6. Creating New Content For Your Audience
One of the biggest reservations that photographers have about incorporating affiliate marketing into their business is the belief that sharing affiliate links won’t align with their brand.
But this simply isn’t the case, and you shouldn’t let this limiting belief hold you back from trying affiliate marketing. You can use affiliate marketing in a way that aligns with your values and feels authentic.
Doing affiliate marketing with integrity comes down to having one goal at heart – creating relevant and valuable content for your audience. If the content that you are creating is relevant to the audience that you serve, whether the link is an affiliate link or a regular link shouldn’t matter. You are sharing it because you believe it’s something that your audience would be interested in, and it’s something that you believe aligns with your brand and your values too.
How to Generate Endless Content Ideas
STEP 1 – Know Your Audience
Before you get too stuck in with brainstorming blog ideas, it’s really important to know who your audience is. When you know exactly who they are, you’ll also know what types of things they are searching for.
Spend time properly working out your ideal client avatar so that you know all about them, including their personalities, likes and dislikes, and their biggest questions and struggles (for example, challenges around planning their wedding or becoming a new parent).
STEP 2 – Map Out Their Journey
Your client’s journey doesn’t start from the day they start searching for a photographer. It starts well before they think about hiring your services and will continue long after.
For example, a couple planning a wedding doesn’t usually wake up one day and decide they are getting married. Often, there’s a proposal involved, perhaps someone does research around buying an engagement ring. And after the wedding day, their journey doesn’t end either.
Once you’ve identified the journey your ideal clients are on, think about all the steps they’ll be taking at each stage of the journey. What things will they be searching for? What questions will they be asking? It doesn’t just need to be questions that they ask you as the photographer, either. It can be anything you know they are asking other vendors/friends, family/Google.
STEP 3 – Create Content That Answers Their Questions
One of the key ways to get discovered by your ideal clients and demonstrate your value is to create relevant, informative content that answers the questions they are asking.
And if you think about their entire journey, they are likely to be asking a lot of questions.
For example, for a couple who aren’t yet engaged, one partner might be searching for the best locations to propose. So you can use your local knowledge to create a post about the best locations to propose in your area. Another piece of content you could create on the same theme is a piece of content about ethical engagement rings or alternative engagement rings, sharing some of your favourites, including a few affiliate links.
Some other wedding-related affiliate posts could be:
- Best Wedding Dresses Under $1000
- Unique Wedding Welcome Sign Ideas
- Must-Have Winter Wedding Accessories
- Eco-Friendly & Sustainable Wedding Favours
If you also shoot seniors, engagement shoots, newborns, maternity, or family sessions, you can have several other posts, such as outfit inspiration and nursery decor inspiration – which are super helpful for clients and can be scattered with affiliate links so you earn commissions from the sales from your time spent creating them.
When you know their journey, you can create content that answers all of their questions, sometimes even before they thought to ask them. So while they might come to your site asking one question, you might end up keeping them there longer and answering ten more.
Each question you answer demonstrates your expert knowledge, which helps your ideal clients in their challenges. You may get some affiliate sales from these posts. You could even end up with a photography booking.
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In the next lessons, we’ll take a look at how to research and write your first affiliate blog post, and then we’ll look at how to actually apply to affiliate programs. This is because I firmly believe it’s better to create amazing content as your priority (and then monetize it with affiliate links), rather than simply create average content that your readers don’t really care about simply based on what affiliate programs you’re a member of.