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How To Promote Affiliate Links

So you’ve joined an affiliate program and now you’re wondering how to promote affiliate links? Joining a program and grabbing your affiliate link is the easy part of affiliate marketing. Promoting those links successfully is much more difficult. There’s many ways in which you can promote your links. Here’s just a few of them:

Blogging – Build a website (like this one for example) and create a lot of written content on it to attract an audience. Link to products on banners on your site and throughout your text.
YouTube – many YouTuber’s are affiliates and they either build a channel over time and get traffic organically or pay for advertising to get people to click on their links. Link to affiliate products in your video description.
PPC – One of the most popular ways to get people to click on your links is pay per click advertising. You only pay when someone clicks on your advert. By creating an ad carefully, you can make sure those people are going to be likely buyers.
Social Media – Many affiliates post their links in their social media bio and also link to content in their feeds. My bio has links to my affiliate websites in all of my social media platforms.
Email marketing – is one of the best ways in which you can promote affiliate links. You can get a free autoresponder here and use it to collect emails from social media or from a blog/channel.

How To Promote Affiliate Links – Strategy

But these are all tactics – specific ways in which you can place your links to get people to click on them. As affiliate marketers we also need a strategy! A strategy is different to a tactic because tactics are simply methods of doing something, whereas a strategy is a broader overview. Blogging, for example is a tactic for attracting an audience who you can sell your affiliate products to. But without a blogging strategy, you can easily become discouraged when your products aren’t selling. You can spend months blogging without achieving any sales and this can be discouraging. But if you have a good strategy, success can come a lot quicker.

A good strategy for a blogger is to choose a topic you are interested in and build a niche website to attract a specific type of person. Your target audience is an important thing to understand as an affiliate. Without a clear idea of who it is you’re selling to, it’s going to be very difficult to make those sales. Once you have identified who you are selling to, you can choose a tactic and build a long term strategy for implementing your marketing tactic. To decide on your audience you need to define your customer avatar.

How To Promote Affiliate Links – Social Media

The many social media channels offer a cheap way to promote affiliate links. You can put your link in your bio and set up your profile with a clear call to action. But how many people see it? Probably not many. You also need a strategy for attracting your target audience. Without a strategy, your bio link won’t get many clicks, especially if it’s a long, messy affiliate link. You can quickly shorten a link like this with a link shortener:

Bitly.com
Tinyurl.com
Sniply.io
Rebrandly.com
Yorelinks.com/

Link shorteners are a good idea for a couple of reasons. Firstly they make a long messy affiliate link which looks like this: https://79a24dnc-1d-ds8fm8o3l3wu2h.hop.clickbank.net, into a shorter, more attractive link which looks like this: https://tinyurl.com/49aefe6s.

This is still messy and unattractive though and it’s a good idea to build your own website or buy a domain name which is branded appropriately to your product. For example, my link above is for a fat burning blueprint product on Clickbank. But I could easily buy a domain name (such as easyweightlo55.com) or something and forward my messy link to it. A domain name is much more profession, appealing and immediately tells your visitor what the site is about. See unpaid social media marketing for specific ways to market your link on social media.

Social Media Attracting An Audience

The hardest part of getting people to click on your links is in the attraction of an audience. Pasting links on social media is easy, getting targeted buyers to click on it is another story altogether!

Ideally make a clear call to action on your profile and give your visitors a reason to click – such as offering a free giveaway in exchange for their email address.

Once you have set up your profile with a clear call to action to your link, you can go about building an audience. One way of doing this on Facebook is to join groups where your target audience might be hanging out. So if you’re product is a health related one, you might find groups which discuss a similar topic. Join those groups and start interacting with other members. Make a daily habit out of this and persevere with it for several months.

Over time, people will find your Facebook profile and see your offer.

Paid Marketing (PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising)

The fastest way to attract an audience is with paid ads. Facebook lets you set up an advert and show it to an audience of your choosing. Google Adwords is another platform where you can target adverts towards a specific audience. Most of these platforms will not want you linking directly to affiliate products from an advert.

If it’s not allowed, you’ll need to create a website of your own to act as a go-between, in between the advertising platform and the affiliate product. A website like this is often called an authority site because it shows your authority in the area of your chosen topic.

