Native advertorials are well known amongst affiliates promoting high-ticket offers using paid traffic from native advertising networks. They offer the creative freedom to use a wide variety of angles to boost conversion rates for hard-to-convert offers. Product reviews are restricted by the need to appear objective, unbiased, and credible. The advertorial format allows for the use of other copywriting formulas including Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS), Attention-Interest-Desire-Action (AIDA), and Before-After-Bridge.

I. Native Advertorials with Retargeting:

There are often paid search targeting restrictions or high competition when bidding for review, product, or brand-specific keywords. Integrating retargeting pixels into your content allows you to advertise to specific segments of visitors. The segments could be specific to the product, category, brand, or stage of customer journey (discovery, interest, intent, or ready for purchase). Using paid retargeting ads with native advertorials, or other landing page types, would be a worthwhile test for difficult offer categories that may require multiple touch points before an eventual conversion (e.g., financial, home services, other lead based services).

The customer journey to conversion varies widely by product or service category. Content marketing relies on embedded calls to action and conspicuous placement of related articles to move readers through the funnel to conversion. These are passive in nature.

I. Embedding Quiz/Survey widgets:

The most common surveys or quizzes are calculators for money or time in the form of loan estimators, debt payoff calculators, skin-type product recommendations, or project cost estimators. These could pertain to the nature of the service for lead generation offers, or product-specific information like capability, size, cost for ecommerce. The use case that comes to mind is embedding these into content targeting the information stage of the customer journey.

II. Integrating Automated Webinar funnels:

Marketing agencies, consultants, and high-ticket coaches use pre-recorded webinars late in the customer funnel to warm up and educate prospective customers before their imminent sign-up or conversion. This pre-recorded webinar flow can be repurposed for affiliate offers in tough to convert niches such as financial, retirement, and lead-gen for certain service industries. Calls to action within affiliate content to sign-up for an “informational” webinar or including it within email follow-up series could be effective.

Certain merchants and product categories offer low commission rates despite the underlying product offering high margins (cough Amazon Associates). For those with ecommerce experience, there are ways to effectively improve profits per conversion without relying on the merchant.

I. Combining Affiliate Sites with Product Imports*:

Embedding remarketing pixels in your affiliate sites with traffic allows you to drive sales for separate private label products that you own with less advertising spend per sale. The act of the affiliate site’s content acquiring organic traffic effectively provides an audience to target directly with the separate private label brand’s products.

If the merchants affiliate commission rate is 10%, and your margin on your private-label product being fulfilled by a 3PL is 30-40%, then you would have a significant uplift in profit per conversion. You also have the benefit of not having to wait to rank the separate website before making sales.

II. Convert Affiliate Site to Ecommerce Store*:

Affiliates with domains relevant to a product category (exercisedepot.com, bicepblaster.com) can convert all or part of their site to an ecommerce store for their private label product(s) while retaining high-ranking content that acquires organic traffic. This provides more profits per conversion and alleviates the need to compete for Amazon search rankings. eCommerce brands with rankings may also command higher multiples than affiliate sites when it comes time to sell the site on.

III. Convert Affiliate Site to Ecommerce Store (Part 2) *:

The potential to convert from affiliate site to private label ecommerce store could be interpreted as a hidden value metric when reviewing affiliate sites to buy on a marketplace. There are scenarios in which sites receive strong traffic to their content, have poor options to monetize with affiliate or display. This makes for lower acquisition costs.

If the traffic and product category are conducive to private label sales, the buyer of the site could unlock hidden value by converting it to an ecommerce site. The existing traffic from content could be used to drive product sales. Those private label sales using third-party fulfillment would provide more revenue per conversion than another merchant’s affiliate commission rate.

*These suggestions assume low manufacturing cost; small-to-medium size product that does not require regulatory and safety considerations (e.g., certain electronics, medical, chemicals, or consumables etc.); and the use of third-party logistics, whether that’s Amazon FBA or another independent 3PL provider like ShipBob or RedStag.

Reviewing Large Affiliate and eCommerce Sites

I. Screen Large Affiliate Sites For Poor Performers:

Mainstream affiliate sites like TheSpruce, WisePick have pages with profitable products to promote that rank poorly for low-to-moderate competition keywords and have low Ahrefs UR. These can be outranked with the right content strategy and targeted SEO effort. Sites of this nature are a great starting point for niche research.

II. Screen Medium-Size eCommerce Sites:

Some medium-size ecommerce sites offer reasonable commissions 6-7% on products with high average sales prices. Some of their underlying product pages don’t receive enough SEO attention and languish in the SERPs for rank-able keywords. Performing bulk analysis on sites’ product catalogs can reveal high price products that do not rank well for keywords. These can be sniped for commissions with a review article.

III. Amazon Browse Tree Guide:

The beginning stages of research start with niche selection. It’s sometimes cumbersome to dig for seed keywords to begin searching. The Amazon Browse Tree Guide are Excel catalogs available to Amazon Sellers to assist them in correctly classifying their products. It is a vast set of files that cover most underlying sub-categories and niches within each product vertical. While the official documents are gated behind Amazon Seller Central, a simple Google search (Query: Amazon browse tree guide) will show third-party sites that aggregate the direct links to the documents in Amazon S3. This is a great resource to inform one’s niche research, even if it’s for affiliate purposes, and not for private label products.