Best Ways to Increase your Value as an Affiliate or Blogger

As we continue with our “Best Of” theme for June, take a look at these 3 best methods for increasing your overall value in the Affiliate Marketing Industry.

The value of attending industry conferences can’t be overstated.   These are opportunities to:

1. Show a potential retail partner that you are committed to your business enough to take time out of your life to show up.
2. Show a potential retail partner that you are a real individual – as opposed to just an email address!
3. Learn about a retailer, their products, and negotiate great terms going forward for yourself in the program.
4. Mix it up with OTHER bloggers who are in the same position as you – and learn from each other.

New customers are more valuable, typically, to a Merchant… than returning customers.   You may ask “How Do I Do This?  I can’t control new vs. old, can I?”

It is true that you can’t necessarily control this, but you can position yourself so that you begin to send more and more of these types of customers.

Here are some tips from an article I wrote previously…

A. Get off (redirected) search.

Search makes up an enormous percentage of traffic generated – and thus we all love it. However, as Merchants become more sophisticated in their own search efforts, they will likely de-value Affiliates who work in that arena.

This has already happened with Paid Search in the area of brand terms, trademarks, etc… and will continue into natural results. From what I hear, Merchants feel as though the majority of customers who have searched for their “Company Name” are repeat customers or those who would have ended up at their store without the assistance of an Affiliate.

As an Affiliate, a new source of traffic – one that belongs all to you – should be a goal.

Which brings me to….

B. Build a Community.

There is no greater source of traffic than the one that you build yourself. Going back my first point above, I think the better use of search would be to simply use search as a way to build up your own site.

Use your skills at search to bring traffic to your site, and then build a community around that traffic. Use small things like polls, questions, games, prizes, discussion, comments – all these things can bring people into your community. Communities feed on themselves – and bring the kind of organic growth to your Affiliate business that can’t be obtained thru search alone.

Be a traffic source, not solely a re-director of traffic.

C. Go Smaller

This entails a few things…

• I believe that working with emerging Merchants brings you greater odds in working with new customers and…
• I believe some of you should be working with less Merchants. Less Merchants…more focus.

To fully focus on, and master a particular niche requires an obvious great investment in time. One of the common techniques in Affiliate Marketing today is to apply to as many programs as possible and see which one performs the best. A large number of Affiliates see success with this, which is great. However, if you were to focus specifically on bringing new customers to a Merchant, I don’t think this technique would work as well.

Pick a niche and master it. Within an individual niche there are likely several Merchants who are suitable, thus giving you the opportunity to test individual conversion. Newer (sometimes smaller) Merchants with less overall market reach will bring you the best opportunity – as the likelihood of bringing in a new customer (vs. a returning customer) will be much higher. One possible way to go smaller is to target local markets. This is something that requires a blog post of it’s own though so I’ll leave that till later. :)

There are dozens of blogs that teach you how to become an Affiliate Marketer, but there are very few that do it well.

Read the following, they are the cream of the crop and even if you are already a productive Affiliate yourself, you will learn.