Aside from the Ad revenues, bloggers can also earn a lot from Affiliate Marketing. This is one of the best ways bloggers can earn passive income through promoting products or services they trust to their audience.
Maximizing the effectiveness of your affiliate referral links can help you generate more revenue from your website. It is crucial that you optimize your content to convert all your traffic into revenues every time a customer clicks your link.
In this guide, you’ll learn different tips on how to effectively promote your affiliate links without forcing it. A common mistake of beginners are neglecting to “provide value” to their audience and just focusing too much in promoting their products.
First, let’s have a brief understanding on how affiliate referral link works…
How do Affiliate Link Works?
Affiliate Links are simply the URLs of Affiliate Programs that you add to your website, every time a customer clicks and purchased through your link, you earn a commission.
Every time someone clicks on the affiliate link on your site, a record is being sent to the affiliate program provider. Usually you can track this using the dashboard of your affiliate program provider.
Once a customer clicks on your affiliate link a cookie is being placed on their computer to track their purchase. The purpose of this cookie is to track if such customer will purchase the product within the cookie duration.
The cookie duration usually ranges from 30 days to 90 days from the day the affiliate link was clicked.
How to Get an Affiliate Link?
Before we deep dive on how to effectively promote these links. Here is a quick guide on how to get your affiliate links and add to your site.
1. Join an Affiliate Program
You can easily find affiliate programs in the internet, if you have any particular product or services that you wanted to promote you can easily check their website if they have any affiliate program being offered.
For other affiliate programs, the following are the most common programs for content creators:
You can check our 10 Best Affiliate Marketing Programs for Newbies (2022) if you wanted to know other affiliate programs for beginners.
2. Login to Your Affiliate Program Dashboard
Once you are approved, you can go to your Affiliate Program provider’s dashboard and start selecting the product or service you wanted to promote.
Note that this dashboard can help you determine how much is the total commissions you earned and the number of clicks you have for your affiliate links. Thus, it is crucial to regularly monitor this.
3. Search for the Specific Product and Copy and Paste the HTML or Direct Link into Your Content
There are tons of products and services that you can promote to your website. The most common are the products being offered in Amazon. Once you have selected your product you should be able to get the affiliate link that you can use to your site.
Copy the above affiliate link and paste it to any of your content.
4. Keep an Eye of Your Dashboard
Once you have already set-up your affiliate links, all you have to do is to wait for someone to click on those links. You should track your commissions on the Affiliate Program dashboard, this helps you to check how much you are already earning and how many clicks were already made on the link you’ve set-up.
Also, ensure to check the requirements of your chosen affiliate program as most of the affiliate links expire if there were no converted sales within a specific period of time.
Now, let’s move onto how you can effectively promote these affiliate link to your site.
How to Effectively Promote Affiliate Links?
1. Transparent Product Reviews
The most common and effective way of promoting your affiliate link is through product reviews.
The above is a good example of product review as this is mainly based on the user’s experience of the product since 2012.
The following are the key components for an effective product review:
- Genuine review
The goal in doing your affiliate marketing is to give value to your readers and not just to promote the product or services. By giving a genuine and honest review, you are able to build a connection to your audience and gain their trust to use your affiliate link and purchase the product.
- Detailed and comprehensive review
Giving your audience an in-depth review of the key features of the product and services gives them confidence that you know what you are reviewing and that you have given the time and effort to review the product or services.
- Pros and Cons
Always include a “Pros” and “Cons” of a product, this also gains the trust of your audience and help them assess whether it is really worth the money to do the purchase.
- The Conclusion / Final verdict
At the end of your product review, give an honest assessment whether such product is worth the money and also add the affiliate link at the end of your content. This helps your audience to easily decide whether such product is really worth their time and money.
2. Include in Your Digital Products
There are some who added some affiliate links to their e-books. One example of this is the book I am currently reading “From Nothing” by Ian Pribyl. He is added a section that discuss about keyword search tools wherein he recommend some free and premium tools.
