7 Channels To Promote Your Affiliate Links

To generate passive income as an affiliate marketer, you need your website or blog visitors to click on the affiliate links strategically placed on your website. Let’s assume you have a great blog and you are promoting an outstanding product, but you don’t know how to make people click on your affiliate links. The whole thing of maintaining a blog and signing up for an affiliate program becomes pointless, isn’t it?

There are many bloggers who are producing great content, but they don’t simply know how to promote their affiliate links. As a result, they cannot optimally monetize their blogs and websites. If you are into affiliate marketing, you need to know two things first – affiliate links are the only way to get due credit for your referred sales and there are more than a few ways to promote your affiliate links.

In this post, we will go into detail about how to promote your affiliate links, but before that, let’s get down to the basics.

What Are Affiliate Links And How These Links Function?

Introducing your followers to a product or brand your love and earning commissions from your referred sales is what affiliate marketing is all about. This is why successful and active bloggers sign up for marketing programs as they want to make money from their web presence.

The moment you’re approved for an affiliate program, you will receive your unique affiliate tracking link, which can be distributed and shared nearly anywhere, provided you are not doing it in an unethical manner or promoting your link using a shady technique.

The only difference between an affiliate link and a regular editorial hyperlink is that the former is used by the merchant or an affiliate tracking system to attribute referred sales to the deserving partners. These links help merchants/brands and affiliate networks to track referrals and attribute sales.

Read more about what are affiliate links and how these links are different here.

You can include your affiliate link in your product reviews or simply share the same via your social media channels like YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook. However, there are more ways than you can imagine you can promote affiliate links. By using the right strategies and platforms, you can increase the chances of converting your followers into confident buyers, which would translate into increased affiliate earnings for you. Here are seven effective ways to promote your affiliate links.

1. Blogs And Articles

The best links come with complimentary content that supports any solution or idea that a brand wants to convey to its target audience. If you wish to promote a product, start a blog, and talk about the product naturally through your blog or website.

Besides creating original and informative content, you can also talk about a product naturally within the content. This is what we call Native Ads. A good example of Native Ads is Instagram Stories. This way, you can show ads in such a subtle way that your followers would hardly recognize them as ads.

For example, if you have a food blog and your audience primarily consists of people who want to follow a gluten-free diet, you can talk about gluten-free foods and promote gluten-free products along the way.

Just make sure you are using an affiliate link disclosure in accordance with FTC disclosure guidelines.

2. Videos

Visuals make a better impact than most content and we already know that. Besides talking about a product, how about adding some videos to show your followers how to use the product? This will increase engagement and boost affiliate sales as you can win the attention of lazy yet potential buyers too. Videos have a higher rate of social shares too.

You can think about making tutorials or maybe video testimonials and analyze how much they boost your sales. After all, a vast majority of your target audience spends their time on mobile devices and you can successfully appeal to them by uploading great video content.

3. Podcasts

It would be hard to gulp this down, but close to 80% of the top-rated affiliates drive sales and revenue with the help of podcasts. A podcast is an audio program that users can download from the web.

If you want to host a podcast, make sure you do not clutter it with too many obtrusive ads. Instead, suggest some products and tools that would do a world of good for your followers. Try building a story about the product that you used and see how people relate to it. You can gradually drive quality inbound traffic to the merchant’s website by using podcasts.

4. Email List

If you wish to build a community, building an email list is the best choice. People on your email list are the people who trust you as a contact. As they expect your emails in their inbox, it implies the trust factor reigns supreme.

You can email a list of products and services to your contacts in the form of personalized recommendations. You can also dish out special offers and deals as it’s a great way to get up, close, and personal with the contacts on your list. People who trust you as a contact are more likely to follow your recommendations and make a purchase.

5. Solutions Inside A Solution

This is yet another type of native ad.

Let’s take the example of an online course. If you are offering an online course about how to boost productivity, you can easily float your ideas and suggestions about tools that help you to stay productive, such as Pluralsight and Freshbooks.

This way, you can promote products without sounding promotional. This is because you are suggesting pertinent products and solutions that compliment your content. It’s a solution inside another solution. Sooner or later, you can drive sales and start earning commissions.

6. Free Courses

This is quite similar to the above option, except for the fact that you need to give out something for free in this case.

Everybody loves free stuff, and if you can offer free courses, you will not only offer value, but you can gradually grow your list and insert contextual links to help people get access to additional resources, tools, and products.

For instance, if you offer a free online course about home and office workouts, you can offer links to products you would love to personally recommend to anybody who has signed up for your online free course.

7. Ads

Using paid advertising to drive traffic is one of the proven effective ways to boost affiliate income. The most popular of all advertising channels are Facebook Ads as of now. As Facebook puts a high emphasis on user experience, do not run advertisements with your affiliate link. Instead, engage people and get them to visit your landing page first.

Final Thoughts

Affiliate marketing is all about building trust over time. There’s no secret formula to master the art of promoting affiliate links. Your link promotion strategy should depend on what kind of product you are promoting. Does the product come with a monthly fee or is it a one-time purchase? Does the product have a high or low product value? You need to think about the purchasing decision-making process from a user point-of-view. After that, strategize your content and build and promote your links in a way that supports the purchase.