An affiliate link is a reference to an advertising product or resource that contains a referrer identifier. Such links allow you to get commissions on the grounds of attracting new customers to the business you are promoting: users follow affiliate links and perform certain actions (registration or purchase), hence bringing the referrer income.
An affiliate program is a format of advertising activity of an online store or service. The store provides affiliate members with links, banners, and texts to advertise their products, as well as pays a percentage of purchases made by customers who came from an affiliate’s advertisement.
Affiliate Marketing is an ever-growing and constantly evolving marketing channel. The main accent is on producing unique content for the target audience, which encourages potential customers to click on the affiliate link.
Online sellers use this marketing channel to expand outreach and sales. Affiliates can own several websites or have a list of email addresses for sending promotional letters. The more websites or email lists an affiliate has, the wider his network and more successful his affiliate program.
An affiliate promotes products through advertising that might have a form of articles, videos, images, etc., which attract the attention of an audience to a service or product.
Below we offer you 12 basic but efficient principles by which you can create and promote affiliate links:
- Focus on link quality
Do not chase a large number of links, but rather focus on their quality. Since the user prefers high quality and interesting content, you should study the target audience and prepare interesting material. Exciting content will captive a potential customer’s attention and entice him or her to follow the link and, possibly, make a purchase. Be sure that Google will appreciate your efforts and raise the potential of your online resource into the bargain.
- Help the robot – create a sitemap
In order to improve your ranking, a search engine robot must be able to quickly find and index your pages. In such a case, creating a sitemap should be your major goal. Sitemap not only improves the site’s reputation and improves its ranking factors but also helps to monitor the status of links to prevent any possible problems with them.
- Formulate relevant anchor links
The link to a relevant page is very important for the user and Google. For an anchor, you should choose words that convey the essence of the page to which the link leads. Otherwise, the user will feel tricked and, most probably, would not remain on the website.
As for internal links on the site, you must also make sure of the correspondence of linked pages. Respect the needs of users and do not direct them “onto the wrong track.”
- Get active on social networks
Your affiliate program should include the activity on social networks to increase productivity. But do not forget that quality and interesting content is important to users.
- Catching and fixing broken links
Often links stop functioning, which happens for various reasons. A broken one no longer leads to the advertised website. There are special tools that allow you to monitor and fix broken links. Some of the most popular analysis services are SEMrush and Ahrefs. With their help, you can find and fix broken links.
This precaution is extremely important since a broken link complicates the user experience, brings to zero all your affiliate marketing efforts, and can negatively affect the rating of the entire website.
- Do not use the word “link” for affiliate links.
The user will easily understand that his eyes met the link, as it stands out visually. Therefore, there is no reason to use the words: “link” or “go to” as an anchor. It will only annoy and perplex your target audience.
- Do not indicate the link in CAPITAL LETTERS
Capital letters are annoying and difficult to read. Besides, it so happens when people “raise the tone of voice” in text, they use CAPITAL LETTERS in most cases. No need to yell at your target audience.
- Use the Affiliate Networks
A very convenient way to find partners is to list products in affiliate networks. Prepare an attractive affiliate program for a marketer. The affiliate program should include different promotion methods and tools, and contain attractive offers. Then you can find many partners who would be interested in promoting your product.
Linksmanagement is a link exchange tool with a vast base to search for donors across all continents, languages, and topics. You can choose different ways of link purchases according to your interests and budget.
- Keep track of affiliate program performance
While cooperating with any of Affiliate Networks do not forget about statistics. You should constantly monitor all the actions to adequately analyze and identify their effectiveness, as well as their impact on income.
- Make text links shorter
You should limit the length of the text link. Visitors get extremely annoyed when a whole paragraph is placed in a link.
11: Do not overdo with the number of links on one page
People follow links for easier navigation. If they see an interesting anchor, they click and go to the page they want. However, if the content is crawling with various links, it stops working for you but rather against you by driving people away not only from your affiliate offers but generally from your platform.
- Remember to use landing pages
You should carefully prepare the landing page to make the conversion from an affiliate link as high as possible. For this, you may accost to web-designers who understand well the user’s expectations.
Above we have covered the basic must-haves for affiliate marketing link building. This is a great start but you can always learn more to achieve great success!
As you can see, not everything in this field is simple and there may be some pitfalls on your way. Nevertheless, if you put some effort into it, it’s easy to catch the basic rules and follow them.
Act deliberately and choose partners meticulously. Correct placement of links will ensure that information reaches your target audience and will help to avoid lower points from search engines. To do this, you can read the conditions and chat with users. It will be painstaking and time-consuming work to determine how popular the service is. But the result will be worth the effort. Besides, you must be aware of your target audience’s preferences to choose the best strategy. Remember, sometimes less is more.
Link building is one of the strategic tools for website optimization. With a careful approach, it’s easy to learn how to use this type of marketing and monetize your link building processes.
