Making money through affiliate marketing is easy… if you know how to promote your affiliate links! Learn 3 Proven Ways to Promote Your Affiliate Links!
Hello Wealth Builders!
My name is John Greg and today I will teach you the following:
- What is affiliate marketing
- How can you make money from affiliate marketing?
- Ways to promote affiliate links
Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest and most trusted methods to make money online. There are three general ways to promote your affiliate link. First is through search engine optimization (SEO). Second is through promoting it on social media, a.k.a. social media marketing. And finally, through pay per click or search engine marketing.
Affiliate Disclosure – I am an Affiliate of many products promoted on this website and may earn a commission if you purchase something.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Before I go into details of Ways to Promote Your Affiliate Links, let me first define what affiliate marketing is.
According to Wikipedia, affiliate marketing is,
“Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.”
If that doesn’t ring a bell, let me put it this way.
For example,
You are a blogger and your blog’s niche is about coffee.
Naturally, you will be writing articles about coffee and other things related to it.
You understand that in order for you to build a following of loyal readers, you need to write articles that add value to the life of your readers and not just articles that are trying to sell something to them.
With this in mind, you write a mixture of value-adding articles and promotional articles.
Your goal when writing value-adding articles is to add value so you need to go easy on promoting coffee and/or coffee-related products/services. Of course, you can still throw in a couple of affiliate links here and there but solely because you want to make it easier for your audience to acquire the products/ services you’ve used in case they want to redo your lessons.
In contrast, when it comes to promotional articles, it is clear that your goal is to sell, so you write an article to convince your reader to buy. You also make it clear to them how and why to buy the product/service promoted in your article.
Where does affiliate marketing come into play here?
In both instances, you gave your reader a link where they can buy the product. This link is your affiliate link which you can obtain by joining the affiliate program of the company that sells the product you are promoting.
How Can You Make Money From Affiliate Marketing?
Your affiliate link contains your unique affiliate ID which lets the company know if you make a sale. Basically, you get a commission when someone buys a product you are promoting in your content through your link.
So in other words, you make money from affiliate marketing by creating content with the intention of selling a product. Then, you ask your readers to buy the product through the link you’ve provided. If your readers buy the product through your link then you earn a commission (making money).
If it is still not clear how affiliate marketing works, I suggest you watch Wealthy Affiliate’s training on affiliate marketing.
Ways to Promote Your Affiliate Links
So hopefully, the what and how of affiliate marketing is now clear. Now let me teach you how the 3 Ways to Promote Your Affiliate Links
Content Creation and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The first way to promote your affiliate is by Search Engine Optimization.
The idea is you will create content (blog or video) peppered with relevant keywords. In addition, you will also have to satisfy the on-page and off-page SEO requirements.
Once you publish your post, Google/Bing’s algorithm will “crawl” your article. Basically, it will grade your article. The algorithm will also determine the domain score of your site. The algorithm will then decide what place your article will be in the search engine result page (SERP) .
You want your article to land on the 1st page of SERP especially on the number 1 spot. The reason is, people will most likely only going to check the number 1 result. Your chance of getting traffic from SEO exponentially decreases as your spot on SERP goes lower.
The Good
SEO is great because you get free traffic IF your article lands on the top spot of the first page.
Mind you, you are not just getting 10, 60 or 100 free traffic per month. If you landed on the first page, you can get several hundred to thousand free unique visitors to your post.
The Bad
The downside of SEO marketing is it takes so much work, e.g. writing blogs after blogs. In addition, SEO takes time especially if your niche is highly competitive.
Social Media Marketing
The other way to promote your affiliate link is through social media. As a content creator, you will need to create a business page on various social media. You will then grow your following either through organic or paid posts.
Once you have a big following, you can then create an affiliate post to promote your affiliate link.
The Good
If you have hundreds of thousands of followers then one single affiliate promotion post can result in a lot of revenue.
The Bad
One downside of Social Media Marketing is you have to set up a sales funnel.
Chances are, your social media followers are not really there to buy your product. It is most likely they liked or follow your account just to consume your free content. That said, your job as a digital marketer is to guide them through the sales process.
Another downside of using social media is each social media has its own terms and conditions with regards to affiliate link promotion.
