A Modern Approach To Affiliate Marketing (Steal These 5 Strategies)

When you hear people making $10k/month or $20k/month from affiliate marketing, they are not just relying on SEO to attract traffic. Often we hear that the traditional approaches to affiliate marketing are through SEO, Social Media & Building an Email List.

Yes, they work. No doubt about it. But they are somewhat difficult to execute. & without a proper plan, strategy, and patience, you will run out of time and start to think whether it was worth it.

In today’s post, I will share with you 5 strategies to make money with affiliate marketing with modern, smart approaches (with real-life examples).

Ready? Let’s go.

Strategy #1: Building a Facebook Group

Facebook groups are ultimate gold mines if you know how it works. This is how marketers or even anyone with absolutely no experience or background in affiliate marketing, people are just printing money.

Here’s how it goes:

  • Once you have figured out a niche, create a Facebook group.
  • Link your FB page to your FB group.
  • Start inviting your friends to this FB group.
  • Discuss topics from your niche daily.
  • Once in a while, promote your affiliate offers
  • Or, even better, build a digital product.
  • Have affiliate links in the group description.

Why does this work?

Because FB group is like a community. You are attracting like-minded people, meaning high-quality, relevant traffic.

You need to give them upfront value, gain their trust, build credibility and promote your offer.

Selling something isn’t wrong. If you know it’s gonna help them, they will happily purchase from your link. Just make sure you disclose.

Some examples:-

FB Groups like Ken Moo’s Lifetime Deals make thousands of dollars each month.

In this group, members discuss about lifetime deals available on the Appsumo Marketplace.

They just add an affiliate link to the discussion. Now whenever someone buys, they get a 5% commission on existing customers or 100% (up to $50) for new customers.

Imagine the kind of commissions they get for an engagement like that.

This can be possible for any group as long it is growing, full of value, engaging, and honest (& doesn’t look like a scam).

Just wanted to share this example to help you understand how you can make money through FB groups if they are leveraged properly.

I saw this tweet about a guy making $6M/yr just from FB groups. Absolutely insane if you know how to tap channels.

Affiliate Marketing is just getting high-quality, relevant traffic to your page. & then it’s just a game of conversions and conversion rate.

Strategy #2: Early Adoption of Review Articles

This is an absolute killer strategy. Somewhat I have been using this for the content site that I own.

I call it “Piggybacking event searches,” but this strategy is slightly different. I will talk about “Piggybacking event searches” later in a different post, but let’s just stick to “Early Adoption of Review Articles

What exactly is Early Adoption of Review Articles?

In this strategy, you will write review articles on products that are not yet in the mainstream market or not well-known on the Internet.

You can get an idea about it if you just search on Google, and there are hardly 1-2 blog posts doing reviews.

You can capitalize on it and benefit.

But why is this so good, and how does it work?

The core logic is that when the product starts growing and making itself a brand, its searches automatically increase due to demand. & obviously, people start searching for “XYZ review” on Google before making a decision.

So if you already have a blog post on “XYZ review”, you can benefit from all the review searches and get the highest quality traffic.

Because this traffic is the one that is looking to buy a product (what we call the BOFU content – Bottom of the funnel).

They are on the verge of deciding and searching for reviews.

& guess what?

Your article will satisfy that intent. Even if that search term has 20 volumes per month, it’s a great keyword, as it is of high intent and can often lead to a high conversion rate.

I have also shared this affiliate marketing strategy in many niches inside Affiliate Corner.

Ben Adler has been doing this for quite a bit of time. Here are some thoughts from Ben Adler (Founder of Keywords Chef)

Now how can you replicate this on your own affiliate site?

  • Make a list of products in your niche.
  • Check on Google whether it has any review articles.
  • Explore forums, sub-reddits, and FB groups whether people are talking about it (to gauge demand)
  • If enough people are talking about it, there’s definitely a demand.
  • Write an in-depth review article for that particular product.
  • Soon, you will see your article on the top.
  • Reap all the benefits 🙂

In Affiliate Corner, we have shared almost 20+ promotion strategies for many niches, along with useful SEO, Audience insights.

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Strategy #3: Building Directory Websites

What are directory websites?

Directory websites are often a collection or curation of tools and resources that can be easily filtered and sorted conveniently.

Users always prefer having information in a single place rather than exploring 100s of different websites.

That is where directory websites play a very important role.

What does a directory website looks like and how can it make money?

