5 Ways to Improve at Affiliate Marketing in 2022

Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced affiliate, you surely want to make 2022 your most lucrative year in affiliate marketing. However, that’s not likely to happen if you don’t grow your skills and knowledge from the year prior.

Luckily, a new year provides an opportunity to re-focus and set new goals. You might just need little direction as to some specific areas in which improvement will benefit you the most.

Therefore, here’s our five recommended goals to ensure you evolve as an affiliate marketer in 2022.

Increase Your A/B Testing

You likely already know that testing is an integral part of any affiliate marketing campaign. However, can you confidently say that you’re performing as many A/B (or split) tests as you think you should?

Any affiliate with a successful campaign undoubtedly performed a ton of testing to find that success. It’s the only tried and tested (pardon the pun) way to finding out what works and what doesn’t.    

Not only is A/B testing as important as ever, it’s also easier than it once was. That’s because many platforms now offer built-in A/B testing functionality like Facebook Ads.

You can also utilize 3^rd party services like Optimizely to help you set up and track testing for your campaigns.

Here’s a refresher on some important rules to follow to ensure your testing is better optimized in 2022.

• Test only one variable at a time (call-to-action, headline, images/video, etc.) so you can properly identify what specific changes are affecting performance
• Run your two tests (control and challenger) simultaneously to avoid the time of day, week, month, year skewing your results
• Spend time determining your sample size. This will be dictated by your budget, traffic source, and the type of campaign you’re testing
• Don’t be afraid to add in C, D, etc. versions to accelerate the process if it makes sense for what you’re testing

Strengthen Your Relationship with Your Affiliate Manager

One of the quickest and easiest ways to gain a new advantage in affiliate marketing is strengthening your relationship with your Affiliate Manager.

If you’re a MaxBounty affiliate, no one is going to understand our network and offers better than your MaxBounty Affiliate Manager. Therefore, they’re an invaluable resource that you should be using to help increase your chances of finding the right offer for your campaign strategy.

We recommend contacting them via Skype or email and asking them the following questions at some point during the conversation:

What types of offers are affiliates who are utilizing similar traffic sources to mine finding success with right now?

What offers are relatively new to the network that should excite affiliates and why?

Do you see any glaring issues with my current campaign strategy? (Elaborate on your strategy if you have not previously)

You can also contact your AM by phone, but you lose the benefit of having their insight in writing to reference in the future. That’s why we suggest asking any important questions over email or Skype.

In addition to touching base through these specific questions, you can also discuss allocating time for a weekly or bi-weekly phone call. This will allow you to easily follow up with your AM on campaign progress so that they can provide ongoing insight.  

Network/Find a Mentor or Coach

Having a mentor can revitalize both your campaigns and your passion for affiliate marketing. They can become an invaluable resource that will give you an advantage over other affiliates at a similar experience level.

However, before reaping the benefits of a mentor or coach you’ll first need to find one.

There are several ways you can go about finding an affiliate marketing mentor. Here’s what we recommend:

• Join and be active in online affiliate marketing communities such as forums or Facebook groups
• Reach out to other affiliate marketers through LinkedIn
• Follow other affiliates on social media platforms such as Twitter and start engaging with their content
• Attend and network at in-person affiliate marketing conferences/tradeshows
• Join legitimate affiliate training courses and build a relationship with either the teacher/coach or other students

Keep in mind it might take some time to find someone who meshes with both your campaign strategies and your personality. Just be patient and do your due diligence.  

Once you’ve found a mentor who is willing to work with you, they can help you in a variety of ways, including:

• Answer any questions you may have that aren’t relevant to your Affiliate Manager
• Help you gain a better understanding of any mistakes you might be making
• Detect any inefficiencies in your campaign or areas that could be better optimized
• Help you choose profitable niches and offers that make sense for you
• Introduce you to other affiliates who may be able to also provide all of the above

If you’ve never considered gaining a mentor in affiliate marketing before, make 2022 the year you change that.

Re-educate yourself on SEO

Effective SEO can be the difference maker between a successful affiliate and a struggling affiliate.

Harnessing the power of organic traffic through SEO isn’t easy. However, with some time and work it can quickly become the most profitable way to drive traffic to your affiliate site.

Since Google’s SERP algorithms are continually evolving, so are the best SEO practices for affiliates. Therefore, your priority should be re-educating yourself on the most up-to-date SEO trends.  

Most of these trends will relate to Google getting better and better at homing in on relevant, useful, content is easy for users to access. That type of content is being increasingly rewarded with higher search engine rankings.

For instance, last year Google introduced Web Vitals as a ranking factor. Together these determine your overall ‘Page Experience’ and can either hurt or help your SEO. The three factors they consider web vitals are:  

• Largest contentful paint (loading)
• First input delay (site interactivity)
• Cumulative layout shift (visual stability)

To put it more simply, you want to ensure your site runs, loads, and functions quickly and efficiently.

The best way to determine this is to use Google’s search engine console which will provide you with a report on your page experience.

From there, you can make necessary changes to improve your page such as re-sizing your images, utilizing compression plug-ins, or optimizing your site’s code.  

Voice search is another growing SEO trend that is altering the way users search for information online. Therefore, it’s also altering the best ways to improve your site’s SEO.   

If you haven’t already familiarized yourself with voice search and its impact, we recommend reading our post all about it here.

Continue to do your own research on the best ways to approach SEO in 2022 and then put it to the test. A campaign strategy that incorporates both paid traffic and organic traffic rather than just one can greatly improve your chances of success.

Build a Subscriber/Email List and Utilize it

One of the oldest affiliate marketing techniques is still one of the most effective.

If you’ve been neglecting building a subscriber/email list, it’s time you give it some more attention. If you’ve tried building one already but didn’t find much success, it’s likely worth another attempt.

If it’s something you’ve never tried, don’t be intimidated. Building an email list can be as simple as populating your affiliate site with a few sign-up forms.

If you’re using a platform like WordPress, these can be easily integrated using plug-ins. Other site builders also offer ways to do this, and if you’re a DIY coder, creating email submission forms should be fairly easy. You can also utilize 3^rd-party services like MailChimp.

Once you’ve spent some time building a list of subscribers, you can then promote campaigns to them in a multitude of ways. Notice that all of these provide additional value to the user in addition to the offer.

• Product and service reviews
• Exclusive content such as downloadable guides or e-books
• Announcements or updates regarding your site
• Newsletters
• Helpful anecdotes or educational content
• Sales/discounts related to the campaigns you’re promoting

Although email lists have the potential to be a high-ROI traffic source, they’re also fragile in that there are several ways to easily ruin the relationship you have with those users.

Here’s some helpful tips to ensure that doesn’t happen:

• Do not spam your email list. You’ll only make them uninterested or subscribe
• Strive to provide your list with new value with each subsequent email and continue to build the relationship
• Don’t ever buy or rent an email list
• Only promote campaigns through email that allow email traffic (This is found on any MaxBounty offer page but ask your Affiliate Manager if you’re unsure)