There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to how you can generate revenue from affiliate links.
So much depends on your brand, your target market, and the niche of products you’re linking to. However, there are some general hacks that maximize your return on investment from the programs you’re part of.
It’s all about taking these general concepts and working out how best to tailor them to your particular situation.
How do you do that? Do you want to know how to get traffic to your affiliate link?
Like this:
- Make Your Content Useful Rather Than Hard Sell
Confusing a hard sell with content that adds value is one of the biggest mistakes people make when joining affiliate marketing programs. The aim is to get visitors on your website to click on links, so big adverts with a hard sell seem the obvious choice. Right? Wrong.
In this day and age, advertisements are everywhere online, and ad fatigue is a common affliction. Big, bold, and flashy ads no longer have the impact they used to.
A much better method is to build content around the product, or the niche you’re promoting.
For example, if you’re selling herbal remedies for stress, your content should be educational and informative about stress management. You can then incorporate recommendations for products in this useful content.
This strategy will get readers on your side because you’re being helpful, rather than just trying to sell, sell, sell. You’ll also find that this kind of content strategy can seriously increase your readership stats.
- Try Text Links Rather Than Ad Images
Following on from the idea of not always promoting hard sell messages, try adding affiliate links to your text.
Don’t completely disregard image or video-based adverts on your website as they’re important for customer engagement. But consider reducing them, or only using them in specific places so they don’t take over.
In blog posts, rather include affiliate links as hyperlinks over relevant text.
For example, if you’re writing a blog post about how stress can prevent sleep, you can have a section where you talk about products that offer relief from insomnia. When you mention the affiliate product in the text, hyperlink the name using your affiliate code line. Readers will feel you’re making a personal recommendation rather than trying to sell them something.
People tend to respond well to personal reviews or recommendations, so you can use this to leverage clicks without looking pushy or advertorial.
- Include A Call-to-Action
Just because you don’t want to be hard sell all the time, doesn’t mean you can’t include a call-to-action (CTA) in your site content.
A CTA is the “buy now” or “read more” instruction that you see in marketing. It gives the reader an action that they should take after looking at the advert or reading content.
If you have image or video-based ads on your website, they must include a CTA. In your blog posts, you can put the affiliate product links at the bottom of the content with a CTA to remind people what it is they should do.
Sometimes we need to state the obvious to get people to make the next move, and a CTA does that for us in a catchy way.
- Make Sure Your Link Is Easy to Spot
In blog and website content, it’s important to put your first affiliate link above the fold. This means that the reader sees it as soon as they look at the page; no one has to scroll down to get to the link and the CTA.
If you’re not adept at writing, it’s not a bad idea to get a professional to write it for you. They’ll know how to word your content to ensure it has maximum impact, and the link slides in seamlessly but grabs attention.
It’s also a good idea to make sure that the hyperlinks in the text stand out from the rest of the wording. As is standard, they should be a different color and underlined. This is a visible factor in how to get traffic to your affiliate link.
- Offer Exclusive Discounts and Deals
If you want people to use your links to do their shopping, you need to give them an incentive.
The best way to do this is to offer something that’s exclusive to your website. If they click through to the product and buy it via your affiliate link, they get a discount or a promotional deal that they can only get via your site.
There are many ways you can deploy this tactic.
For example, in your blog text, you can hyperlink over your CTA that includes wording such as “get the lowest prices” or “up to 50% off”.
Another great option is to create a specific landing page on your site for specials, sales, and promotions. These pages contribute to improving your search engine rankings, and you can link to them on your social media pages, or in newsletters you send out.
If you have a lot of sway with your affiliate merchant, ask them for an exclusive promotional deal that you can market. If you don’t have that kind of connection, you can just wait for the merchant to run their own special deals and link to them specifically when the time is right.
If you use this tactic, be sure to check that your affiliate program accepts this kind of copy on their links.
Companies like Amazon don’t allow affiliates to hyperlink over words like “sale” or “best price”. However, there are many that do.
- Leverage The Big Shopping Periods
There are certain times of the year where shopping is big.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are massive sales for just about every industry or niche, and are two days you need to take advantage of.
Make sure you know what deals your affiliate merchants are running for special days, so you can link to them. Christmas and the festive seasons are other big shopping periods you should take advantage of. Especially if your niche can be related to gift-giving.
Then there are seasonal sales.
It’s always good to mark the changing of the seasons with a sale. Clothing retailers are big on this, as they get rid of old stock to make room for new. But any seasonal sale is an attractive incentive, and you should take advantage of it to get customers clicking on your links.
Get The Clicks That Convert to Cash
There you have it. I hope you’ve found this advice useful, and that when applied, you’ll increase your click rate on affiliate links and generate more revenue from your affiliate partnerships.
