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What type of content do people love, yet you don’t see much of it in most niches?

Comics, of course.

You can start your own comic strip with the help of sites like this:

https://www.pixton.com/

Why would you want your own comic strip? Namely to get the social shares and links. A good comic strip could go viral and bring many new visitors to your site.

The key, of course, is to target it to your audience and your niche, so that you’re getting the right kind of traffic for your website.

It won’t necessarily be easy, but for some people, this will be the marketing hen that lays the golden egg over and over again.

Truth is, thinking outside the box and doing things a little different than everyone else is often what it takes to stand out and become truly successful in your business.

Go create a new comic strip today, share it with your circle of influence (on your website and social media) and find out what your audience thinks of your newly discovered talent.

Affiliate marketing is all about the connections you make. There are people out there who need and want to buy the things you’re promoting – you just have to know how to reach those people and get them to buy even when they’re currently on the fence.

You may know already that people are a lot more likely to buy things if someone they know, like, and trust has recommended it. That’s where you come in. You’re going to be that person they come to know and like. They are going to trust you to make product recommendations that will really serve them in all the right ways. They’ll start to feel like they really know you if you host interviews and they can hear your voice.

It’s also likely that you’ll make more sales when you combine the power of your audience with the power of the product creator’s audience.

The product creator attracts an audience. They have their own audience and the benefit of the buzz and chatter that’s going on about them and their products on the web.

The product creator also has something absolutely no one else has—an in depth and intimate knowledge of their product. They know their product inside and out. They have a story about why they created the product. People want to know these things.

These days, people want to buy based on a story. They want to buy when they know someone has gone through what they’re going through. Or, at the very least, when someone has taken the time to really understand what they need and want. That’s what the person who created the product you’re promoting is for the people of your niche.

When you conduct interviews to get more product sales, you’re combining a few different things people need when they’re about ready to make a buying decision.

You’re giving them access to the actual product creator through the product. You’re also giving them access to your thoughts and opinions on the product. That can help people make the right choice when it comes to buying the product.

Getting Started Interviewing

Hopefully, you’re ready to get started interviewing. It really can be a nice way to introduce people to the products you’re promoting and to increase your conversions.

But, what if you’ve never done any interviews before? It can honestly be really intimidating to get started, if only because it’s something that’s new to you.

Think of it as a conversation. The other parts are easy. Get some questions ready for the product creator or ask your audience what they’d like you to ask.

Use some simple recording software – you can use recording tools and Skype for an easy way to do this.

Prepare yourself. Paint a word picture for the audience of what the product is and how it’s going to change their lives.

For much of the interview, you probably won’t want to directly sell. You’ll want to focus on problems, emotions, and solutions.

At the end, though, you’ll probably want to include a call to action where you promote the product outright and tell people where they can buy it.

How To Get Interviews With Product Creators

If you’re newer to affiliate marketing or don’t yet have strong relationships with product creators, you may wonder how you can get people to agree to an interview with you.

It might not be as difficult as you might imagine. After all, product creators want to sell more of their product.

It is a fact that many of them are short on time. There are probably other affiliates who are asking them for interviews.

Some affiliates interview the person and then do nothing with it, which wasted the interview subject’s time, so after a while people become reluctant to be interviewed. You need to assure your guest that you’re really anxious to not only interview them, but to actually use that interview to promote their product and make sales.

You just have to approach people and ask them. It does help if you get to know their business and build at least the start of a relationship with them. But, you really don’t even need that.

Just ask! You might get some “no” answers but you’ll certainly get some “yes” answers.

Figure out where people would best like to be approached. If they’re active on email, it might be email. If they’re on Skype, they might prefer Skype. Or, it could be Twitter or Facebook or wherever they tend to spend a lot of their time.

You can make it clear that the interview won’t be long (or maybe it will be – highlight what’s in it for them). Detail the size of your audience or where and how you plan to promote the interview to make sales.

Making Your Interview Available

After you’ve run the interview, you should save it and make it available. Depending on your level of skill, you can edit it to make sure it’s great. You can eliminate any dead space and things like that. You can add an intro and an outro.

At the very least, you should email the link to the interview to the people on your email list. Make it available on your blog.

Upload it to file sharing and audio sites.

Your goal should be to get your interview in as many places as possible.

You’ll probably also want to give the interview to the product creator so they can share it with their audience. They may or may not want to share it because you’ll be getting the affiliate commission as part of the interview. Others won’t mind because it’s additional exposure and ready-made content they can use to get sales they might not have had otherwise.

Running A Webinar to Earn More As An Affiliate

I want to mention that in addition to recording interviews as a straight audio file, you might also consider running a webinar with the product creator.

Webinars and Google Hangouts are great because people can see your screen, and/or your faces, live. You can show things on your screen (or on the product creator’s screen) or a PowerPoint presentation or something like that.

People love being able to join live because they can ask questions and feel like they’re really part of something.

Interview and Profit!

Hopefully, you’re really excited about the prospect of conducting interviews with product creators to make more sales of products you’re promoting as an affiliate.

It’s really simple to do and helps boost conversions. It’s different hearing a candid interview with someone than it is to just read about them.

Make sure you ask great questions and ask members of your audience what they want to learn about the most. Make your interviews interesting and try to ask things other people aren’t necessarily asking.

