The Internet thrives on fresh content. Affiliate marketing works best when the affiliate marketer is promoting their offers in the form of content.
Here are some ideas on how to do that.
The best way to blend affiliate marketing and content marketing is through pre-selling. This is not a new idea and has been talked about almost since the beginning of affiliate marketing almost 20 years ago.
Affiliate marketing is Internet marketing where an affiliate merchant has an offer they want promoted, and they’re willing to pay an affiliate marketer to do it.
The merchant provides the marketing materials for the affiliate to get started with. They also provide the offers which can include products to sell, cost per action offers, or pay per click offers.
The primary problem with affiliate marketing has been the question of what is the best way to promote these offers? As an affiliate you are promoting the exact same offer, and generally using the same marketing materials, as the other hundreds or even thousands of affiliates you’re competing against.
It doesn’t really matter what niche you’re in either. Certainly some niches are less competitive than others, but every affiliate is working with the same tools and products.
The way to get around this is to customize your affiliate marketing promotions through content marketing. This is why blogs are so popular today.
Blogging works best when the blogger is creating new content and adding it to their blog. How do they do that?
1. Articles. You can write blog articles and post them on them on your blog. These could be anything from short snippet articles of a 100-200 words, all the way to longer articles of 500 to a thousand words.
From an affiliate marketing standpoint this is great because it gives you the opportunity to pre-sell your affiliate offers. It also gives you the chance to create content and link to your affiliate offers in the text of the article.
2. Videos. Create videos and publish them on You Tube and other shared video sites like Vimeo and Daily Motion. Then take the video embed code and post it on your blog to create fresh content.
This instantly gives your blog more professionalism. It’s also way to create additional content outside of just writing articles.
You can add text before and after the article and in that link to your affiliate offers as well. You can also link to your affiliate offers in the description box of the video when you post it on You Tube and the other shared video sites.
3. Graphics. Pinterest is one of the hottest websites on the Internet right now. This is a shared graphic site where you pin pictures. Link back to your blog in the description box of the picture you pin.
Add graphics to your blog to create memorable content. The graphics might actually be the content, or something you add to your articles or videos to liven them up even more.
Over time your blog will begin to take on a life of its own. Think about what you’re really doing here.
You are creating a long-term asset on the World Wide Web. There are ways that you can expand on this even more.
For example, you can bookmark your blog posts into social directories. There are literally hundreds of these you can get your blog into a help drive traffic back to it.
Popular social directories include Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Digg. You can reach multiple directories through bookmarking services such as Social Marker and Only Wire.
Search engines spider the social directories every day. The large search engines such as Google picks up on a link back to your blog that likes.
It could rank your blog post in its organic search engine rankings. These can stay there for several years giving you free traffic over and over.
The same thing is true with the social directories. The links always stay alive and you never know what somebody’s going to click on that and end up on your blog.
Just from one piece of content you’ve created all kinds of potential free advertising or your blog. From an affiliate marketing standpoint you’re doing something different than many other affiliates are doing.
This can lead to potential readers that act on the required action from the affiliate merchant. Again this could be anything from purchasing a product, filling out a lead form, or clicking on an ad. There are many ways to make money doing affiliate marketing.
These are all ways that content marketing with blogging and affiliate marketing work so well together.