Affiliate marketing is the avenue to peruse when you don’t have your own product or service, but you want to make a lot of money quickly. Affiliate marketing is also great for those with a very low marketing budget. With this type of marketing, you sell other people’s products and services and you make a commission on every item you sell. There is one thing to consider before you get started, however. If you don’t know how to properly affiliate link the products and services you plan to sell, you’re not going to get very far as an affiliate marketer. The following tips and techniques will show you how the experts affiliate link to really ramp up their online marketing income.
Getting Affiliate Links
Before you learn how to properly affiliate link the products and services you plan to sell, you need to find those products and services that you might be interested in promoting. For our example, we are going to turn to ClickBank, the Internet’s largest digital marketplace. Of course, ClickBank is only one source of affiliate links. Contact the manufacturers of your favorite products and search the websites of your favorite services to find affiliate offers you would be proud to promote. Amazon is another example of a site that provides affiliate links to ambitious online marketers. For right now, let’s stick with ClickBank, which is very user friendly and which has plenty of products and services to choose from.
With ClickBank, you can search through hundreds or thousands of products and services until you find one you’d like to promote. Then, you simply click the ‘Promote’ button on the product or service you like and you’ll be given an affiliate link to promote.
Not so fast. That link is not going to work by itself. You need to change it if you want to learn how to affiliate link like everyone else.
Link Shorteners and Trackers
Link shorteners like Bit.ly or trackers like Clicktrax are perfect for cloaking or masking your affiliate link so that consumers aren’t so wary of clicking. A tracker helps keep track of your clicks and various trends and really helps with cross-testing. ClickBank will track your affiliate link clicks for you, however, so a tracker is not necessary for our example.
Why Shorten or Hide the Links?
When you get an affiliate link from ClickBank or some other source, it’s typically very long and may even include your affiliate username and other information. Regardless, it looks like an affiliate link. Those consumers who are in-the-know will rarely click an affiliate link when they know it is as such. For this reason, it helps to cloak the link so that it doesn’t appear in the preview bar in the person’s browser. The person will only be able to see the shortened link or the anchor text the link is embedded into.
Getting People To Click
It used to be easy to get people to click affiliate links. Today, people know better and they really hate being sold to. For that reason, you’ll need to use effective affiliate marketing strategy. The following tips will help you place your affiliate links so that they’re more enticing and click-worthy for your prospects and visitors.
Pre-Sell: When selling anything, it helps if you can establish your name and brand as the leader in your industry. Establishing authority over your field is key to succeeding when affiliate linking. Try to gather email addresses so that you can send out a regular newsletter, fill your site with valuable information that isn’t found elsewhere and make sure your graphics and images remain minimal and consistent with your overall brand. The more professional you look, the more click-worthy your affiliate links will appear.
Highly-Recommend: Once you establish your authority, it should be easy to leave affiliate links that people will want to click. If you send out a regular newsletter that contains valuable information your subscribers can use, they’ll be happy to click any affiliate links you recommend. Especially if you can provide examples and real-life evidence that clicking on that link provides some sort of result.
For example, if you are recommending an affiliate link for a new weight loss product, show photos of you actually using the product and losing weight. If you are providing an affiliate link for a new video editing software package, show your subscribers an actual video that you created with the software. Show your audience cold-hard proof and they’ll begin to trust you. Once you have that trust, affiliate marketing becomes a downhill affair. Enjoy the ride.
Use The Products and Services: It is not always necessary, but it helps if you actually have experience with the product or service in question. Whether it’s a physical or digital product or it’s some type of service you’re providing an affiliate link for, it helps to be able to relate actual life experience to your review or affiliate offer. When you use the product and are able to give an honest review, your customers will begin to reward you with more sales. That’s how the affiliate marketing experts do it and that’s how you should go about your campaigns if you hope to affiliate link with the best of them.