Simple. Add your own affiliate links.

Here’s an example of how I did it: I made Swipe Directory – A curated collection of top resources and tools in marketing & growth. (I later sold this for a mini 4-figure exit)

Now this directory can be easily filtered with a lot of options. I have added affiliate links for many products and also added a disclaimer on my usage of affiliate offers.

In 2021, I made roughly $1220+ in affiliate commissions (majorly from Appsumo). Mind you, I didn’t actively promote this.

It was the magic of cookies and some people sharing on social media.

How did I make this type of directory?

With just a Google Sheet & a No-code tool called “SpreadSimple

It’s just plug-and-play. Love it. Easy to use and get started.

How can you do this for your niche?

If you are into the dog niche, you can create a directory of the best products for dogs and add your affiliate links similarly to how I did it.

You can even add your own blog posts as hyperlinks.

The goal is to make the directory helpful for someone who wants to save a lot of time.

Research your niche and explore what kind of products it has, make a database, fill it up in the Google Sheet, and Plug-in SpreadSimple.

There you have it. A directory website making money through affiliate offers.

You can cross-promote it on your affiliate site and position it as a free directory to help your users.

Smart, isn’t it?

Strategy #4: Create Lead Magnets

A lead magnet is basically you offer something to your visitors for free in exchange for their name and email address (or sometimes you just give it away for free).

Lead magnets can be:-

  • eBooks
  • Video Courses
  • Checklists
  • Calculators
  • Case studies
  • Reports
  • Templates

The goal of creating lead magnets are:

  1. To get the email address of your target user so that you promote affiliate offers on their email (setting up auto-responders & automation series)
  2. To get affiliate sales from the links inside the lead magnet.

I prefer the 2nd route.

Focus on the 2nd lead magnet. Add tremendous value and embed affiliate links wherever relevant.

You will get affiliate sales from the lead magnets.

& often, this is low-friction because you are not trying to sell anything, but you are sharing a resource for free.

Example: If you are in the pet niche and want to promote “Dog” related affiliate offers, you can create an mega-guide (eBook) on “How to take care of your dog” and promote affiliate offers in-between, wherever relevant.

Make this eBook free. Ask for the name and email address to share the link to the eBook.

This is how you can leverage lead magnets for promoting affiliate offers. You don’t need to just stick with eBooks; you can create checklists and templates and make it a lead magnet.

Use Canva to build up graphics & you can easily create lead magnets on the fly.

Advance Strategy: Affiliate Marketing on Automation

I will do a separate in-depth post on this later. This will not be for you if you are a beginner or don’t have much technical knowledge.

Honestly, it took me more than 30+ minutes to understand the method 😛

But it’s great to have some knowledge and see how people are doing crazy stuff on the Internet.

This is the story of Ruben Alonso. What does he do?

You first need to understand what Appsumo is.

It is a digital marketplace where you can get lifetime deals for recurring-priced softwares and tools. It’s a good place as you can save a lot of money.

Ruben runs a Telegram group.

He wanted to automatically send a message in the telegram group as soon as there was a new deal on Appsumo (ofcourse with his own affiliate link)

This is what his automation looks like. It’s complex, but if you know the basics of how URL & API works, you can do it too.

So he used 4 different tools to make this automation a reality.

  • Integromat (Now Make) – A widely popular automation software & alternative to Zapier
  • Appsumo
  • Impact API – Where he gets his affiliate link on the fly
  • Link Shortner – To make his link look good and short

The result?

He can send an automatic message into his telegram group notifying all the members, there is a lifetime deal on Appsumo, with his own affiliate link embedded.

I will do a separate blog post on how he has done this. Probably ask him to do a Guest post here on the Affiliate Corner blog.

This is what the modern approach to affiliate marketing looks like & I love this approach.

Final Thoughts

You don’t want to rely heavily on Google or any big tech platform to make money. You can always diversify and use some smart strategies to make money through affiliate marketing.

This was my attempt to show what is possible and how people make money with many different methods.

I hope this article inspired you and got your creative juices flowing. Thank you for reading.

If you got value and learned something new, please don’t hesitate to share this with your followers or your audience on social media. It would mean a lot.


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Tejas Rane

Tejas is an Entrepreneur & Founder of Affiliate Corner. He has been in the SEO industry for the past 4 years. He has published 2 books under his name. Currently, he is building & growing "Affiliate Corner" and foraying into niche and affiliate sites.

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