Your role as an affiliate marketer is to advertise products through your affiliate link and receive commissions from visitors who use it to make purchases within the designated cookie lifespan of 30-90 days.
As your affiliate link plays an integral role in generating affiliate sales, it is wise to maximize the effectiveness of your use of affiliate links. This article provides a comprehensive guide to affiliate links, including their various types and placements, as well as their tracking and promotion.
Before delving into the specifics, it’s important to review the fundamentals so that you can apply these top strategies for maximizing your utilization of affiliate links and generating increased sales.
Affiliate Links
Affiliate links consist of the affiliate’s ID or username embedded in a URL and are utilized to keep track of the traffic directed from the affiliate’s site to the merchant’s site. Each affiliate has a unique link that generates a cookie on the user’s browser upon clicking, enabling the merchant to monitor all clicks and transactions that stem from that particular link.
Although conversions are generally the only basis for payment in most programs, tracking click data is a valuable way to monitor traffic and conversion rates. Additionally, affiliate managers may use it to assess an affiliate’s potential. Consistent clicks on an affiliate link are typically indicative of an active promotion of the product, which could lead to successful sales.
Upon the prospect’s purchase within the cookie’s timeframe, affiliates receive recognition through a commission, typically consisting of 20% of the sales price.
Promoting affiliate links
1. Product reviews for affiliate offers
Reviews of products are highly favored in the world of affiliate marketing as they can often be used to sway the purchasing decision of the reader. With the opportunity to provide an affiliate link at just the right moment, it becomes effortless to generate additional income from products that consumers were likely to purchase regardless.
To ensure significant revenue, focus on evaluating products that boast of a high conversion rate, substantial commission, and sufficient sales volume. Look beyond typical Amazon consumer products for an advantageous position.
One can review a range of subjects, such as:
- Physical products like outdoor gear or luxury clothing
- Digital products like SaaS tools or online courses
- Services like bank accounts or travel experiences
Specifically, commissions for digital products and services can be exceptionally high due to significantly lower production costs compared to physical items. Crafting a product review that results in a high conversion rate is not overly complex, but requires some trial and error.
In order to effectively promote affiliate links, it’s important to use them frequently but not excessively. Use enticing anchor text that piques the reader’s curiosity about the linked content, such as “discover more pictures” or “check out this specific [product category].” Such phrases suggest that valuable information is readily accessible with a single click.
2. Inside a free email course
Throughout the years, email has been recognized as the most economical marketing channel. This statement remains accurate in 2021 and is just as applicable to affiliate marketing as it is to other forms of digital marketing. This is because email affiliate marketing empowers you to:
- Reach buyers reliably. Regardless of ongoing Google and social media algorithm updates.
- Sell to the same people over and over. Instead of convincing new buyers from ground zero every time.
- Share time-sensitive information. Such as discounts and deals, which boost conversion rates.
Email courses are one of the most effective methods for creating an email list, and they also provide an ideal opportunity for incorporating your affiliate links.
A set of emails sent over a specific time frame, aimed at instructing subscribers on how to achieve a certain objective, is known as an email course. By incorporating affiliate links in an email course, you can equip subscribers with the necessary resources to attain their desired outcome.
Every email in the series doesn’t just offer great educational content but also allows for natural affiliate promotions:
- The first email could recommend a premium password manager.
- The third email can suggest a VPN affiliate program
- The fifth email could review an antivirus program.
As long as the subject of your blog or website is relevant, you can replicate this process with almost any email course. The greatest advantage is that many email courses are timeless, allowing one complimentary course to grow your subscriber list, generate profits from affiliate marketing, and promote higher-priced products.
Automated methods to monetize your email list that pose a triple threat.
3. Link your own products with affiliate links
Monetizing a website becomes more effective if you sell your own products as it allows you to obtain complete profit instead of a meager commission. Nevertheless, imagine being able to obtain both. There are certain platforms and sellers that permit you to share affiliate links to promote your own products without diminishing the payment you get per conversion.
An instance of this is LinkedIn Learning, which permits educators to use affiliate links for promoting their own courses. With this system, you can earn more revenue as an affiliate than as an instructor, but the most advantageous aspect is that you can perform both roles concurrently.
Whenever you mention your Udemy courses or promote your Kindle books through Amazon affiliate links, remember to include an affiliate link to boost your revenue. The principle remains the same.
4. Gift guides and product roundups
One of the most effective methods for driving affiliate link promotion in your content is through product roundups, or what is often referred to as “best product reviews”. This is largely due to the fact that individuals seeking out product roundups are typically at the beginning stages of their purchasing process, thus increasing the likelihood of link clicks as they explore their available options.