Make it your mission to spread the interview in as many places as possible. Also, consider transcribing the interviews so people can read the content as well.

Affiliate marketing is an industry with lots of potential, but you have to be careful when it comes to choosing which merchants you’re going to promote. There are definitely good and bad merchants out there. I don’t mean to scare you, but people have been burned by not investigating a particular affiliate merchant thoroughly enough before promoting it.

Even if a merchant is good and pays well, there may be other, even better merchants out there for you. Some merchants convert better than others. Some merchants pay faster than others. Some merchants pay more than others. You have to investigate and weigh your options, and it doesn’t always come down to who pays more than others.

Affiliate marketing can be a very lucrative business, but it’s important to be smart about how you approach it. First and foremost, make sure you can trust the merchant. Take a look at what other affiliates in your niche are successfully promoting. Make sure the merchant you’re interested in has a reputation for paying fairly and on time.

Research the merchants in your niche based on what’s written about them on the web. Read reviews about them and even consider contacting other affiliates about them. Sure, there are merchants out there like Amazon and eBay that you won’t really need to investigate because they’re well known for being legitimate.

But, what a lot of people don’t realize is that there are other merchants that might be even more lucrative than the usual suspects. There are other merchants out there that are easier to make sales with because they aren’t anywhere near as saturated.

It depends on your niche and your goals, of course, but promoting these lesser-known merchants might be the right path for you. That’s why you should do more digging to find great merchants than you otherwise would if you were choosing something like Amazon or eBay as an affiliate.

Consider how often and how much you want to be paid for your efforts as an affiliate. This totally depends on your niche, your audience, and the opportunities that are out there for promotion.

When you find a merchant you’re considering, in addition to their reputation, consider what they sell and whether it’s a good fit for your audience. Sometimes, promoting something might be really, really enticing because you see the dollar signs, when in reality, that particular product or merchant may not convert at all for your audience.

And there’s no real way of knowing upfront whether something will or won’t work. You can do your research and pay attention to your audience, but in the end, it’s going to take some testing and tracking and trying different offers before you find the perfect merchants.

Also, think about the future you might have with certain merchants. With certain merchants, you’ll be bumped up in payment with the more you sell. This even happens with merchants like Amazon where you’re paid on a tiered system.

But even with private, lesser-known merchants, if they see that you’re a good affiliate, they will often give you special deals for your audience, special percentages, and more.

Again, I recommend that you test different products and merchants to see what works for your audience. That’s really the only way to know, beyond the initial research you do.

As part of testing the different products, especially with digital products, I strongly suggest that you either obtain a review copy of the product (many merchants will be glad to provide one to proven affiliates), or purchase the product itself.

By doing that, you can get an inside look at the product, compare it with the sales page, write an in depth review, and especially you can weed out the bad products or poorly supported products before you recommend them to your followers.

Keep Track of Who You’re Promoting

This might sound silly, but once you really get started as an affiliate, you’ll probably end up promoting many different merchants. It’s important to keep track of who’s supposed to be paying you, how much they’re supposed to be paying you, and by when they’re supposed to pay it.

In an ideal world, everyone would just pay you what they owe you like clockwork. It doesn’t always work that way though. If someone is late in paying you, you may have to contact them. You don’t want to leave money on the table by just letting your payment due slide because of disorganization.

Of course, if someone doesn’t pay you at all or has a hard time paying you on time, then you probably should drop them as a merchant. Sometimes, it’s disappointing how people who used to pay well in the past suddenly have trouble doing so, and so on.

Trust me, from my own personal experience, this does happen.

Maintain Solid Relationships with Your Merchants

It can be really helpful if you maintain solid relationships with your merchants. You want them to contact you first with new offers, special rates, and more. It’s these relationships that can really help you earn more and grow your business.

Also, if you decide to create your own products in the future, these relationships will really help you because these merchants might, in turn, become affiliates of yours.

Or, you might find opportunities to joint venture partner with certain merchants. You can really scale your income up if you have solid relationships with proven merchants. Remember that they have their own customer base. When combined with yours, the opportunities are endless.

How to Find Affiliate Merchants

You can easily find merchants to promote depending on which niche you’re in. For example, if you’re in the Internet marketing niche, then you can search JVZoo.com, ClickBank.com, and WarriorPlus.com—these are great places to look.

If you’re looking to promote physical products, then you probably want to check out Amazon first and foremost. Commission Junction and ShareASale are other great options for physical products and more.

You can also search for merchants by typing in keywords related to your niche combined with affiliate related keywords (“your niche affiliate”). You might find great merchants that not many other people are promoting. This can be a great boon for you because there’s less competition to contend with.

You can also pay attention to what other people in your niche are promoting. If you see that someone is promoting a product that is selling really well and that you really like, follow the trail and figure out how you can become an affiliate for that product as well.

Choose a Merchant and Get Promoting

Do your due diligence on choosing a merchant, but don’t spend all your time researching. Yes, make sure that a merchant is going to pay you and pay well. Spend some time getting to know your audience and what they are most likely to buy.

But in the end, you aren’t going to make any money if you don’t actually promote. So, choose a merchant and promote them to test them out and start earning. Don’t fall prey to analysis paralysis. Move forward, build your business, and promote products your customers will love… and rinse and repeat. That’s how you earn money as an affiliate with great merchants.