For example,
Facebook allows affiliate links to be posted on business pages but they don’t allow affiliate posts to be boosted. Pinterest allows the use of certain affiliate links but they will mark others as spam. The bottom line, you need to research each of social media’s terms of condition before posting your affiliate link.
Search Engine Marketing
The final way of promoting your links is through search engine marketing or pay per click (PPC). And, as you might have guessed, Microsoft Advertisement (formerly Bing Ads) and Google Ads are two major PPC service providers.
Search engine marketing is where you bid for advertising space on the first page of a search engine result page.
Basically, PPC is SEO’s dream job when he grows up!
As mentioned earlier, every blogger wants to make sure their SEOs are right so their site can land on the first page of any SERP. As explained earlier, this feat is easier said than done.
Thank goodness there is search engine marketing. Sure, you need to pay but at least you end up on the first page of SERP (if you bid right).
The Good
PPC ignores all the drama SEO requires. It skips all the work and time and it instantly puts your site on the front page of SERP!
Again, like a broken record, top 1 result on first page = traffic!
Traffic is good because people get to see your promoted product and hopefully they buy!
The Bad
If you don’t know what keyword to bid, don’t how much to bid, don’t know who to target, then you are flushing all your money down the drain.
Did I Miss Anything? Can You Add Something to The List?
Well, those are my Ways to Promote Your Affiliate Link. Did you know a way that I didn’t mention? Please let me know down in the comment section!
Hopefully, this article added some value to your life. If it is, what do you think is the best way of promoting an affiliate link?
Hi there John,
I think you’ve covered the three main ways in a pretty good writeup, one thing to say is that if you choose SEO as your road, please make sure that you use White Hat techniques, that is ethical ways to attract traffic and not Black Hat techniques, which are underhand and the search engines will soon cotton onto and penalise your site accordingly.
You’re right in that PPC can get quite expensive if you don’t know what you are doing, although Bing lets you experiment more than Google Adsense because it is cheaper and more forgiving. Bing are also kinder to affiliates.
In essence, you should be using all three methods to attract traffic to your blog/product. Listing sales funnels as a bad side of Social Media may be short sighted, because sales funnels allow list building and this where you can further promote your offers. You may get more sales this way than any other method. The money is in the list, as the saying goes.
Anyhow, I enjoyed the write up. Good hunting
Dave
Hi,
Thanks for your insightful comment.
I agree with what you said about SEO. Sometimes, we think we can outsmart Google/Bing so we try to use Black Hat techniques. Sure, those who do that may get away for a short period but definitely gonna get caught in the long run – this is not a good business practice.
I also agree with you about Bing. I use Bing to PPC my Clickbank Affiliate Links.
You are right about social media sales funnel as well. As just listed it as bad because it takes time to build and if you don’t know who is your audience then you might end up paying for ads but get stuck on the top of the sales funnel.
Regards,
John Greg
I enjoyed the information in this article. It explained well how to promote your affiliate links in various ways. There are always trade-offs and it depends on each person’s specific situation.
Thanks so much for these insights into affiliate marketing. All the Best.
Hi,
Thanks for appreciating the article. Let me know if you have more questions!
Which way do you prefer the most?
Regards,
John Greg
You are so right with what you have said, thanks so much for these tips.
Hi
Thanks. I am glad you agree!
Regards,
John Greg
Hi,
I agree that these are the most important strategies. They are the general techniques online marketers use, but it’s really a science when you realize how many ways there are to use your links within these strategies.
For instance, if you consider social media… all the platforms have different methodologies of getting your message out to the public. Blogging and SEO go hand in hand, but connecting articles in a way that funnels your reader to the right pages is an art that new bloggers rarely learn about.
… And PPC, as you’ve mentioned, can get pretty expensive. Unfortunately, you are learning to trade money for more money, so you have to spend and lose a little in the beginning to earn profits in the end.
Thanks for the value,
Wadud
Hi,
I totally agree with you.
In the future, I am planning to write a more detailed explanation of each way to promote your affiliate link.
Regards,
JG
I really love your website and fiverr post. Great article and useful tips. I use fiverr for animation video.
Great day!