One of the most common ways to monetize online content is through
affiliate marketing.
Over half of the Top 100 US and UK publishers by revenue (Conde Nast,
Hearst, BuzzFeed, MailOnline, HuffPost, and others) use affiliates as a
the starting point for a new revenue stream and an alternative to advertising in
Skimlinks' network alone.
Affiliate marketing allows authors to be compensated for their contributions
to customers' buying experiences. If a publisher includes an affiliate link to
a merchant in their article, they will be paid a commission for every sale
made as a direct result of the affiliate link being clicked. Publishers can
include as many affiliate links as they like in an article, but they must
manually create each link, which can be time-consuming.
They may, however, automatically convert every link to a merchant on their
website into an affiliate link and start earning commissions when their
content leads to a transaction if they work with Skimlinks.
Affiliate marketing is a relatively simple concept that can be quite profitable
if approached correctly. This post is meant to assist newbies to get started
and monetizing their material, based on our experience with hundreds of
publications.
- Begin with your strongest suit.
Publishers who make the most money from their content make millions.
However, this did not happen immediately, and the publishers did not begin
by attempting to write about every product available. Instead, writing about
certain things that you are familiar with is the ideal approach to begin.
Consider your editorial content, as well as the subjects and trends you
already cover, and how you can locate goods that are relevant to those
topics and trends. It will be significantly easier to monetize your writing if
you believe in the products you write about and they are linked to the
the content you already provide.
You can start thinking about an expansion plan for the things you want to
write about once you've established the core goods you want to write
about, begun producing content, and started making money from it.
- Produce High-Value Content
Today's online game is all about adding value to people's lives. If you give
them something of worth, they'll come back for more. So, if you're thinking
about affiliate marketing and how you can monetize your material, make
sure it's high-quality and adds value to your readers' lives.
To begin, determine what makes your material unique. You must
understand what your readers' unique selling point is and why they would
choose your material over everyone else's. Look at your engagement
analytics, figure out which material gets the most attention, and keep using that structure again. - Disseminate the content to as many people as possible.
When creating content, it's critical to consider SEO and how to get your
commerce content to rank effectively in search engine results. Articles that
are more than 60 days old account for 40% of large publishers' revenue on
Skimlinks. You can use very particular keywords when you first start
creating very specific content, which is exactly what search engines seek
when selecting how prominently to rank content in search results. As
your most popular posts become indexed and people discover them, you
should see an increase in organic traffic.
You can also go beyond SEO.
To enable publishers to spread their expertise as far as possible, some of
our network's most effective material gets repurposed for email, social
media, and other channels. People will want to find your material, obtain
advice on purchases they're making, and act on it in the channel of their
choosing if you're an authority in your field. Consider how you may increase
interest in your material through means other than search. - Keep trust at the forefront of your mind.
Affiliate success hinges on trust.
Readers must believe you are providing legitimate suggestions about what
they should buy, and they must be intelligent enough to see when you are
selling them short.
So keep these factors in mind when writing commerce content:
Consider whether you would actually buy the thing.
Think about whether you enjoy the brand and its items.
In an ideal scenario, make sure you've tested the product and are confident
it will meet your readers' needs.
Readers can tell if you believe in a product or brand because your
excitement shines through in your writing. The higher the quality of your
recommendations, the sooner readers will start to trust you as a resource
for learning about things they want to buy and begin making purchases
based on your advice. - Adopt a data-driven approach.
Once you've begun making money with affiliate marketing, you'll begin to
collect data that you can use to improve your affiliate approach and make
more money.
As previously stated, merchants will give publishers a commission if they
are directly responsible for a sale. So, whether you're looking for merchants
to write about or things to evaluate, think about how much commission they
pay. If you drive a sale, the greater the rate, the more money you'll make.
You'll have hit gold if you can combine a high commission rate with a
product you believe in.
It's also a good idea to consider conversion rates. Although a merchant
may offer a high commission rate, if their conversion rate is low, it suggests
that consumers rarely buy their products, lowering your chances of
generating a transaction.