8.Adding Affiliate Links

Adding Affiliate Links to your website is an easy task but a lack of care equals lost revenue.

Have you ever consider how important your affiliate link strategy is? Do you simply add links to your post, page or review and hope your readership feel compelled to follow them without any more encouragement?

If you're anything like me, the answer is yes! I have been creating content for some time, but recently I’ve had the blinkers taken from my eyes through my exhaustive training, research, and experience.

So far you have followed the processes through sections 1 to 7 of my ’10 step to creating a successful affiliate website’ now it’s time to add your affiliate links.
As I was saying, previously, I added links that I found relevant or logical but didn’t truly understand or consider what my readers were looking for.

So, here’s my affiliate links strategy 101 for newbies and intermediates out there in the affiliate marketing world. You will be happy to know this is a nice short piece that’s super easy to get through and it should serve you well.

How To Engage With Your Readers:

Know Your Readers:

There is one sure way to engage your readers and that’s knowing your readers. Without knowing your readers and why they are visiting your site, leaves you powerless to leverage any kind of product or service.

By now you will have been through the process of targeting your key demographics with targeted keywords and phrases and hopefully using ‘long-tail‘ key phrases you will have a good idea who your readers allowing your to add and leverage the most appropriate affiliate links.

Quality Over Quantity:

The next step is to promise yourself to promote ‘Quality’ products and services over those that simply offer a better commission for yourself. Over time, you will come to realize that the ‘long game’ is where your success lies, and that can only be realized through long-term promotion of products to you loyal readership who keep coming back for more.

This means you need to promote products you know, and what I mean when I say ‘know’, is a product you’ve bought, tested, reviewed, and able to offer an objective opinion and comparison with an alternative product or service. This means you are building a relationship of trust between you and your readership that can be nurtured and grown over time.

Respect Your Readers:

Bear in mind how you feel when searching for an answer to your problem. All you want is to find is honest, clear and helpful content that you can trust with as few searches as possible. After you have done all your homework and got your reader to your site, please don’t throw it all alway by failing to respect your readers.

The number 1 rule once you have found your readership, is to create and maintain your Integrity, and don’t try to fool your reader into making a decision.

By all means introduce CTAs that leverage emotion but don’t try to persuade your readers to take action by using misinformation or misdirection.

Affiliate Link Positioning:

This is part of your SEO training and also utilizes a lot of common sense, but let’s go through the basics just to reinforce the idea of adding affiliate links. Throughout your SEO training you will have been bombarded with rules about how and where to place links, but now I just want you to start to look at this as if you were a reader rather than a publisher.

When you are reading a review or article, it’s likely you want to read the article and follow the direction of that article if you are interested in its content. We, of course, hope the reader is interested in the content because we’ve worked hard to get our reader to our page.

So, how do we move the reader along without irritating them with annoying popups and bullying techniques designed to take email addresses and direct readers to sales funnels?

In my view, you need to use a mixture of subtlety and gentle nudging. I would never advocate hitting your readers with popups at every opportunity, this is intensely irritating and feel it’s rude and bullying. If you want to add POPUP, add it to your entry page and delay it’s action for 20 seconds to allow your reader to at least have an idea of your content before asking for a subscription email.

Please add your banners along the top and the bottom of the page so they don’t interfere with the reader’s pleasure, but if you really need to add a banner in your main copy make sure it’s truly relevant to the immediate content. This same requirement should be adhered to for descriptive text links like:
“for more information read my Wealthy Affiliate Online University review to understand how to create an online business”.

You can also add Click Here links and calls to action that’s neither descriptive or generic, but emotional and designed to encourage a reader to take action using their heart rather than their head. Something like a call to make an urgent decision: ”
“Hurray, only 30 places available, this opportunity will not be available much longer”

This is an exaggerated offer that you may see on a scam site but you should get the idea right?
It’s my personal view that your copy shouldn’t be littered with affiliate links but enhanced with a few select links that offer true relevance to your article that add value to your reader’s experience.

With time and practice, this will become easier, but the main thing to understand is through mistakes and practice comes better understanding and better articles and posts.

Cloaking Affiliate Links:

The last thing I want to mention about affiliate links is their cloaking.

You may already know about this and have this under control, but for those who have not looked at this, I am going to give you a lightening fast run through to get you up and running with affiliate link cloaking.
Firstly, why cloak your affiliate link?

There a few simple reason to cloak your links. If you have ever seen an affiliate link they are not pretty and this can put people off clicking on them, look at these two links and tell me which one you would trust more:

http://localhost/sam/anpdupa_click?lid=123456&pubid=777444×98
http://localhost/sam/MyCoolProduct/

Enough said?

Other reasons are more technical for example, an affiliate link could possibly be seen as SPAM if you were including it in an email campaign meaning your emails will be sent to the spam box.

Another important reason for cloaking is the ease of tracking your affiliate links allow you to manage your links.

How Do I Cloak My Affiliate Links?:

Good news. Cloaking your affiliate links is very simple and it’s done with a free WordPress plugin call Pretty Link Lite.

Install it, Open it, Add your affiliate link, Add you friendly link, Create, Paste. Look, I will show you:

Select Add a new Pretty Link.

Add Affiliate link to Target URL*

Add preferred name into Pretty Link*

Select Create button

You link is now ready.

Notice the HITS/UNIQ column? This allows you to easily keep track of how many hits your link id receiving.

There are other ways to create shortened URLs but by far the Pretty Link Addon for WordPress is the best tool for the job and is free to use, and allows you to create, delete, edit and monitor your affiliate links.

This was my quick guide to adding affiliate links to your site and I hope it was helpful.

Don't forget to read all 10 of my ‘10 Steps To Creating A Successful Affiliate Marketing Site‘. The next articles looks at Generating Traffic.

1.Build your free site
2.Hosting
3.Niche Market
4.Keywords
5.Google analytics
6.Mailing lists
7.Writing content
8.Affiliate links
9.Traffic generation
10.Testing!