One of the great ways of earning money through blogging is to promote affiliate products. If done right it’s a win win situation for the affiliate (you) as you get paid for promoting something you think is of value and the vendor who gets more sales thanks to your hard work.

There are a few mistakes most bloggers make when trying to promote a product and they can hugely impact your profits and even worse your audiences trust in you.

Here are the top 5 ways to succeed at promoting affiliate products.

Don’t Try To Sell The Product

Everyone can spot a bullsh*t testimony or sales pitch from a mile away. Talk more about the problem you had and how the product solved these problems. Provide real proof of the results, if you don’t have any, don’t make them up. Always be unbiased in your review. If the product has its flaws let them be known.

Purchase The Product First

This is slightly obvious but it’s amazing how many don’t even bother purchasing the product first before they promote it. Affiliate marketing can be broken down into the following. If you master this the rest will be much easier.

The best ways to promote an affiliate product is to review it – the best way to review something is to own the product yourself.

That’s really all there is to most of the successful affiliate campaigns.

If I think about the last thing I purchased online, a Canon 6D, to start my video podcasts, I came across some excellent examples of affiliate marketing done right. I extensively researched the best camera to purchase for filming and watched and read many reviews. The good reviews were very detailed, unbiased and well produced. Just take a look at how much effort the-digital-picture went to when reviewing this camera. I purchased my camera through an Amazon referral link as a way of saying thankyou. To be successful at affiliate marketing this is the type of review you need to create.

Track Individual Pages

This applies to bloggers who use multiple pages to promote a product. For example if you create a free wordpress site to promote a product. If you are promoting the same product across multiple pages then always create an individual tracking code for each page you place a link on. It will really help you narrow down what pages are performing well and what aren’t. Being able to see what pages are not performing as well will allow you to invest your resources into improving them which will boost your overall conversion rate of the site.

Sites like Amazon allow you to create up to 100 unique tracking ids that you can use as you wish. It will take a little more work at first to set up but will pay off in the long run, trust me.

Create A Video Review

Video reviews will likely be more engaging for the users and therefore more likely to convert. Studies have shown web page with videos convert better than those without. Another key point to using a video format is that it’s easier for the reader to tell if you are being genuine. Anyone can sit down and write a glowing post promoting a product but only the few will get in front a camera and tell you why they think you should buy this product.

Test Variations

I bring this up a lot on the blog but it goes without saying, if you are sending traffic to a page that is trying to convert visitors, you need to be split testing the page. You might find a large button for your affiliate link might put off people from clicking on it as it seems too in-your-face. You will only know these sort of things from testing.

Take a look at our split testing on a budget comparison to find a suitable service.