There are also some who offers a course and listed down all their recommended tools wherein they earn some commissions whenever you purchase it.
This an effective way of earning some commissions from every person who joins the course you are offering.
3. Create Instructional Contents
This is the “How-to” content wherein you are giving some valuable information to your audience through instructions. Look at this specific content:
This content is about how to start your blog by Adam Enfroy, he included some affiliate links on the web hosting platforms that you can use.
Since these Webhosting platforms are necessary in order for you to follow the instruction, it allows him to significantly increase the likelihood of someone, who reads the blog, to click the affiliate links (in this case it is monday.com, wix.com, zoho.com).
This is a very effective way of promoting your links without any obvious intention of just selling something to someone.
4. Promote Different Affiliate Products
The common example for this the “Best” contents. Wherein you are creating a list of suggested product that you wanted to promote to your audience. An example of this is the content I found browsing about “Best Cameras for Landscape Photography in 2022”.
In this blog content, the author added 4 DSLR cameras and add some key features and affiliate to Amazon. This is a good way to be able to earn commissions from your selected products, you are giving value to your audience by allowing them to select from the list of products you added.
5. Adding a Affiliate Links on your Youtube Channel
If you have a Youtube Channel, adding an affiliate link for the equipment that you are using and also products that you are promoting allows your viewers to purchase the exact equipment that you are using. Other youtubers also mention some products that they wanted to offer to their viewers.
One example is the link of all recording equipment (picture above) added by Graham Stephan to its channel. He rarely mention that link to his Youtube channel but is he earning thousands from those commissions.
He added a list of all his camera and recording equipment on his Amazon Associate affiliate link:
6. Promoting Affiliate Links through Social Media
Other people also promote some products and services through FB, IG and Tiktok. This is usually being done by those who have huge followings, they typically add an affiliate link on their story or on their bio. Although this may also be effective, it takes a huge followings in order to utilize this one.
This is not as effective as what has been mentioned above especially for those who are just starting in internet marketing.
How to Manage Your Affiliate Links?
Now, let’s discuss how to manage these affiliate links. As your website grows and start publishing more articles with affiliate links, you have to really pay attention to the data it is providing to you.
A great affiliate marketing always analyze data and consider the following:
- Which article is performing and earns more commission?
- Where are the clicks coming from?
- Which affiliate program is working well and not doing okay?
- Which content strategy gives you the most commission?
- Do you have enough traffic on your site?
By analyzing the data through these questions, it allows you have deeper understanding on how to optimize your content and affiliate links to maximize the commissions you are earning.
How to Add Affiliate Disclosure to Your Site?
An affiliate disclosure is simply the statement or notice near a placement that explains what affiliate marketing is and that you’re being paid to make such recommendation. It is illegal not to add any affiliate disclosure if you have any affiliate links to your site.
This is an example of Affiliate Disclosure that we are using in this website;
Affiliate Disclosure Guidelines
1. The disclosure must be clear and conspicuous
The disclosure should be readable and clear to anyone who is reading your website. You cannot add an affiliate disclosure with difficult to read font color or font style.
2. Disclosure Must Be Prominently Placed and Accessible
Putting an affiliate disclosure near the affiliate marketing link is better. Internet marketers are not allowed to just hide the affiliate disclosure inside the “Terms of Services” or “Disclaimer” pages. These will not be considered as an affiliate disclosure.
3. Hashtag is not considered as Affiliate Disclosure
In the recently released update from FTC, using “#” or “hashtag” is not considered as an affiliate disclosure. An example of this is adding “#affiliate”, “#affiliate program” or “sponsored”, these are all considered as not affiliate disclosure. Thus, an appropriate statement should be added to any post or content which has an affiliate link.
Final Thoughts
There are different ways to effectively promote your affiliate referral links to your audience. However the main key here is to ensure that you are giving value to your audience and not just selling something by promoting these affiliate referral links.
With this, you are able to establish authority and gain trust from your audience. This ultimately allows them to have confidence in your contents and the referral links you are promoting.