Building an authority site doesn’t have to take very long, if you’re going to be running paid advertising to it and promoting your products from the site. But it’s a good tactic to give something away on your site because you’ll then be able to collect visitors email information and follow up with an email marketing campaign.

Why Use Email Marketing?

If you’re using paid traffic, it’s always good policy to send that traffic to a landing page and not just a normal website. Why use landing pages? A landing page is a page designed specifically with the intention of collecting your visitor’s email address. Whereas on a website, a person can browse around, click on your pages and generally have a look; on a landing page they only have two options. They can either sign up or leave.

With paid traffic you want to collect email subscribers so that you can build a relationship with them over the longer term, through sending email messages. On a website, most people are gone within a few minutes, often only seconds. So it’s wasteful to pay to send people to a website, where they probably won’t buy immediately through your affiliate link.

In fact most people will need several touch points with a product before they buy. This is why email marketing is so effective. With email marketing, the time period with which someone makes a buying decision is vastly extended. People can buy from you from an email list even months or years after they sign up!

Why Customer Avatar Is So Important

Before you start with any promotion method, tactic or strategy, it’s vital you know who your audience is. If you’re promoting a fitness product, such as a weight loss plan for example, you need to understand who will want it and where they are online.

The better you can understand your perfect customer, the better you can target them with your content/adverts and the better you can communicate to their needs, wants and desires through your marketing. Without having done this work, you’re effectively trying to sell to everyone without a marketing strategy or plan. This simply doesn’t work no matter how much you try and how many times you paste your affiliate link everywhere online! Try to sell to everyone and you sell to no one!

It’s easy to forget that the internet places you in connection with a global audience, most of whom don’t care a jot about your affiliate product. But a small segment of the people online will value what you’re selling. If you can place a desirable offer in front of those people, you’ll be a more effective affiliate than if you simply spam your link to everyone! See also customer avatar worksheet pdf.

Traditional Forms Of Advertising & Tracking

Let’s not forget the traditional forms of advertising too. You can easily place a banner on your wall, promoting your website. Newspapers, magazines, billboards and flyers are traditional marketing methods. As an affiliate marketer you can do anything you want to attract your target audience to your affiliate link.

With traditional advertising of course nobody can click on an affiliate link on a physical banner. But you can send them to your website, if they remember the name of it! So short website names are better for traditional advertising such as a banner alongside a motorway, for example. This website wouldn’t be a good one for a motorway banner!

Whatever you do, it’s worth tracking everything so you know which adverts and campaigns are bringing in customers and which aren’t working.

This is done through tracking and you can create unique landing pages for each campaign so you can filter them out when you build up some data. Or use a tracking code at the end of your website url.

How To Promote Affiliate Links With Blogging

Blogging is a great strategy if you can find a topic you love writing about. You can attract organic traffic which is completely free too. This is done by identifying a niche you’re comfortable creating a lot of content in, and making blogging a daily habit for (ideally) several months at least.

To get free traffic can be quite tricky, according to the competitiveness of your chosen topic. But a clever way to get found more in the search engine results pages (SERPS) is to target long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

Shorter tail keyword phrases are usually very difficult to rank on Google (and others) for. So instead look for the longer three or more word phrases which relate to your niche. You can find these using Google’s free keyword research tool the keyword planner.

Best Way To Promote Affiliate Links

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.

What Is The Best Way To Promote Affiliate Products?

So what is the best way to promote affiliate products? There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing:

Blogging
List building
PPC – pay per click marketing
Social media
Video marketing
SEO – search engine optimisation
etc.

So what’s the best way? Well it really depends on a number of things like your marketing budget, your available time, what you like doing and what products you’re actually promoting. However, all that aside I would say the best way to promote affiliate products is through a combination of email marketing and paid marketing.

What Is The Best Way To Promote Affiliate Products? Paid Marketing

There’s a few reasons why paid marketing offers the best opportunity for affiliates. Paid marketing is faster and more scalable which means you can start generating income more quickly too. But there’s investment involved and paid marketing is not right for everyone nor for every type of affiliate product. Low value physical products, for example, are much harder to profit from when selling them using paid marketing.

