5 Affiliate Marketing Strategies Examples That Work

Here are 5 real-world affiliate marketing strategies that provide you with guides and inspiration for growing and improving your affiliate businesses from few hundreds into tens of thousands of dollars a month using various digital marketing techniques such as websites and search engine optimization.

As In any business it is important to have a strategy so does the affiliate business. The same applies to affiliate marketing since it is your business and has to be treated like a business.

Each of the examples of affiliate marketing strategy has own strengths and weaknesses, that’s why we’re stepping in and providing you with couple strategies to use separately or in one big marketing mix to ensure growth and stability of your affiliate business.

If you like to understand better about your website and what strategy best for your situation. Feel free to contact us and schedule a free consultation with us.

Before you start to apply these strategies, it’s important that you have already had basic knowledge understanding about websites, hosting, search engine optimization, and other basic elements of Web. So let’s get started.

#1: The “Blog” Strategy

Very simple but yet effective strategy is blogging. Blogging is good for a couple of reasons, like:

Blogs are free to create;
There are many different blogging services to use with different and very flexible features;
Very important – blogs are search engine friendly content management systems (CMS) that can achieve high rankings in search engines even without knowing much about technical aspects of search engine optimization.

What would be the blog strategy that works?

Basically, the main goal is to create little blog network of 5-20 blogs that are on close topics to each other as well they should be aiming for low competition search terms. Usually, it means either low searched term or also terms that are 3- 4 and more words long.

Tools for keyword research:

Google AdWords Keyword Planner: The most obvious choice for the top spot, this free keyword tool has been a favorite for many years. Not only is the Google Keyword Planner a good choice when starting a new site, but it can also be your best friend as you grow and produce more content.
WordStream Free Keyword Tool: As a free keyword tool for the first 30 searches, it never hurts to become familiar with what WordStream has to offer. Similar, in many ways, to the Google Keyword Planner, this is one of the more user-friendly keyword research tools on the list.

The key factor in blogging is to have keyword rich content and then link it to blogs and other sites targeting these specific keywords and pages. See SEO Friendly Content Writing Guide more details.

Each blog should be updated with 1-2 posts every other day or so. Blogs should achieve 10 or more posts each.

In a month’s time, it would be quite realistic to achieve 100 visitors a day and earnings of $500 to $1000 per month depends on your earning plans like a commission. Of course, some blogs will produce better and some not. Some will achieve higher rankings some will support these with links.

Of course, also one blog can be doing well as it would be easier to create unique content and gain more links. Be sure to avoid the duplicate content.

#2: The “Mega-Site” Strategy

Mega site approach is good owner concentrates not only on very small niche and a small content site like 10-20 page review site but goes after a wide variety of topics that include high competition and volume keywords as well as smaller sub keywords along with related niches/topics.

Core strategy is following:

Select the main keywords and their keyword categories and sometimes even more sub-subcategories;
Select related subjects and their categories;
Develop a huge list of keywords of so-called long tail (thousands of little keywords) that fits under the main topics;
Develop main topics (quickly) just to fill main categories;
Heavy development of long tail articles – this means creating articles on groups on these small keywords and optimizing them fast with couple good links. Usually, this strategy will allow having 10’s of pages optimized within few shorts months and receive first targeted traffic;
As the long tail is being targeted and developed – the more traffic and more links are achieved which eventually will result in subcategory rankings and later in rankings of all main categories.

Here is simple example how it could look in practical world:

Category:	weight loss
Sub-Category:	weight loss pills
Sub-subcategory:	herbal weight loss pills best weight loss pills best weight loss pill cheap weight loss diet pill effective weight loss pill diet free weight loss pill
Long Tail:	best weight loss pills review top best weight loss pills best recommended weight loss pill best weight loss diet pills best weight loss diet pill

These long tail keywords in some cases can be split in even more sub categories so it’s not necessarily limited to 3-4 levels but can go even in depth of 10 and more.

Important factor is that from these long tail keywords is easy to extract some related terms, for example: “diet pill”. This combination again will give us several dozens of keywords we could use to create other long tail and even subcategory level pages.

This strategy relies on the principle of uncovering different low searched low optimized keywords from different angles that relate to the main topics and then optimizing them for driving thousands and thousands of visitors from a list of search engines and leading them from these long tail pages to your main pages like product reviews and sales pages.

