Below are 6 tips to help you convert more sales when marketing affiliate products on your blog…

1. Market to your niche – Make sure you promote things that are relevant to your readers. If you are running a Martial Arts blog, don’t try promoting a “Guide to Making Money Online” just because it pays a 75% commission. Stick with affiliate programs related to your blog’s audience. I see people all the time trying to sell things that have nothing to do with their blog’s niche and I just don’t get it!
2. Don’t just rely on banner ads, instead promote affiliate products in your posts – I find it amazing that many bloggers still think the way to monetize their site is to sprinkle some Adsense ads throughout their blog, and display some affiliate banners on their sidebar and they are done. You are not going to sell many affiliate products that way. To get people to buy affiliate products you need to write about them in your posts. You can write a whole post dedicated to one affiliate product, or you can write a post on a broad topic and recommend one or more products throughout the post.
3. Know your product – The best way to promote something is to try it yourself first, so you can give an honest review. Not only that, but you know the ins and outs of how it works, and if you have used it a while you can tell people how it has worked for you. If you just can’t afford to purchase the product first, make sure you learn as much about it as you can before you try and promote it.


4. Only recommend quality products and services – Do you want to get a bad reputation fast? Then start recommending crappy products to your readers. That will do it! But seriously, if you want to be successful and be known as a person that people trust… make sure you only recommend really good products. If you do, those past buyers will be much more inclined to purchase whatever you’re promoting next. Plus, they might even write some nice comments thanking you for your great suggestions, which can only help your sales conversions… as well as your reputation as an honest marketer.
5. Try and keep out the competition as best you can in your posts – Usually when I am promoting an affiliate product in a post I try and not have any Adsense ads in the post, as those ads could actually steal your affiliate commissions if clicked on. Sure, you might have made 50 cents for the click, but you might have lost a 50% commission or more if they decided to purchase the product through that link instead of yours.
6. Display ad banners in your post that relate to what you are trying to market – Instead of displaying a bunch of rotating random banner ads (which I did in this post)… when writing posts to promote affiliate products I usually display banner ads that relate to whatever product I am writing about. I like to keep my reader’s mind focused on what it is I am trying to promote. If the affiliate merchant doesn’t offer any good banner graphics, I usually just create my own banner ad and use that. If you are not good at creating banners yourself, you can always use 20DollarBanners. You can save 10% on your order (packages not included) with the coupon code “mmodotcom“.

Those are the major things I think about when promoting affiliate products in one of our blogs. Of course the key to converting more sales is to get more traffic. So if your blog does not get a lot of traffic, don’t expect to be making a lot of money just yet. Hopefully, if you stick with it and your site becomes more popular and your traffic grows… so will your sales.

How about you? Do you have any tips for promoting affiliate products on your blog? I am sure everyone would love to hear what works for you.