What is the best way to promote affiliate links? Since there’s many ways to promote affiliate links, the best way is the one which works for you! Depending on your products and marketing strategy, one way might work better than another. For example, if you’re using paid marketing and selling digital products, your best bet is likely to be by building an email list. Then, promote your affiliate products by placing links in outgoing emails.
This is definitely one of the best ways to promote affiliate links because it’s a scaleable strategy and you can build an email list very quickly with a good marketing budget. However, what if your strategy is through blogging, or content marketing and you’re promoting products from Amazon? A list isn’t going to be as appropriate if you’re sending traffic to physical products and have a number of affiliate items on your website. So in this situation, a different approach might work better. Banner placement and links within your text might be better with a review website, for example.
So before throwing your affiliate links everywhere you can you need to think about your products and how you attract your target audience. This should prepare you better to understand the needs of your customers and how it’s best to market to them.
Best Way To Promote Affiliate Links: Target Audience
The best way to promote affiliate links is with a congruent message and to a very targeted audience. Without this, whatever marketing strategy you use can fall on deaf ears. But once you understand who it is you are serving with your marketing messages, you can get very focused on delivering your affiliate products to the right people. This can dramatically effect your affiliate business if you do it right.
Who is your target audience and how do you attract them? Your target audience are those people who absolutely want the products you have for sale. No convincing, no selling, just connecting the right people to the right products. When you attract the right audience, your affiliate links will lead customers to products automatically.
A good example of finding a good target audience is with product reviews. With a product review, you attract people who are already in the buyer mindset, credit card out looking for some final bit of information before making a purchase. They find your review which leads them to the product after reading it. This is an example of knowing your target audience and providing some information to them connecting them with a product. So whether your affiliate link is a banner, and email or a contextual link, the audience is the main factor!
Best Way To Promote Affiliate Links: Free Traffic
Promoting affiliate links for free is another one of the best ways to promote them. While this can be a little tricky, once you have free traffic, it’s well worth all the work you have done to make it happen. You can get free traffic to your affiliate links in a number of ways:
- Using social media
- creating content on a blog
- Building content on a YouTube (or TikTok) channel
Free traffic takes time and can be unreliable too. But if you’re a content creator it’s one of the best ways to sell affiliate products. Even though a blog takes a huge amount of time and effort to gain traction with, once it’s running, you can make affiliate sales for free! One way of doing this is to target long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. If you’re successful, you can rank your content and get free traffic from the search engines.
This strategy is not easy and not for the faint of heart. But if you’re in it for the long run, it can be a joy when those affiliate commissions start dropping in! Place links in your copy for a blog or under your videos if using YouTube.
Best Way To Promote Affiliate Links: Paid Traffic & Email Marketing
By far one of the fastest and most reliable ways to promote affiliate links is through using paid traffic and sending visitors to a landing page where you can collect their email addresses. While this can take some initial set up to work, it’s far faster and more scalable than by using SEO (search engine optimisation) and content creation. This is particularly good for business tools and digital products which take more trust to sell online. With an email list, you can follow up with your subscribers with more content which provides value and builds trust.
Most people don’t buy immediately from a website on their first visit. It often takes several “touch points” for a visitor to build some trust with a product/website. An email list does this because you can continue following up with marketing messages long after someone has left a website. Whereas on a website, you only have one change of making the sale if the visitor leaves.
However, you can also use retargeting to follow your website visitors around the internet with another marketing message!
Retargeting
Retargeting is a very effective marketing tool for affiliates. It is paid advertising which is done once someone has already interacted with your online business in some way. So if someone has landed on your website already, you can place adverts in front of them which show up on other websites.
Re-targeting is a good way to re-engage with potential customers. Since someone has already shown an internet in your website, it means they are highly targeted and a potential customer for your business.
Retargeting is pretty cheap too and you can retarget visitors who bounce off your website quite cheaply. Send them back to your website or to a separate landing page where you can collect their emails for an email marketing campaign. Place links in your email messages.
Summary
There’s many ways to promote affiliate links and your tactic will depend on the type of products you promote and your marketing method. Here’s a few strategies you can use:
- Bloggers place links in their content
- Email marketing – place links in email messages
- YouTube/video marketing – place links under uploaded videos
- Social media – place links in your profile
However, it’s worth getting to know and understand the type of visitors you want to attract. Knowing your target audience lets you better understand their needs and find the people who are most suitable for your products/service. See also the easiest way to promote affiliate links.