The future of ecommerce and product discovery is bright with Affiliate Marketing. Here are 5 ideas that will help you increase audience engagement and create more revenue from your content.
Monetization of digital content is changing fast.
Declining payouts coupled with issues of ad viewability and growing user privacy concerns are forcing large content publishers in the US and UK to look at a more diversified strategy for monetizing their content. Media publishers clearly no longer believe that display advertising on its own can cover the cost of producing quality content, let alone deliver a viable business model.
This observation is at the core of the ‘affiliate marketing renaissance’ which the industry is experiencing, as media owners in the US and UK are turning to affiliate marketing as a more targeted, controllable and user-friendly way of monetizing their content.
Affiliate marketing is not new. It’s a marketing channel that can trace its roots back to the mid-1990s but a surge of new innovation is bringing affiliate marketing to the fore for publishers once again.
Different publishers have different ‘DNA’s, which shapes the type of content and the editorial frameworks that they can experiment with. And whilst not all content is created equal, here are 5 ways will help you to make every link worth more using affiliate marketing, irrespective:
1. Find new advertisers, niche products or emerging brands
Readers are always on the lookout for new product recommendations, and the rise of Direct-To-Consumer purchasing now offers content publishers a broader range of advertisers to link to. Bringing your audience new and exciting products or brands increases advocacy for your site, and many of these advertisers can be monetized using affiliate marketing, and with lucrative payouts.
2. Identify the inbound traffic sources that are driving the most sales
Advertisers consider attribution analysis a vital part of their online strategy, and so should publishers. Reviewing the entire sales funnel will help you see which Facebook campaign or inbound traffic source converts best. Looking at this down to which specific products are bought and how the traffic was generated will help you optimize the entire journey for your readers and assign specific ROI’s to your acquisition channels.
3. Aggregate how much revenue per article you’ve driven, and which links in each article are performing best
Being able to consolidate all your reports will save you time and allow you to see exactly how your content is performing. Setting up daily reports straight to your inbox will save you precious time, allowing you to see revenue driven from all your content.
3. Get the best return from your investment by deciding which advertiser to monetize
Using affiliate marketing opens up thousands of advertisers you can link to, but how do you know which one to use? Looking at the earnings per click (EPC) and conversion rate for each advertiser is the best way to decide, particularly if you’re faced with linking to a product that is stocked by multiple retailers. This will ensure you’re driving the most revenue from your link. Looking for retailers with low Return Rates (RR), high Average Order Value (AOV) and solid Conversion Rates (CR) is a good way to spot high-value niches.
3. Regularly review content for broken links
Publishing sites are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month from monetized links that are out of date or broken. This creates a poor experience when a user reads your article and clicks on a link, only to be taken to a dead page. It’s a quick win but one so often overlooked…review popular pages for out of date content. Checking which links are rotten and updating them will help you generate continuous revenue from your most loved articles.
Media publishing sites brought an estimated $150 million to the US market in 2018 and are now one of the fastest growing contributor’s to the affiliate marketing industry. More and more digital publishers produce content based around embedded affiliate links, connecting their users directly with the products they are promoting.
While In the past, affiliate marketing was often ignored by media sites because it was viewed as resource-intensive and not lucrative enough, technological advances in the space are quickly changing its status and turning it into a pillar in the publishers’ content monetisation strategy.