One of the key ways that affiliate marketers generate leads is through content marketing. And for good reason – content marketing works amazingly well! As Demand Metric suggest, 80% of marketers believe that custom content should be central to marketing work. Their data also suggests that content marketing generates approximately 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing per dollar spent.
Content marketing is all about building your audience with valuable content, and consistently delighting them. You can then leverage that audience by using affiliate links to the brands or products that you’re creating content about.
But how do you come up with all this content? To help, we’ve put together a list of 4 categories of posts that you could be writing. Obviously, these will vary across different niches and industries, but in general, they’re applicable to all kinds of affiliate marketing.
1. Blog articles
Blog articles are a firm favourite of content marketers. You can write blog articles about a wide variety of things related to your niche. The key thing is to make sure that they’re addressing a genuine need for information from your customers – if you’re just writing lots of very similar posts you’ll find your audience gets bored, and your reputation will suffer.
To keep your blog posts feeling fresh, consider branching out into different types. For example, if you mostly write informative content about specific products, think about adding fun content or round-up posts with multiple products.
2. Video
While video might not be the type of content you’re used to producing, it’s quickly becoming a very popular form of content. 52% of marketing professionals have named video as the type of content with the best ROI, as Hubspot have noted.
Making videos doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. There are plenty of tools out there that make the process easier, and some that will even automatically generate videos from images and text.
If you’re not sure where to start with video, consider making demo videos of a product or service, or filming real-world testimonials. Lots of consumers are turning to video for informative content, so think about producing how-to videos or guides to really inform and delight customers.
Video can be a great way to really showcase a product or service. You don’t need a really expensive camera to start. With video, often less is more: go for a simple style and keep it short and snappy.
3. Product reviews
Product reviews are a great way to produce content that drives affiliate leads. If you’re trying to drive traffic to specific products, posting reviews of them and similar products is a great way to do so.
However, it’s important to make sure that your product reviews are unbiased and honest. If you’re writing overly promotional content for a product, your audience will know and your reputation will suffer.
At Quotatis, we write informative product reviews over on our Quotatis Pro blog. We post informative reviews about tools and other products that tradespeople are looking for.
4. Social
Social is a great way to distribute your other content. But, you can also use social to drive leads with content of its own.
Seeing your social channels as opportunities to create specifically crafted content is a great way to boost your reputation and generate more leads. Often, short-form content that’s intended for social performs much better than simply distributing your other content.
To get started, think about which parts of your existing content you could repurpose to work as social content. If you’ve got list articles, try to pull out the section headers and use them as short informative tweets. Also, if you’ve got longer videos, consider editing shorter sections and posting those to social media as short videos.
With all these different options for producing content, it’s clear that content marketing has never been a stronger way of generating affiliate leads. Tweet us @QuotatisPartner with your ideas for great content!
