A Strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim. A tactic is a conceptual action aiming at the achievement of a goal. In other words, Strategy is the end goal and tactics are the way you get to that end goal.

For affiliate marketers, the strategy might be to rank organically for keywords while the tactics could be to purchase links to boost the power of the website.

Most affiliate marketers would say their strategy is to sell as many copies of a product as possible. And that’s a sound strategy. But there is a lot more to clarify about that strategy before we get into the tactics.

The strategy, then, is to put the products in front of as big a targeted audience as possible.

To find the audience, we conduct market research, which includes discovering where our target customer spends there time online. Is it Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, blogging sites, Snapchat, etc. Once we know that information, we can then say…

The strategy to sell as many copies of a product as possible is to gain a following of 50,000 targeted followers on Pinterest.

The tactics are what you do to get those followers. And when you start looking for tactics, that’s when you start to find courses with names like…”12Minute Affiliate Marketing”, “Four Percent Challenge”, “Clickbank University” etc.

WHY NEW AFFILIATES OFTEN FAIL WHEN THEY CHASE TACTICS

Please don’t get me wrong, we need tactics. Have you ever heard of anyone paying thousands of dollars to attend a ‘mastermind?’ Well, at that mastermind, a super successful person shares their tactics with the audience.

The only issue is brand-new marketers can find themselves unsure of how to implement the tactics, and then measure the success and make changes based on performance data.

To Illustrate, an Amazon seller told his mastermind audience claimed that a simple tweak to the images on his listing increased sales by 310%. That sounds exciting, right?

Well, what is a 310% increase — really, I mean interrogate that statement, don’t take it for face value, figure out what you need to do to implement that tactic while you ignore the mystical 310%.

Break it down like this –

How to get better images for my Amazon listing

1. Shoot the images myself…
   Do I have a camera or am I using my iPhone?
   Can I use Adobe Photoshop?
   Do I know anything about photography?
   Should I have people using the product or should I just showcase the product?
2. Get someone else to shoot the images…
   What is my image budget?
   How do I recruit an outsourced worker?
3. What if it all goes wrong and I spend my cash on a photographer and the images are rubbish, can I afford to find another person?
4. Is free or paid traffic being sent to my listing?
   Yes → Great let’s test those images
   How do I perform those tests?
   No → Pay for traffic so I can test the images
   What am I testing against?
   How do I know my baseline?
   How do I know what to test for?
5. Can I afford to pay a photographer, the running costs of my hosting, website, autoresponder… If the answer is no, then there is no point in looking at any tactics if we don’t have the budget to implement them. The strategy should be to build up a bankroll.

The point is people who release courses that show you a new way of doing something assume you already know the foundational principles and have a budget.

They also know what they want to achieve before they look for a way to achieve it, and then they go and find the tactics that help them achieve it. The new marketers tend to see an exciting headline which they react to by purchasing a course, only to feel ‘ripped off’ hours, days, weeks, or months later when no sales have been made.

NEW MARKETERS CAN ADVANCE QUICKER IF THEY FOCUS ON FOUNDATIONAL COURSES

Make no mistakes about it, if you don’t have a budget then your number one strategy should be putting a bankroll together.

One tactic to make that bankroll happen is to stay away from affiliate marketing sites that offer nothing more than neologisms and tactics that can only be employed if you have all the basics locked down.

For example, most affiliate sites will urge you to increase the load time of your website by purchasing new and expensive hosting. Yet, more than likely, attention has not been paid whatsoever to what is making the site slow. And that can be checked for free with https://gtmetrix.com/ and the only way to understand the information GTmetrix offers is to either study up on basic web dev skills or pay someone to sort out the issues for you.

That’s why we say, if you are new, the best way to spend your time is by learning marketing principles while building up your bank balance.

We recommend foundational affiliate marketing courses found on the Make Money page of this website.

References

Affiliate Marketing Strategies