It’s far more difficult running paid campaigns and making a profit if your product only pays a measly 5-10% commission, unless of course you’re using high ticket affiliate products.

But paid marketing has another advantage and that’s speed. Within a few days you can determine whether your marketing campaign is working. Whereas with content marketing it can take months before you see the results. So content marketing is much slower and results are less scalable.

What Is The Best Way To Promote Affiliate Products? Paid Marketing Problems

There’s a couple of issues with using paid marketing. It costs you marketing budget for starters and at first you should expect to spend money while learning. This puts many people off because they can’t afford to spend money while learning, or they just get fed up of spending without selling products! So they quit!

The other issue with paid marketing is compliance. Unless you are following some specific training it can be easy to get your account shut down for a minor violation. Having a Google or facebook compliant site is vital to avoid this happening.

what is the best way to promote affiliate products

Another small issue is sending traffic directly to affiliate links is often a violation of the terms and conditions of many advertising platforms. Make sure you know what’s allowed and what isn’t to avoid any problems. One way around this is to send traffic to a landing page instead of directly to affiliate products.

However if you can sidestep these issues and are happy to spend money learning paid marketing it offers a far quicker outcome with affiliate marketing if you’re prepared to put the work in. Ideally send paid traffic to a landing page and collect subscribers for your email marketing list. Follow up with emails promoting your affiliate products and offering value to your subscribers, while building trust.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is super powerful for affiliates. If you’re selling directly from a website, your visitors only have a small window of opportunity to buy your product/s. Usually website visitors are gone in a matter of minutes, never to return. But if you can encourage them to join your email list, you can communicate with them for days, weeks, months and even years and decades!

Most customers will need at least a few “touch points” of a product in order to make a buying decision. Email marketing gives them this in the form of multiple email follow ups. Providing the affiliate is offering value to the subscriber, and they are trusted, people are much more likely to buy having been given a huge amount of value already.

Reciprocity is a powerful tool for affiliates and if they can give someone a huge value upfront, that person will be more likely to make a buying decision in the future.

Email marketing works and most top affiliates use it.

Best Way To Promote Affiliate Products?

Of course the best way to promote affiliate products is also fairly subjective. The best way really is the way you can make it work. Whether you align more with content generation or paid marketing, good affiliates create value and help people with certain problems. If you can give someone more value than they pay in fees, you’re likely going to be a wealthy affiliate.

Keep this in mind whatever your marketing method. I’ve chosen to focus on paid marketing in conjunction with email marketing for this article. But there are hundreds of other ways which can work really well too.

Ideally use email marketing in conjunction with whatever other marketing strategy you employ. I’m a fan of blogging and love making sales from my blogs without paying for advertising. However, the time it takes to build enough content for this to happen on a regular basis will likely be too much for most people to bare! Paid marketing is a much faster method and you can get traction much more quickly.

Blogging is a long term strategy which can take months before you see any results from it!

Summary

The best way to promote affiliate products (in my humble opinion) is to use a paid marketing platform and send visitors to a landing page where you collect their email address. Then follow up with email marketing.

Of course this strategy will work better with a high ticket offering in your sales funnel and subscription affiliate products which pay out recurring commissions.

You still need to learn about targeting to get the right kinds of people on your list, and your success will depend on the customer’s affiliate marketing journey too. A congruent messaging tactic will work much better than conflicting messaging. Well targeted adverts will work better if you know your target market.

But paid marketing is the fastest way to build an affiliate business and many will quit when approaching content marketing. It can take months or even years to get any traction. Content marketing isn’t as scalable either as paid marketing is. With an email list you can extend the time period of getting to know you from your subscribers point of view.

Emails can help convey the value of your products much better than straight from a website. With an email list you can communicate with thousands of subscribers and a single email can mean multiple sales in a single day!

Still, not everyone has the budget for paid marketing and if you are more time rich than financially rich, another cheaper strategy might suit you much better! Blogging or video marketing are also great strategies if you have the patience! See also unpaid social media marketing and 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Where To Promote Affiliate Links?

You’ve just started affiliate marketing and wondering where to promote affiliate links? Those long, ugly links don’t look that attractive either do they!? So why would anyone want to click on them, right? A good place to start here is to ask this question: why would someone want to click on my link?