Additionally, the probability of them having another person’s affiliate cookie saved in their browser is lower. Roundup posts can also serve as a means to experiment with various products in terms of conversion before crafting specific reviews or supplementary material exclusively for the products that resonate with your audience.
To ensure effective inclusion of your links, it is important to incorporate them tastefully at the beginning and frequently thereafter. Avoid making your readers go through your entire life before revealing your top choice for the “best toothbrush”.
5. Run pay-per-click ads
If you’re receiving organic traffic on your website, yet you believe that the conversion rate could be improved, social media advertisements may provide a solution. By assessing your cost-per-click and commissions, implementing retargeting ads is an effective technique to redirect individuals who initially discovered your website via Google back to your site.
They simply require a gentle push to finalize the acquisition.
If you lack clarity on the appearance of your ads, seek inspiration by perusing through the Facebook Ads Library. By searching for your preferred blogs (or rival businesses), you can view the Facebook ads that are displayed on their page.
Not all PPC ads are permitted in every affiliate program. Retargeting visitors by affiliates and brands can increase the cost for both parties.
Certain brands discourage the promotion of affiliate content through advertisements or direct linking, where your affiliate link is shared. It is advisable to search for affiliate programs that offer credit even if the customer comes through retargeting efforts following the setting of your cookie.
6. Place affiliate banners on your website
Although contextual links typically generate more sales than banners, both have their merits. Banners are advantageous due to their aesthetic appeal and ease of placement in areas such as page sidebars, headers, footers, or within content. By simply copying and pasting the code, your affiliate link is automatically incorporated.
In general, placing the banner higher on your page results in more clicks. However, visitors who intend to make a purchase tend to read your content more thoroughly.
Using banners extensively may appear too promotional and often get overlooked by visitors. Therefore, it’s advisable to use them in moderation. However, they can be effective in other marketing channels such as social media and email campaigns.
7. Embed affiliate links into your video content
Adding videos to your written blog content is beneficial. You can even transform your previous blog posts into videos. Additionally, you can also insert affiliate links into your videos by including them in the video description and mentioning them through verbal communication. This approach is uncomplicated.
8. Promote affiliate links on social media and forums
Comprehensive tutorials on utilizing affiliate links are available for various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and TikTok, as well as discussion forums like Quora and Reddit.
In order to advertise affiliate links using these platforms, it is essential to have a pool of potential customers as your followers. The advantage of social media is that you can insert affiliate links directly into your posts on certain platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
The effectiveness of linking your affiliate offers directly is entirely subject to your audience. Given that most users on social media have negative opinions towards promotional content, it’s preferable to link to your comprehensive blog posts, which have the affiliate links embedded in them. It’s rare to generate direct sales from social media, making it more appropriate to use it as a means of directing traffic to your affiliate website.
Your affiliate product may not be suitable for every social media platform and online discussion forum. For instance, Supermetrics may not be effectively promoted through TikTok and Instagram due to their unsuitable target audience. However, individuals who utilize Supermetrics in marketing may still opt to advertise on these platforms.
In forums such as Quora and Reddit, it is prohibited to insert affiliate links directly into your posts as it is deemed spamming, which may lead to your account being blocked. Nevertheless, you may bring in both organic and paid traffic to your affiliate site through the forums.
9. Link to your affiliate offers directly on Medium
Unlike guest post websites and forums, Medium allows affiliate links to be included directly in your posts. However, as with all marketing channels, it is ultimately up to users to determine the acceptable level of promotion.
Overloading your Medium articles with excessive links will not result in an increase in traffic or sales. However, incorporating your affiliate link at the conclusion of a valuable and informative article may prove to be a successful tactic.
Tracking affiliate links
As an affiliate, it is not possible to track your conversions directly since you do not have ownership of the product pages that you promote. Unlike site owners, you cannot simply generate and incorporate UTM codes into your URLs for the purpose of tracking conversions.
Although you can’t monitor conversions for your affiliate promotions or actions taken on your affiliate landing pages, you are able to track the clicks and impressions. Afterwards, the data on your affiliate dashboard can be contrasted with that on your Google Analytics account.
Disclosing affiliate links
You must disclose your affiliate partnerships as endorsing and promoting products for profit is a regulated activity.
The disclosure of affiliation is a means of informing your website audience that certain products referenced and linked to may be affiliated products, resulting in potential compensation for you. This not only allows consumers to make informed choices, but also ensures transparency of your incentives.
In addition to the disclosure requirements set by the FTC in the U.S. and GDPR in the EU, affiliate programs have their own set of terms and conditions which mandate that disclosure must be made. If you fail to disclose your links, you would be breaching these terms and conditions as well.
