2020 has been an interesting year for affiliate marketers. The pandemic has accelerated the shift away from physical stores to digital shopping by roughly five years, boosting opportunities for affiliate marketers.
As, hopefully, the pandemic comes to an end and life goes back to normal, how can you make more money with your affiliate marketing blog?
First, let's look at the upcoming hurdles to overcome in terms of increasing affiliate marketing revenues.
Upcoming issues for monetizing affiliate marketing blogs
A quick look at Supermetrics affiliate marketing 2021 trends immediately draws attention to some upcoming issues:
- Obvious rising difficulty in high-value terms with regards to organic SERP rankings and traffic acquisition. Ricky Wang, Content Marketing Expert & Founder
- Attribution is a huge problem, and all advertising platforms will favor themselves for anything. Mert Aktas, Marketing Manager at UserGuiding
- Explosion in user-generated content, which is likely to continue in 2021.Raul Galera, Partner Manager at CandyBar
- Customers are becoming much pickier. Andre Oentoro, Founder of Breadnbeyond
Affiliate marketing trends for 2021 identified by the Search Engine Journal (SEJ) are not any better.
- "2020 is Google Ads' worst year on record for shifting away from transparency and limiting access to data [...] we can expect Google to continue on this path indefinitely as it maximizes its own revenue and earnings." Amy Hebdon, Founder, Paid Search Magic
- "The erosion of hyper-specific user-level targeting will push more advertisers back to contextual targeting methods and raise the importance of compelling creative." Ben Wood, Strategy Director, Hallam
But at least, SEJ offers recommendations:
- "One of the most important things PPC marketers can do in 2021 to set themselves up for success is diversifying their skillset beyond Google Ad. As Google continues to move away from actionable data and more toward machine learning, it will be vital for advertisers to be well-versed in other advertising platforms that allow them more control over their spending, reach, and messaging." Christine Zirnheld, Digital Marketer, Cypress North
- "Test other platforms that help drive overall business. I'm starting to see this with clients more and more. I'm very much a 'traditional' PPC account manager, but have been talking with clients about diversifying their advertising beyond Google Ads Search and Display, and Microsoft Advertising." Nikki Kuhlman, Senior Account Director, JumpFly
These recommendations are valuable, but they all ignore a crucial factor. The potential value of your content itself, for its own sake. Today, the time you spend producing quality content only brings revenue when it turns into a sale or your readers click on a banner.
That is, if banners, pop-ups, and other such advertising tools are not driving your visitors away, as is increasingly the case.
Yet, your content has value too! Now it is time to monetize your content regardless of sales or banner clicks.
How can you monetize affiliate blog content in 2021?
Your website is already generating revenue from commissions from product sales or banners, but are you aware that you could earn from people reading your actual content, the content you work so hard to produce?
There are three ways you can already use blockchain content distribution strategies to increase your affiliate blog revenues.
1. Add a Refer & Earn button
You can maximize your content distribution strategy as well as your digital marketing strategy by rewarding your visitors for sharing your content. Even better, with the 2key SmartLink Refer & Earn button, it costs you nothing. 2key network is paying out the rewards with its Qi Points Reputation and activity score that yields 2KEY tokens periodically, currently weekly.
What does the Refer & Earn button do for you?
- It boosts referral traffic to your site by rewarding your viewers for sharing your content, adding a referral bonus at zero cost to you.
- It increases your viewers' loyalty and return rate, as they are grateful for the opportunity you give them to earn from sharing links to your content and keep coming back for more.
- It adds a revenue stream to your blog, as you also earn rewards when your viewers share your content.
Adding a Refer & Earn button to your site requires no coding or integration, so it is worth trying it now.
2. Use 2key SmartLinks to hyperlink any source
If you write long-form informative content, odds are that you are quoting sources and hyperlink the relevant text to your source, or, if you are more academically inclined, list your sources with hyperlinks at the end of your post.
Today, when your readers click on these hyperlinks, you earn nothing. If only it could bring you some additional revenue, wouldn't it be great?
Actually, you can. Let's imagine that you are writing an article that mentions SEO and prefer to hyperlink a Wikipedia article rather than explaining what is SEO.
Until now, that would yield zero revenue, as it is neither an affiliate link nor a banner. Yet, if you click on the link above, you will see that it is a SmartLink, so both you, as the link creator, and your reader that clicks on it, might earn from interacting with a SmartLink.
Once you start using SmartLinks for all your non-affiliate hyperlinks, even their typically low CTR does not stop it from generating growing revenues, especially as each click increases your reputation, hence your earnings even in the absence of any interaction.
Check this article about actual earnings from 2key users to get an idea of the potential residual income.
3. Boost traffic to posts with high commission sales by adding rewards
What can you do to boost traffic to a post or a page designed to push a high commission product or service?
Of course, you can go the usual PPC way, pay through the nose for highly competitive keywords or opt for the cheap PPC road and collect high bot traffic that kills off your CTR, shoot down your SEO efforts and bring zero sales.
Alternatively, you could go the blockchain PPC way and add a reward to the SmartLink for that page. This means leveraging your readers and thanking them, instead of Google or fraudsters, for spreading the word about your content and bringing in real interested humans to read it, skyrocketing your CTR and click/buy ratio.
Be ready for the upcoming blockchain affiliate SmartLink
Even better, while you boost your traffic and increase readers' loyalty today, you are also building up your reputation.
2key is developing a SmartLink specific for affiliate marketing, and one of the features will be to let sellers select affiliates based on their reputation score.
Of course, odds are that products with the highest commission will go to affiliates with the highest reputation, so earning a residual revenue now might indeed lead to earning higher commissions later.
Try adding the Refer & Earn button to your site and see what happens.
Sounds too good to be true?
Welcome to the decentralized economy, where everyone wins except for the centralized middleman.