Recommended Keyword Research Tools

Google AdWords Keyword Planner: The most obvious choice for the top spot, this free keyword tool has been a favorite for many years. Not only is the Google Keyword Planner a good choice when starting a new site, but it can also be your best friend as you grow and produce more content.
WordStream Free Keyword Tool: As a free keyword tool for the first 30 searches, it never hurts to become familiar with what WordStream has to offer. Similar, in many ways, to the Google Keyword Planner, this is one of the more user-friendly keyword research tools on the list.

#3: The “Diversification” Strategy

This strategy is oriented towards the creation of many sites and working with a visitor from different angles. Basically diversification says it all. It can be applied on different niches, products and viewpoints creating different sites to appeal to various visitor needs and capturing the sales from all these niches.

Several products within one niche

The core structure would look like pyramid starting with big generic site down to small product / visitor groups targeting mini sites and can be described like this:

Main site: covers all methods and all products –it could be mini-site about everything covering each topic briefly. It also could be a mega site and then many mini-sites around it.
Category sites: several sites on each product category, e.g. exercises, devices, surgery, weight loss. In some sites showing the greatness of technique and say surgery site showing articles and cases on how bad it is while recommending safe alternatives such as exercises, devices, etc.
Last level: in-depth review site for each product.

How to diversify within one product?

Let’s see how we could diversify using weight loss niche and create many websites:

weight loss in general;
weight loss for men;
weight loss for women;
weight loss for older people and how important it is to be in good shape;
weight loss exercises;
dieting and weight loss;
overweight children and their psychological problems in school and society.

The list probably could go on and on targeting different aspects like regions, eating habits, countries, nations, races etc.

Visual diversification

It means having great differentiation in terms of websites design, navigation, colors and layouts (e.g. left hand navigation, right hand navigation, complex two side menu navigation, heavy graphical approach, presentation look like site, etc).

Approach diversification

Here are few ideas on how to diversify websites approach to the visitor:

independent user’s website
independent doctor’s website
independent research group
testimonial collection site
site answering questions (FAQ) site
forum / community type site
product store / catalogue

#4: The “Dominate the Market” Strategy

This strategy is oriented toward creating many small niche sites targeting very tight keyword groups (5-10 keywords) from the long tail.

If in mega-site links and site-building starts from the very long tail pages (that applies also to link gaining) then here this is totally opposite. Each website created is targeting actually small keyword on its homepage so 95% of all linking activities are oriented towards the homepage of the site.

In general, such website will have 5-10 pages on average. Of course, some sites will naturally grow bigger as more related content and keywords will get discovered.

In many cases, it will be enough to gain 20-50 links to rank well on all 3 major search engines in top 10.

These mini sites are good for funneling traffic to your review sites or MN product and feeder sites.

Action step example of first phase:

In-depth keyword research on niche;
Creating realistic keyword groups.

Then move to second phase:

Pick up 10 sites and get content written for them;
Registering domain names (it’s important to vary registration information as well registrars for maximum safety);
Find several different hosting companies to host these sites with;
Put these sites up and check if everything is working smoothly;
Start building links;
Repeat the process with next batch of sites.

Depending on your resources you could be able to build quite big mini site network that over time could grow into huge part of the market.

The biggest disadvantage is the quite high costs associated with domain names and hosting that’s why it’s advisable to do research and use bulk order offers where possible.

Since these mini-sites are made for attracting search engines than creating a high ranking site under heavy keywords, then outsourcing could be a great help – be it for content, web design or linking campaigns.

If it seems that it is hard to come up with 100 or more new sites without problems being unique then here is the fact: there are already millions of similar sites so extra 100 wouldn’t make big difference for search engine indexes (0.000001%) but could add to your bottom line heavily.

#5: The “Conspiracy” Strategy

This strategy is called conspiracy because of the fact that to visitors are given several choices but as the result, they end buying through your affiliate codes.

How would it look in practical life?

For example, your site is ranking under keyword that generates 5 sales a week or month and your site ranks No.1.

Question: why not to make another site that would rank as No. 2 and another for No.3?

Reason: if you know how to get it to No.1 it shouldn’t be too hard to repeat the process.

The important thing to remember when doing so is to diversify your sites. Make them look and feel the way that visitor would have an impression that this is a totally different website and a totally different person behind it.

Also its advisable to host similar sites in different places as well as not to interlink them.

Remember, one site can rank for several keywords so use it for maximum exposure on search engines!

5 Affiliate Marketing Strategies Examples That Work

#1: The “Blog” Strategy

More to Read: The 14 Most Popular Free Blogging Websites