to hear you trying to get me to join a gym. If you’re a fitness instructor, I don’t want you sharing your favorite printers with me. Your audience is there for a reason, so don’t take advantage of their time just to make a quick buck. It won’t be profitable in the long term.

I remember in 2017, I made a goal to make $10,000 that year from all my affiliate partnerships. Just the other day, I got a check for over $10,000 for just one quarter’s earnings from one partner. So this just goes to show that it can add up significantly over time!

The biggest piece of advice I can give about any new revenue stream is this: Try something, then revise. Try a tactic or two, see how they do, and then continue to get better over time. You probably won’t go viral and hit 6-figures in a few days with affiliate marketing, but if you give up you definitely won’t ever get there.

Haven’t started your Affiliate Marketing journey yet, check out this blog post and watch these YouTube video about how to get started!