To promote my affiliate link free, I use a number of strategies. First and foremost it’s well worth having a website. A website is your digital property which you can use for generating traffic to your affiliate links through your content. Although there’s tonnes of ways to promote your affiliate link free, it all starts with a piece of “digital property” you call your own. Although there are free blog sites such as Blogger.com, Hubpages.com and WordPress.com, having a website of your own has more authority.
Visitors to your own hosted domain will trust your content more than a blog post on a free blogging site. Search engines trust owner hosted websites more too, and will rank them more favourably than free blog websites. To promote my affiliate link free, I start with creating a website. If you know nothing of how to do this, you can get started here with a program which offers you an easy step by step process to set up a site.
Promote My Affiliate Link Free – SEO
To promote my affiliate link free from a website, I start with a goal in mind: free traffic from the search engines. Getting free traffic to your website from the search engines is quite tough. There’s plenty of competition. One way of doing this is to build your website around a specific keyword which you want to rank for. This website, for example was built around the keyword affiliate marketing mentors.
Before starting out you’ll want to research keywords within your niche. To find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, use Google’s free keyword planner. Then compare your chosen word on Google with a search to compare the relative competition. More on this concept in the article: create niche websites.
Promote My Affiliate Link Free – Content
You can use the same strategy to build content on your website. Target specific long tail keywords which offer low SEO difficulty. Write content using an SEO plugin. I use Yoast SEO. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress. As you choose content to write about, make sure it lines up with your products.
Think about the search intent which will be used when someone types the keyword into a search engine. What are they looking for and might they be interested in your affiliate products? If the answer is yes, that’s the kind of content you want to create. If no, then keep searching!
Blogging is a long, slow process but there’s a number of other strategies you can use to help bring people to your affiliate links for free.
Promote My Affiliate Link Free – Ebooks & Autoresponders
Ebooks are a great way to promote your affiliate link for free. An ebook can be used to build an email list from a website. From an email list you can send out messages on autopilot which bring people to your affiliate links. See the power of email marketing. You can even get a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
As you start to generate traffic to your website from your blogging and link building efforts, most of your visitors won’t make a purchase. Only a small percentage of your website visitors will buy from your affiliate links. But if you can offer them something on your website, such as an ebook, you can get them to subscribe to your email list. Once on your list, you can build a relationship with your subscribers over a much long period of time, sending them to your affiliate products as you do so.
On a website, a visitor only has a small “window” of opportunity to purchase something. On a email list, this time period is dramatically extended.
Link Building
Once you have some content on your website, link building becomes a useful way to:
- Build pathways for people to find your content – and visit your site.
- Improve your SEO score and increase your visibility in the SEO rankings
Your link profile is one of the major ranking factors used by the search engines, especially Google. Think of links as naturally occurring “votes” for your website which come from other sites which recommend your content. As your content gets more views, more people will naturally link to it, providing it is worthwhile!
This is why creating high quality content should be a priority when you get started with blogging. To build links to your website you can reach out to other bloggers in your niche and offer to write guest posts, linking back to your website. You can also comment on blogs in your niche, leaving links as you do so. If back linking isn’t your strength, you can always outsource this strategy too. (See image above).
Social Media
You can also use social media to promote your affiliate links for free. Place your link in your profile bio. It can help to have a website again here for a few reasons:
- A long, messy affiliate link doesn’t provide the context which a website does
- People are less inclined to click on an unknown affiliate link than a contextual domain name link, especially if it’s a long, messy link.
- It looks more professional
- A website attracts an appropriate audience
Social media can also be used as a means to build links to your content on your website. A good social media plugin to use for your blog is Revive Old Posts which automatically syndicates content throughout your social media platforms. See also unpaid social media marketing.
Link Cloaking/shortening & Domain Name Forwarding
Link shortening is a useful tactic too when it comes to link promotion. A long, messy link doesn’t look as clean as an shortened link. Here’s a few link shortening services:
- Bitly.com
- Tinyurl.com
- Ow.ly
- Rebrandly.com
- Tidyurl.com
You can also purchase a domain name which gives your link more context and meaning. Then, forward your domain name directly to your affiliate link. A clean domain name looks more professional and has more context than a messy affiliate link which has neither meaning or context.
Here’s an affiliate link: http://d463b5gmw66qlm7cl7m8z10wbj.hop.clickbank(.net). There’s no context with this link and it could lead you anywhere. Plus, it looks messy!
Compare the above link to a domain name such as this: learnpianoforbeginners.com. This domain immediately has a context so potential visitors will know immediately what the domain name is about and whether they will be interested in the product/information or not.
See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.