In this article

Learn more about the three easy steps for how to successfully grow your existing partnerships and transform affiliate marketing into your #1 income source.

You have recently set up your first affiliate marketing partnerships. While you’re starting to see some revenue growth, you may be thinking — what now? It may be time to expand your horizons and build up the diversity of your partnerships.

As you may have seen in our previous blog, Making Affiliate Marketing Work for You, setting up a robust revenue stream through affiliate marketing takes time and you won’t see results overnight. However, the benefit to this type of digital marketing is that it’s like a snowball down a hill; it continues to grow in size and momentum the longer it’s rolling.

The more you maintain each partnership and learn about which products/placements work with your audience, the more you can build revenue.

What Makes Affiliate Marketing So Attractive?

Before we begin, let’s take a closer look as to why it is a good idea to grow and focus on your affiliate marketing partnerships.

For most people, the biggest reason for growing their affiliate partnerships is the opportunity to earn more money. Because CPA marketing is based on results and therefore generally unrestricted, individual earning potential is often uncapped, and is a lucrative revenue stream if you can make it work for you.

For many people that choose to invest in growing these partnerships, this opportunity enables the transition of their blog from a side hustle to a full-time occupation.

Before You Begin: Set Goals for Your Site

Everyone has a different objective that they want to achieve and just because someone is doing one thing, does not mean that you need to be doing the same. This is especially true when it comes to directing your site and setting goals.

If your goal is to make your blog a full-time vocation, then you will have a very different set of targets from someone who wants to keep it as a side hustle. Firstly, the amount of time you take to create content will be different, as will the energy you use to maintain pages and engage with your audience.

For example, if your goal is “Build monthly traffic to 10K unique users by the end of the year and receive an average $3K from CPA partnerships monthly starting January next year” then a good idea would be to focus heavily on SEO, database building and choosing appropriate products for your site.

For the purpose of this blog, we will focus on those who are starting out and want to grow their site exponentially. However, many of the steps discussed are universal and applicable for any sized site. As long as you keep in mind your own goals and available time/effort, these steps can be the building blocks of building revenue and a successful site.

Step 1: Build Your Traffic First

Affiliate marketing is a numbers game. The more high-quality traffic you have, the higher your conversions will be. In this instance,high-quality means the % of your audience that are engaged and converting on the products you’re promoting.

For example, if you’re a beauty blogger, your target audience would be one that is interested in make-up, hair and beauty making them more likely to engage with your content. To attract this target audience, not only does your content need to be consistent and relevant, but it also helps to have a unique tone of voice or point of view. Think about the reasons why a user would turn to you instead of a different beauty blogger.

Finally, behind the content, there needs to be the technical element of great SEO with smart keywords and a strong backlinking approach. For a more in-depth look at SEO tactics for success, take a look through our tips for writing great content.

If you want to create speed and grow your audience faster, you can pay to increase traffic to your site. If you’d like to explore this more, our Facebook and Instagram advertising How-To guide may be of interest. It is important to monitor closely and be sure you’re getting the right audience to your site.

Once you have built up your website traffic with high-quality users, you will begin to see the true value in CPA marketing.

Step 2: Choose Your Products Carefully

The number one reason that performance marketing may not successful is due to the incorrect choice of products. This is most often because the product choice is not relevant to the site’s target audience. For example, a personal finance advice site would likely not perform well reviewing lipsticks.

A good way to gauge if the product is a good fit would be to ask yourself, ‘Would I use this?’ If the answer is yes, chances are it would interest your audience too. In addition to this, something important to keep in mind is that just because one type of product worked well, doesn’t mean that all products in that industry will perform well. Evaluate each product individually, even if they’re from the same partner.

Financial products are some of the most versatile on the market. Money underpins almost every other vertical and it is human nature to hunt for the best deals. If you’re unsure how to incorporate financial products into your site, read this blog to find out how easy it can be.

Step 3: Increase Visibility

The final step to building revenue from affiliate marketing is making sure your affiliate links are being seen and clicked on. It’s important to monitor your site and user behavior on site to understand which type of placements or links your audience responds well to. For example:

• Dedicated emails or newsletter inclusions
• Banner/sidebar ads
• Reviews of products
• Blog posts on related topics
• Comparisons of products

We recommend that you combine a few methods together, such as a review, emails and banners for maximum success. That being said, don’t saturate your site with ads – keep your user experience in mind.

Once you have a successful formula, replicate it with new programs to gain results faster.

Final Words

Building a foundation from which you will be able to grow and earn increased revenue will take time, and you’ll need to be persistent with it. You may find it will be more time intensive than you initially expected, but stick with it because once the programs are running, they build momentum.

To recap, here are some tips to keep in mind as you explore affiliate marketing as a revenue stream:

1. Grow your high-quality traffic
2. Chose programs that are relatable and suited to your audience
3. Find your sweet spot for product placement

Our top tip would be to set realistic time goals:

• Three months to set up your partnerships
• Six to nine months to build a foundation
• Three months to build momentum and earnings
• Ongoing maintenance of your site such as fixing broken links, updating SEO and engaging with your audience

We hope that you’ve found this blog helpful. For those that haven’t yet considered affiliate marketing and are ready to get started, we can certainly help and welcome you to sign up for our network by clicking here!