Congratulations on starting a blog. You’re getting some traffic, growing your Facebook likes, and building your email subscribers, but… we’d all like to extract a little more revenue from our hard work. If those adsense display banners and blank ‘banner for sale’ ads aren’t cutting it, consider affiliate marketing with Jack Media.
First, how does affiliate marketing work?
In a nutshell, here’s how affiliate marketing works.
- You add one or multiple ‘campaigns’ to your site. A campaign is an affiliate program run by an advertiser that pays out on goods sold, leads generated or any other metric they are trying to build.
- Rather than using a normal link to push traffic to the campaign website, you use a special Jack Media tracking link that logs clicks and conversions. When a visitor clicks one of those links, a unique cookie is dropped on their browser.
- Doing this informs Jack Media that a unique click has been sent by your blog, and informs the advertiser that the particular click was sent via your website.
- When that click performs a particular action (for example clicking, purchasing or signing up), the cookie activates a tracking pixel installed on the advertiser’s website which reports to us that a/ a successful action has taken place and b/ details of that action – eg. purchase price.
- We then match that successful action to your account and credit you for your work.
Generally CPS (cost-per-sale) fashion campaigns run on 30-day cookies, which means your clicks have a 30-day window to transact in which you will be given credit for the sale.
How can I as a fashion blogger monetise my audience with affiliate marketing?
Affiliate Marketing with BANNERS FOR FASHION BLOGS
Banners are pretty simple. Throw up a banner and your audience clicks it. If those clicks transact (in the case of a sale-generation campaign) or signup (in the case of a lead-generation campaign) you’ll be credited for the action.
It is commonplace for blogs to organise affiliate or paid banners down their left or right side navigation. Generally these banners will showcase an incentive to click, such as free shipping and free returns, to a fashion retailer that is contextual for the blog’s audience. Here is an example banner from our friends at RunStopShop:
Note: you should be aware that banners are getting lower click through rates every year, and your audience is required to click your banner (and unique tracking link associated with it) for you to be credited with the sale. So – banners are a good first step, but don’t rely on them exclusively!
AFFILIATE MARKETING WITH TEXT LINKS FOR FASHION BLOGS
Text links are where you hyperlink text to a relevant offer. Example: I just love these fantastic pieces from Pilgrim. Text links are super contextual and are a great way to encourage click through – visitors visit to read your post, and the link is part of your post, so is a good chance of the text link being clicked upon.
Warning: be careful not to spam links into posts and abuse your readers’ trust. Make sure you link to quality and contextual offers that your audience will appreciate being made aware of. As the great Warren Buffet says, “it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it”.
AFFILIATE MARKETING WITH EMAIL FOR FASHION BLOGS
Email is another way to monetise your audience. There’s no rocket science involved – insert a relevant banner into your email, create a small text block linking through to something awesome that an advertiser is currently offering, display some cool coupon codes down the side etc. Build and nurture your email list – it is one of the best push tools known to internet marketers, and an email list that opens and clicks your emails because they see value in your content will print money. If you’re interested in reading more on email marketing best practices, Mailchimp’s Email Guides offer good reading.
Note: you can also try sending non-fashion, yet contextual offers to your audience. For instance, if you’re a price-conscious fashion blog, a save-money-on-electricity campaign might appeal to your email audience and earn you good money.
AFFILIATE MARKETING WITH FACEBOOK AND OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKS FOR FASHION BLOGS
By now you should be well aware that if you have an audience – unique visitors on your blog, active email subscribers etc – you can monetise it. Facebook, Twiiter and all the other social media platforms are no different – so – get linking! If there is an awesome sale, great new arrivals, a super coupon code etc that your audience would love, let them know. Share it, tweet it, pin it, instagram it, stumble it – whatever platform you use, syndicate relevant content through it! If people you reach start retweeting or sharing, your tracking link suddenly reaches people you never had a relationship with before. How good is that!
Remember, keep it interesting and don’t spam non-contextual links out to your audience, you’re going to get a bunch of un-follows pretty quickly if you’re tweeting out how you love every third product on Amazon each hour. We run a Facebook page for one of our internal sites, VouchersIn, which has great engagement while still syndicating out affiliate links. Like it and try to pick up on best practices when you’re flicking through Facebook next time you’re on the train or waiting for a bus!
AFFILIATE MARKETING WITH NATIVE ADVERTISING FOR FASHION BLOGS
So banner ad clicks are down, you always skip YouTube video ads (unless its a cool movie preview you haven’t seen yet), more than half of our mobile ad clicks are accidental – the fan boys and girls of native advertising have never been singing louder. Native advertising doesn’t have a standard definition, but to us it means building advertising into your platform as part of your content offering, rather than offering a disruptive banner/video/something else. Adwords appearing on keyword searches for ‘buy dresses online’ is a great example of native advertising.
What can you do to incorporate native advertising into your blog?
- Dedicated ‘coupon’ section
- Dedicated ‘my favourite shopping sites’ section
- Dedicated ‘lookbook’ section
- Dedicated ‘sales’ section
- Dedicated ‘trends’ section
These could be entire pages with links found in your navigation bar or simple text-based widgets that sit in your sidebar on every or certain pages. Your site is unique, think about what best suits it and audience and go from there. FYI Jack Media has some awesome sale, coupon and lookbook widgets currently in development – so stay tuned for some real simple copy paste solutions!
Stay tuned for Part 2 in this series – a step-by-step guide on how to do the above through Jack Media.
And if you haven’t yet signed up with Jack Media..
