Today I’m happy to feature a guest post from Kevin Conner, founder and CEO of Vast Bridges, a customer acquisition and lead generation company in the home services arena.

Kevin is a wealth of knowledge whenever it comes to blogging and entrepreneurship, and I know you'll gain a ton of value from this post. Take it away Kevin!

Running a blog is a fun and rewarding experience. It’s a chance to express your thoughts and opinions, and also to interact with people from all over the world who share similar interests.

But it’s also a time commitment. And if you’re investing time into something, doesn’t it make sense to get some money out of it? Of course it does! Which is why so many bloggers engage in affiliate marketing in the first place.

However, once you get going with affiliate marketing, meaning once you get used to passive income (not hard), you may find yourself wanting to give your efforts a boost so that they bring in more money. Here are some tips to help you do this.

Optimize Your Content

We all know how important it is to optimize your content for search engines, but after you do this, you need to make sure you optimize your content for conversions. If you’re already generating sales, it’s likely you’ve got some content that’s working. Take a look at it and ask yourself the following questions:

• Why do you think it’s working?
• What information does it convey?
• How long is it?
• How visual is it?
• How many calls to action (CTAs) did you use?
• And where are they found on the page?

Once you do this, go back to all the content on your site that is designed to generate conversions and redo it to reflect what has worked for you already. Leave some variation, as this will help you learn even more about what people want, but stick to what you know works well and you should see sales start to climb.

Run A Personalized Email Campaign

More and more research is coming out to support the idea that personalized marketing campaigns are the way to go. People respond to them better, and because of new technology, it’s much easier to create content that is geared directly at a person.

To do this, consider investing in a Customer Relations Management (CRM) tool. This will help you collect data about your customers according to the content they’ve viewed on the site, the things they’ve bought, and the comments they’ve left, as well as their demographics.

And once you have this information, you can use it to spot trends. For example, maybe you find out that people who buy one product often come back to buy another. A quick email to those who haven’t made that second purchase yet could help speed that process along and also recruit people who may have yet to consider getting something else, helping you maximize the value you get from each person who buys something from your site.

Infusionsoft, HubSpot CRM, and Active Campaign are all great options for CRM platforms that will help you better understand and speak to your target audience.

Reduce Costs

You will inevitably need to pay for some of your traffic. Whether it’s content for SEO, PPC ads, or Facebook promotions, there’s always an expense. However, if these efforts are producing returns, then this isn’t such a bad thing. And you may be able to increase what you get out of these activities by upping your investment. For example, you could buy into more PPC keywords to help you cast a wider net.

However, the smartest thing to do here is to find areas where you can save and then invest the savings into new areas. This will help you optimize your blog, making it easier to handle the expected boost in affiliate sales.

There are a number of areas where you could reduce costs, such as:

• Evaluate services, such as web hosting, broadband internet, cloud storage, etc., to see if changing providers could save you money.
• Automate or outsource some of your blog’s non-incoming producing activities, such as accounting, taxes and payroll, if you have employees, as these take you away from focusing on the expansion of your audience and affiliate revenues.
• Determine new SEO angles to use that may currently be uncompetitive, helping you expand your organic search traffic.

Get More Affiliates

When you first start out with a blog, it’s a good idea to stay focused on one thing. The idea is to find or create a niche for yourself and then succeed within that niche. But once you do this, you can begin to expand beyond that niche, so long as you’re careful not to conflict with what you’ve already established yourself to be.

For example, if you work to grow yourself by being a fitness expert and you manage to work out an affiliate arrangement with an apparel company, a good way to expand would be to start offering nutritional advice so as to promote different foods and dietary supplements.

A leap like this is very natural, and it will often be useful to your audience, helping you win their loyalty. Over time, you can continue to do this, and you'll soon find yourself promoting all sorts of products to many different audiences, which translates into higher overall affiliate sales.

Supercharge Today

There’s no time like the present to take a look at your affiliate operation and give it a boost. The tactics mentioned today are a good start, but as you grow you’ll soon find new ways to reach more people and make more sales, helping turn your blog from a fun side project into a full-time lifestyle.