Affiliate marketing on a small budget: sounds discouraging, but it’s realistic. Having an endless budget to spend on campaigns and traffic is every affiliate’s dream and should be the end goal.
As a beginner, it’s likely that you’ll have a small budget to start with. With a small budget, you’re going to need to have a specific strategy in order to stay within the competition. The main approach with a lower budget will be to reduce the competition, rather than trying to compete with large, big-budget affiliates.
Let’s discuss how to avoid the big competitions while still reaching users looking for what you’re promoting.
Narrow Your Niche
Where there is less competition, there’s less spending.
Finding a niche and then further breaking it down into a sub-niche is a great approach to avoiding highly competitive affiliates.
Example: Dating.
Dating is a big niche that affiliates often enter and is highly competitive and saturated. Everyone is looking for love and so it’s an everlasting industry. To promote dating with a small budget, it’s best to consider sub-niches of dating, such as international dating.
Ensure that your campaigns are still relative to the larger niche. The copy, angle, landing page, and all creatives must connect the sub-niche and large niche.
Target Smaller demographics
Targeting smaller demographics will allow you to reach the users that are being missed by broad targeting. Similar to narrowing your niche, targeting smaller demographics requires
Unique creativity when creating the campaign, resulting in unique users/untapped leads.
For example, say you’re creating a campaign for the fitness niche. Advertising to only women is a bit broad for how large the industry is. Instead, you could target women above 35 who are looking for a workout that is flexible with their busy schedule.
Narrowing your demographic allows you to reach people who have an interest in what you’re promoting at a lower cost than the larger niche.
Select the Right Campaigns
When working with a small budget, it’s important to choose campaigns that fit the budget. This means campaigns that will cost less to test and promote.
It’s also important to choose campaigns with a broad payout model, such as avoiding cost-per-sale campaigns. Yes, CPS campaigns have a high reward. But what comes with that? High risk. Avoid risky campaigns to keep costs low. These campaigns require higher budgets for testing and promoting.
Instead, cost-per-lead campaigns have a greater chance of converting into leads.
Promote Campaigns in Less Popular Countries
Not many affiliates think to promote campaigns in less popular countries, yet it’s one of the best ways to stretch a small budget. English-speaking countries are usually the top choice because they offer a wide reach without the extra step of having to translate content.
Countries in Europe are much less competitive to promote, thus lessening costs. When taking this route, ensure that your campaigns and creatives are relevant to the country you’re promoting to. Take into account the different culture, the different products of the country, etc. Simply put: difference countries and have different preferences.
Your advertising methods need to represent the culture of that country, so be sure to take the time to alter your creatives to be appealing and worthwhile.
Less Competitive Traffic Sources
With an abundance of options for traffic sources, opt for the ones that aren’t saturated. Simply avoiding the top-tier traffic sources will yield a lower cost.
For example, if you’re planning on using search traffic, it might be best to skip Google Ads and opt for Bing Ads, instead. Yes, most people use Google Ads, but your costs will reflect that. Bing Ads is a huge competitor to Google Ads and is often frequented by older generations, as it’s the default landing page for their browser.
In addition, Bing Ads has a cheaper CPC.
With traffic platforms, you can save a lot of money by choosing the Powerade over the Gatorade. Most of the time the conversions will taste just the same.
Affiliate Marketing on a Budget
In order to become a super affiliate, you have to start small. We all have to start somewhere, and for most, this is with a small budget. There’s nothing wrong with that. Smaller budgets will teach you to cautiously spend your marketing dollars and make every cent spent worth it.
