Ninety Percent of advertisers think affiliate programs are essential to their marketing strategy, and marketers extensively use affiliate marketing to promote their brands and products. However, though affiliate marketing is a huge and growing industry, not everyone succeeds.
There are some affiliate marketers playing in billions while some others struggle to earn even pennies from their affiliate links. So, where does the difference lie? What are those successful affiliate marketers doing differently?
Well, it’s their strategy. Using affiliate links is an art and a science; you must understand that. If you’re searching for that knowledge, you’re in the right place.
In this article, we tell you all about affiliate links and the best ways to use them.
What are Affiliate Links?
An affiliate link is a unique URL given as a referral to affiliates for tracking traffic movement from the affiliate website to the merchant website.
The link helps track the traffic and conversions generated by an affiliate, and based on those conversions, the affiliates are paid their commission.
These links also help affiliates track their performance and improve their strategies to bring more traffic through their affiliate links.
How to Use Affiliate Links?
Using your affiliate links depends on multiple factors, such as audience, demand, competition, product price, commissions, incentives, and sales cycles. You have to keep all these factors in mind when choosing products for affiliate marketing.
Once you have your affiliate link and affiliate dashboard, you can start using them to promote products. The use of the links totally depends on how you decide to promote an affiliate product. For instance, if you’re doing affiliate promotions through your blog, you can add your affiliate links in the text somewhere in the blog.
Whether you add these links as HTML codes or simply copy and paste the standard affiliate link — doesn’t matter. If you copy and paste the standard affiliate link or add the link as an HTML, you will get the same results.
What you are trying to do is show the metrics for clicks and sales your customers will view, and thereby, you view, analyze, and improve all of this by planning more effective affiliate link promotions.
9 Ways to Promote Affiliate Links
It’s not the affiliate links — but the ways you promote those links that get you the money. You need to effectively strategize the promotion of your affiliate links to get the most value from them in the form of sales and conversions. But how can you promote your affiliate links?
Well, here are nine effective ways to efficiently promote your affiliate links for the most benefit and profit.
Use Affiliate Links in Your Product Reviews and Tutorials
Product reviews are the best way to bring conversions because the audience you are gathering in such content has a purchase intent. So, you can write reviews of your affiliate products and add your affiliate links to those products.
Similarly, you can write tutorials to help your audience understand how a particular product works, and in that tutorial as well you can add links to your affiliate products. Such tutorials are mostly for driving traffic to your blog, but they may also bring sales and conversions.
You need to strategize how you write the reviews and tutorials to bring the most value out of them, and once you do, your affiliate links start paying you through active conversions and sales.
You can also create affiliate review videos to promote your affiliate products and links.
Create a Resource Page and Add Affiliate Links to It
A resource page or landing page is a webpage that has details of tools, apps, and products that you use. You can add the merchant tools, applications, software, and products for which you’re an affiliate and add your affiliate links to those products.
With every product on your resource page, also add a description of those products, tools, and apps so that your audience understands their use and is tempted to purchase the product, thereby giving you the benefit of sales and conversion.
Place Affiliate Banners on Your Website
Banners are visual, and they appeal to the audience, so there is a high chance that your visitors will click the affiliate banners. However, the placement of these banners on your website also matters. If you place the banners within the content, chances are the users will ignore them and find them disturbing as they read through your content.
Placing affiliate banners on the top of your web pages makes sense and brings more clicks. You can also place the banners on the sidebars and footers of the pages.
The fact is that the more prominently the banners are placed in clear and visible positions, the more clicks they will generate.
Add Affiliate Links to Your Newsletters
Newsletters are a great way to build relationships with your audiences. If you have people subscribing to your newsletters, you know that you already have traffic on your blog and that your content is valuable. So, rest assured people will read your newsletters.
Therefore it serves as a good channel to promote affiliate links. You also have to build trust through your newsletters. They must not look promotional. So, while you add affiliate links to email drip campaigns, you must also ensure that your content doesn’t look very promotional.
Building relationships and establishing trust are the prime objectives of newsletters and emails. Once you have your audience trusting you, you can start adding your affiliate links to your newsletters to get clicks and conversions on them.
Repurpose Your Content for Videos and Add Affiliate Links to Them
Eighty-seven percent of marketers say that publishing videos have increased their website traffic. So, adding video content to your website is highly beneficial not only for affiliate link promotion but for building a strong base for your website and engaging your audience as well.
You can add affiliate links to this video content by simply mentioning the link in your video as well as in the description. Since your video is engaging, you will automatically get clicks on your affiliate links through it.
Leverage Social Media and Forums to Promote Your Affiliate Links
Social media and forums are popular channels where most of your target audience is active, and you can target them to buy your affiliate products through these channels. However, to leverage this, you need to have a good online presence. Once you’ve created that online presence, you can promote your affiliate links.
You can add affiliate links to your social media bio and descriptions and also create posts promoting those affiliate links. As you promote your affiliate links on your social media channels, you can track that the clicks grow, and you make more profits through conversions.
However, as you do this, you need to be quite careful, as often the audience gets annoyed by promotional posts. So, you must keep the quantity of such posts and link promotions to a minimum.
Additionally, on forums like Quora and Reddit, you cannot directly promote your affiliate links. So, you need to adhere to the guidelines of the forums to promote your affiliate links through social media and forums. Take time to read and understand the forum guidelines.
Add Affiliate Links to the Posts You Publish on Platforms Like Medium
As a blogger, it’s natural for you to publish posts on content publishing platforms like Medium. Such platforms allow you to do link promotions in your posts directly. So, you can add your affiliate links to your posts on such content publishing platforms.
You need to maintain the quality of your posts. The readers do not wish to read too promotional posts, and stuffing too many links is not a good strategy as it will not bring any traffic to your platform. Suppose you post only a single affiliate link at the end of your article, which also happens to give value to the audience. In that case, chances are you’ll get many clicks, and your affiliate conversions will shoot up, thereby getting you more profits.
Add Your Affiliate Links to Your Own Products
As marketers, you must have your own products, such as ebooks, digital courses, etc. So, it helps to add affiliate links to these products of your own. Your audience already trusts your products and will also trust the affiliate products that you market in your products.
Again don’t be too promotional. The strategy must be naturally adding affiliate links to your products in relevant places so that the links don’t look as if they are deliberately stuffed.
Once you learn to add affiliate links to your products naturally, you’ll see that your affiliate sales will rise along with the sales of your product.
Run Pay Per Click Ads
Running ads is also a great way to promote your affiliate links and get clicks on them. This is the most direct way to promote your affiliate links and will bring the most conversions. You only need to strategize your ad campaign based on your commissions and other factors.
Are You Ready to Earn More Through Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is a great way to make money. You only need to know the right strategies to promote your affiliate links. We hope the strategies we shared in this article will help you out, and you will be able to generate huge profits through affiliate marketing.
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