There’s millions of places you can put your link, but you want to put it somewhere where someone will actually click, and buy something, don’t you? Otherwise, you could spend months or even years pasting your link around the internet for nothing!

The key to knowing where to promote affiliate links is answering this question: why would someone click my link, and is their intention to purchase?

Where To Promote Affiliate Links – Link Shortening & Cloaking

If you’ve just joined an affiliate program, chances are good that you have a long ugly link that looks something like this: https://3fb99fgcr-jtfr9qs8fjsbr33z.hop.clickbank.net/

However you dress it up, it’s not tempting to click on a link like this. So one thing you can do is shorten your links with a link shortening tool. Here’s some link shortener websites:

TinyURL
ShortURL
Cutt.ly
Bitly
Ow.ly
Buff.ly

Many internet users are reluctant to clink on long links. According to a study conducted by Marketing Sherpa, short links attract over twice as many clicks as long links. It’s also harder to remember long, messy links, so people are less inclined to share them.

Link cloaking can help you track your sales too, and prevent other affiliates from hijacking your affiliate commissions.

Where To Promote Affiliate Links – Buyer Intent

Now that you’ve got your affiliate links nice and pretty, you’ll want to know where to promote affiliate links! Affiliate links can be promoted in a number of ways: through social media, via paid advertising, from an email list, on a blog, on YouTube videos.

You can even go through your social media profiles and paste your link into each profile. But what you really want is to put your link somewhere where people will click and purchase your products. You don’t want inquisitive “tyre kickers” either, you want hungry buyers!

An affiliate link on a social media profile doesn’t attract a log of buyer traffic. Firstly not many people will see it, and even if they do, why would someone click on your link anyway? Especially if it tells them nothing about what that link leads them to.

Having an affiliate link in your Facebook bio doesn’t guarantee this result. You need to drive targeted buyer traffic towards your affiliate link. There’s several ways to do this and you’ll need to choose a strategy which is right for you, your products and your style of working.

Where To Promote Affiliate Links – Hungry Buyers

Where do hungry buyers hang out? If you want to buy someone, where do you go? To the shop right? But before you go to the checkout and physically make that purchase, you might want to learn a little more about your product first. You’ll want to check your product is the right one, and that you’re not missing out on anything which might be better, or cheaper. Where can you find this kind of information? A product review website!

A review website is a good place to put your affiliate links. But in order to do this you’ll need to create the website. One of my first online sales came from a review article I wrote on a free blogging site called hubpages.com. You can also blog for free on WordPress or Blogger.com.

Free blog sites are a good place to start out and learn about blogging, but they can limit what you can do. Building your own blog website is a better idea if you want to take your affiliate marketing business seriously. Free sites are free, but they do limit you in terms of the links you’re allowed to post and from the traffic you can attract. Search engines don’t tend to rank content on free blog platforms as well as they do for owned websites.

Building Your Own Blog Site

Building your own blog website is a cheap method of attracting buyers for your affiliate products. By creating lots of content, which attract the right kind of buyer traffic, you can lead people to your products through your content. Blogging does take some time though, see how long does it take to make money blogging. But it’s a solid strategy to build a steady stream of traffic to your affiliate links.

If you just paste your links on social media accounts, there’s really no incentive for people to click on them because there’s no context for “passers by” to purchase something. But if you create a resource which is specifically for your target audience, you can collect a “showroom” for interested buyers. See why target market is important.

Once built, you can keep adding content to your website which is relevant for people who are interested in your product or service. Once you have this content, you can share it on social media platforms and link to it in your social media bios and other online profiles. This is much more relevant for “passers by”on your profiles because it offers them some information, rather than a ambiguous and messy link.

Where To Place Your Affiliate Link – Domain Forwarding

If you’re a super lazy affiliate and don’t want to build a blog, another strategy is to use domain forwarding. Find a product you want to promote and grab your affiliate link. I’ll use this product from Clickbank as an example. This is a text to speech artificial intelligence voice over product for video marketers.

This is what my affiliate link looks like having just created it on Clickbank: https://0fa6b9kms0bzlw9cwas7n2ud75.hop.clickbank.net/.

