Do you have a great deal of knowledge and experience on a topic of interest? Are you authoritative or are you building your authority in the industry? Do you already have a blog or social media channels? Do you want to make money by creating online content? An opportunity is affiliate marketing: within your content you can propose products or services and earn commissions on sales and conversions generated by links to merchant websites.
Knowing how to write well, making mpactful videos and images, and generating a lot of traffic is not enough to generate sales and conversions. To get results, you need to know how to choose the products or services you offer, build trust, understand user needs, and use some persuasion techniques.
In this guide on how to write an article for affiliate marketing, we’ll take look at all the steps for creating quality content that converts.
Choice of products or services to advertise
Affiliate marketing is growing more and more, and many brands are beginning to understand the value that publishers and influencers can generate both in terms of brand awareness and, more directly, in terms of leads and sales. This is now expanding to different industries and types of platforms.
Consumer products, travel, courses and even a wide range of services, from financial to consultancy of various kinds, can be sponsored. There are large marketplaces, such as Amazon or Booking for travel, or affiliate networks, such as Awin, Tradedoubler or Rakuten, which have very advanced tracking systems. Then there are individual entities, from the most organized to the most extemporary.
The first step for publisher is to choose the companies and brands that are most relevant to the content. For example, if I have a travel blog, I might look for a partner program from Booking or Airbnb to promote accommodation, or from Expedia or Skyscanner for flights. Immediately after, choose the type of product. Still in the travel industry, you can set a limit to offers in Italy if your blog talks specifically about this country. You can get more precise information about a publisher website by analyzing audience interests from Google Analytics.
Most advanced platforms offer many tools to identify the most successful products. For example, Amazon allows you to filter and choose between the best sellers and the most popular products and those easiest to sell.
Search intent and consumer needs
Once the object of the sponsorship has been defined, it is important to precisely identify the target audience: who is the person who should buy it, what is his budget and what are the needs and parameters that guide his choice. Very important is the search intent, i.e. the reason why he reads our content. Where in the sales funnel is him located?
An example of buyer persona may be: occasional traveler, interested in Italy, with a limited budget, looking for a seaside destination for the month of August. This analysis is useful for pinpointing key information to use in your affiliate marketing article to drive the reader to conversion.
A parenthesis in this discourse concerns the trust that the reader has in the publisher. To buy, I have to trust your advice. Trust is based on credibility and authority that are defined by expertise in a specific topic, references, and quality of content. Without trust, the chances of generating conversions are greatly reduced. Later, we’ll take a look to how to work on credibility and authority in the text of an article.
Article Types and Formats for Affiliate Marketing
Now, we are ready to choose the most suitable channel and distribution methods to promote a product or service to a target. We can choose between various types, for example:
- inspirational article;
- review;
- comparison between different products or players;
- technical sheet;
- how-to guide.
For our traveler in the previous example, we could opt for an inspirational article, accompanied by photos, describing a series of low-cost seaside resorts in different regions of Italy, with links to Airbnb to book an apartment.
Along with the type of article, we have to choose the most suitable format, also considering our available resources. An article indexed on Google might be the best choice for the example above. But let’s also consider a post on social media, or a good video.
Article writing and structure for affiliate marketing
After a preliminary analysis – necessary, but too often underestimated – the time has come to move on to the creation of online content, the most fun and creative moment. Here, are good all the rules to index online articles and, if we have important news sites, to grow on Google Discover – an excellent source of organic traffic -, or those to promote content on YouTube and to improve visibility on social networks.
Getting traffic is all well and good, but in this case the goal is to convert, so the purpose of the page must be clear in the title, meta description and photo already, and it must be compatible with user’s intent .
In the body of an information content – a type for which it is more difficult to get to conversion, but which can hit a very wide target – we must follow a path capable of winning user’s trust and leading him to the desired action: click and conversion.
User’s need in the article for affiliate marketing
The first part must be the one where user’s need is made explicit or created. This must then be amplified and placed in a common situation, in order to make it even more real. If the context allows it, is here where the strong emotional element must be added. The reader keps going only if he thinks that the content can satisfy a great need of his own or if he is emotionally involved.
The second part is where the author explains how he can satisfy user’s need and, unless he is already a well-known authority in the field, leverages his expertise to gain reader’s trust.
Solution and call to action in the affiliate marketing article
The third part is where the solution (the sponsored product or service) is presented, with all the qualities and strengths. To be more effective, you need to be original, describe direct experience and personal opinions. In this way, the positive consideration derived from trust is given to the subject of sponsorship.
Finally, we come to the call to action, which must be clear and direct. To increase effectiveness, we can use some cognitive biases such as urgency or scarcity: “last available pieces, on offer only for today”. This is where the initial emotion comes full circle.
Data analytics & Conversion tracking
As always, it’s important to analyze data and monitor it, so you can make the right adjustements. In the case of affiliate marketing, it is not enough to do it on your own website, but also on the merchant’s website, where the conversion that generates a profit takes place.
Usually, marketplaces, affiliate networks and more advanced players provide a personalized tracking link and a detailed dashboard that allows you to analyze various parameters, including the conversion rate on the destination site. Platforms such as Booking even allow you to further customize the link to create specific taxonomies reserved for individual campaigns.
In other circumstances, a purpose-built UTM link is assigned, that allows the merchant to track conversions and share data with the affiliate. Google’s Campaign URL Builder is the perfect tool to create these links. Otherwise, for e-commerce websites, a discount code, linked to a source, can be created. This is a tracking method often used to calculate conversions generated by posts that are published by influencers as part of a social campaign.