It’s a bit messy and unattractive, and I could use on of the link shorteners to make it look more pretty! But that wouldn’t give it any context. To tidy the link and give it context you can purchase a domain name which is suitable and simply forward your domain to the affiliate link. Hey presto, you now have a domain name you can share on your profiles around the internet. It’s much more attractive than the messy link, and there’s an instant context for your link.

To find a suitable domain name, I’ll look on Google’s keyword planner first to see what people are already looking for when it comes to AI voiceovers.

A good domain name which is used for forwarding to an affiliate link should sum up the purpose of the product in a few of words. This one might be suitable and is only £6.66 per year.

Once you’ve purchased your chosen domain name simple access your domain management system and forward the new domain name to your affiliate link.

Once you have your new domain name, you can share it in your emails, paste in throughout your social media profiles and it gives context and looks pretty!

Using Your Email Signature For Links

Here’s a clever strategy I use to share links to my website (which contains many affiliate links). If you build a website, it’s much more likely that someone will visit it than if you only link to a single affiliate product. Here’s an article sharing how to get traffic to your website free, once you’ve built one.

But if you have cloaked you link, or forwarded a domain name to a link, here’s a simple hassle free way to share it. Go in to your email account and under the settings tab find the email signature which you can add to every outgoing email you send.

Then simply add your name, and your link to your signature. Make sure you make the link clickable too. In Gmail, it looks like this:

using email signature to promote affiliate links

It’s well worth doing a domain name forwarding option if you’re going to do this. It adds more relevancy to your link and people will know what it’s about.

Use An Active Profile

You can as mentioned post your links on your account profiles wherever you spend time online. Inactive profiles won’t get the same number of people visiting them as your active ones.

When I first became an affiliate, I used eBay quite a bit as I used to buy and sell on the site. You can update your profiles on eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and whichever social media platform you are connected to to link to your affiliate products. Just don’t expect too much if you’re not actively building an audience or a following on them.

Here’s my eBay profile with a link to one of my articles on another website:

Building An Email List + Driving Traffic

Don’t expect to make a fortune by just posting your affiliate links and then sitting back! Sadly, that doesn’t really work very well. In order to make money through affiliate marketing, you need to drive traffic. The best ways to drive traffic are using paid advertising and by building an email list of subscribers. Top affiliates work hard at driving traffic to a landing page where they build a list of email subscribers.

Once you start getting subscribers on your list, you can create email messages to help them and build a long term relationship with them. As you build trust, and your list grows, you should find you can promote products to them if your focus is to help them and offer them the right products for them.

Paying for advertising can get expensive though so if you’re just starting out as an affiliate, it’s a good idea to learn the cheaper strategies for building traffic to your website.

You can still build an email list through blogging, but it will take much longer than by using paid marketing. You can start building an email list once you purchase an email autoresponder and learn how to drive traffic.

Once you have built a blog/website, you can attract people to sign up to your list by creating ebooks or using a “hook” provided through your affiliate product owner. Here’s a bit using selling ebooks as lead magnets.

Paid Marketing And Affiliate Links

Using paid marketing with your affiliate links is very difficult due to advertising regulations. Google Adwords would seem to be the perfect solution for affiliates since it is for targeted advertising. However, since you can’t control the website where you’re sending traffic, and it’s a third party site, Google doesn’t approve! To get round this problem, you can create a Google compliant website and collect subscribers information on your site.

Then, market your affiliate products through an email list.

If you drop affiliate links on your site, this can be a reason for an advert disapproval. Google considers these links as bridging, and may ban your advert from running. There’s a long list of requirements from advertisers – read Google advertising policies here.

However, if you’re using organic marketing on your website, this isn’t an issue, although affiliate links can affect your SEO (search engine optimisation). Here’s another reason for organic marketing although it’s much slower than using paid marketing.

Access Training And Get Support

I started out as an affiliate several years ago and it’s can be tough, especially if you go it alone. It’s well worth paying for training and support if you’re serious about earning an income as an affiliate marketer.

Access a free webinar for some key tips from Stuart Ross, who has been an affiliate and 8 figure entrepreneur in the online space for many years: