How to Promote Affiliate Links Tips That Actually Work

Are you struggling to generate affiliate sales? Maybe you started your blog in hopes of supplementing your income so you can leave your day job? If so, these tips will help you learn how to promote affiliate links that can work well.

Most of us who start a blog, have unrealistic expectations. We tend to believe that we can earn millions in our first year online. While underestimating how much we can accomplish in 3 years.

Today, we are going to talking about affiliate blogging.

What Is Affiliate Blogging?

It is nothing more than writing blog posts that are monetized with affiliate links to help you earn a commission. You can write reviews, how to posts, comparison guides and etc that talk about a specific product or service.

You get paid on the type of action that the person takes. Some programs pay for leads (pay per lead) while others pay for an actual sale (cost per action).

You’ll have a better chance of getting conversions if you sign up for the best affiliate programs that are related to your niche. Once you sign up for a few programs, it’s time to start working on the promotion.

After all, without any traffic, you’ll never make any sales. Today, I wanted to go in-depth on some ways that you can learn promote your links for free.

How to Promote Affiliate Links

I’m going to assume that you already know how affiliate marketing works and you are already a member of some top networks like AWIN, ShareASale, and FlexOffers. If not, then be sure to check out these high paying affiliate programs you might want to consider joining.

In this blog post you will learn:

How to use blogging to promote your affiliate links
How to write a product review to promote your links
How to write a How-To post to publicize your links
How to use affiliate banners to help you boost your affiliate links
Why you should create a landing page instead of direct linking
How to promote affiliate products without a website
How to Promote Affiliate Links on Facebook

7 Ways to Promote Affiliate Links That Work

Before we get into the different ways to work on affiliate promotion, I want you to know that some will work better than others. You need to find a strategy that works for you and work that method.

It takes time to figure out what actually works to get conversions. But just keep at it and eventually, you’ll start to see commissions from your hard work.

How to Use Blogging to Promote Your Affiliate Links

This is my favorite method and I have found it that it works very well. However, it does take a while to start seeing a return from your hard work. You also have to overcome the learning curve that comes with blogging.

This is How it Works

You start a blog, preferably a self-hosted WordPress blog. Your goal is to write amazingly helpful content that helps your audience solve their problems and answers their questions.

Over time as you continue to add content to your blog, it will grow. Google will eventually start sending you free organic traffic. Of course, it depends on whether you have optimized your blog posts and are using keywords that people are searching for.

At first, you’ll want to work hard to promote your content to social media sites, forums, and other methods to get some traffic.

It also helps if you’re using a social media plugin that makes it easy for people to share your content. I personally use Social Warfare for this blog.

If you still haven’t started your blog, then check out my The Ultimate Guide to Starting, where I take you step-by-step and show you everything you need to do. All you’ll have to do is sit down and start writing the content.

The Key to Making Money With Your Blog

The only way you’ll ever be able to drive traffic to your affiliate links with your content, is if you actually take the time to create quality content that is useful and helpful to your readers.

Your content must educate and inform your readers. If they find your content helpful, they will click through your links and eventually buy the products and services you recommend.

If you create a blog just to act as an affiliate blog that has tons of links, you’re going to be extremely disappointed. No one is going to click on your links if you’re NOT providing value.

The strategy that works is to place your links naturally within your content.

One of the cool things is that you write the content once and eventually, it will make sales for you over and over. Of course, you might have to go back into your blog archives and update some of your old posts.

But you’ve already done the hard work of writing the content in advance.

Don’t Do This

This is a great keyword tool that I am currently using to get more traffic.

www.amazingkeywordtool.com/affiliateID=pleasebuyit

Do This Instead

Since I started using this keyword tool, I’ve noticed a significant increase in my organic traffic. Check it out and get started for free now.

As you can see, I casually linked to the affiliate link by telling them that they could get a free trial, all they have to do is check it out.

They don’t feel like they’re being sold to and chances are they would want to know what is helping me grow my traffic.

Keywords

When you become a content marketer, you not only need to write helpful content. You need to make sure that you’re doing keyword research before you sit down and write.

Nothing is more devasting than spending hundreds of hours growing your blog, only to realize that no one is searching for the keywords you’re targetting. Or maybe you’ve written tons of blog posts that are not targeting any keywords?

Don’t laugh, it happens. In fact, I’ve been guilty of this.

When I started this blog, I didn’t pay enough attention to keywords and I wrote over 60 blog posts that will NEVER be able to rank on the first page of Google. Heck, I don’t even think they are ranking in the top 100 yet.

Don’t do what I did, make sure that you take the time to do proper keyword research and keywords that have low competition with high search volume. It takes time, but this keyword tool has been helping me improve my organic traffic.

SEO

Every blogger dreams of the day that they can make affiliate sales for free without a lot of effort on their part. Well, you can, as long as you’re willing to do all the hard work on the front end.

When you sit down to write a blog post, you want to make sure that you’re properly optimizing your blog posts. Check out my step-by-step tutorial on how I optimize my blog posts with Yoast SEO.

It’s not hard and if you do it properly from the get-go. As your blog ages, you’ll start to see traffic from those old blog posts you wrote several months ago.

How to Write Reviews to Promote Your Affiliate Links

Product reviews have worked really well for me, however, I do them a lot differently than I have in the past. In the past, I would quickly talk about the pros and cons of a product and let it fly.

While I did make some sales, I have found that when I write a complete review of a product, I tend to make more sales.

How to Do This

I recently wrote my KWFinder Review blog post and it took me an extremely long time to get it written. What I did was log into my account and walk through all the features and of the product. It took me quite a while, I even had to research some of the features, because I don’t use them all.

However, if someone reads my review, all their questions will be answered on how to use this keyword tool. If they feel that they need it or want to check out the free trial, there’s a good chance that they will click on my link.

It takes a lot longer than just creating a side by side comparison table, but I’ve found that full reviews work a lot better.

I don’t know about you, but whenever I am researching a product to buy, I would rather read a full review than see a comparison table.

Another way that people have been able to make a killing with product reviews is to create a site focused on one topic or niche.

Niche Websites

These are still extremely popular and many people are setting up sites that are tightly focused on a sub-niche of a large topic. For instance, let’s say that you want to start a blog in education.

Well, education is a huge topic and you’re going to need to do a lot of promotion and even then you’ll probably NEVER be able to make a lot of money.

However, if you dig deeper and you target

Niche websites are created the same way as an authority blog. You’ll still need a great web hosting service for WordPress, check out my post on how to install WordPress on SiteGround.

How to Write How-To Blog Posts to Publicize Your Links

If you are an affiliate for a product you love, it’s so worth it to take the time to show your readers how to use it. Write a thorough blog post that walks them through step-by-step on how to use the product you’re promoting.

Make sure that you create screenshots that shows them exactly how to do something. I’ve written several How-To blog posts and I can tell you that it’s definitely worth your time writing them.

These are another type of blog posts that take time to write because you need to create screenshots. But if someone is looking to buy that specific product and they find your thorough blog post, there’s a very good chance that they will buy it from you.

How to Use Affiliate Banners to Boost Your Sales

While banner blindness does exist, I have found that if you use them sparingly, you can still get some clicks and sales.

Most newbies tend to place a ton of banners on their sidebar in hopes that someone will click on them. I personally haven’t had a lot of success with this method. Instead, what has worked for me is to place affiliate banners inside of your content using a plugin like Advanced Ads.

All you have to do is create the add and then set the plugin up to display them inside of your content. You have full control of where you want to display your ads. Make sure that you read this Advanced Ads Review to see exactly what this plugin does.

Landing Page Vs Direct Linking

If you have an affiliate product that you talk about all the time, then you might want to consider creating a landing page instead of direct linking.

For one, Google hates affiliate links and this is why you want to make sure that all your affiliate links are “no follow”. I personally use ThirstyAffiliates which makes them all no follow for me.

If you’re not using ThirstyAffiliates or PrettyLinks, you definitely need to check out The Ultimate No Follow Plugin From WordPress. It’s completely free and you won’t have to worry about upsetting Google.

You don’t have to create a landing page for all your affiliate products. But if you find yourself always linking to a specific product in a lot of blog posts, you might want to consider creating a landing page.

You won’t have to worry about having a ton of links that point to affiliate products. Plus you will eventually overtime be able to get better organic rankings for that specific product, thanks to the landing page you created.

How to Promote Affiliate Products Without A Website

Most affiliate networks are going to require that you have a website before you can promote their product. However, once you’re a member, you can easily apply to other programs inside the network to promote.

Many people have had success promoting their links without using their website. Let’s say that you’re an Amazon Associate, someone who promotes Amazon products and earns commissions from sales.

Some people use Pinterest to promote their links without sending people directly to their blogs. However, you can’t create an Amazon Associate account for the sole purpose of promoting affiliate links on Pinterest.

It’s possible to make affiliate income using Pinterest and direct linking to Pinterest pins. Just remember, that you’re going to need a lot of traffic to go to that link.

You might be better off sending them to your blog and building your email list.

How to Promote Affiliate Links to Your Email List

We’ve heard it all the time, focus on growing your email list. These are the people that are eventually going to be your biggest fans and will buy the products and services you recommend.

Yet most of us tend to neglect our list, because:

We don’t know what type of emails to send them
We’re too scared to sell because we think they will unsubscribe

I’ve personally been in both situations and I can tell you that once you start emailing them on a regular routine, you’ll start to get more comfortable with emailing them.

Think of it like writing blog content. It’s hard at first, but once you get on a regular blogging schedule, the process becomes a lot easier.

One of the things that have worked for me is to sit down and create a content schedule for my email list. If I know what type of email I am going to send out on Friday’s, it’s a lot easier to do it on a regular basis.

Don’t Be Scared to Sell

No one wants to be sold to, but there’s a good chance that you are paying for your email autoresponder service. You can’t have a bunch of people on there that NEVER buy from you.

No, you don’t want to sell every time you send out an email. But you should make it a point to sell on a regular basis.

If you’re always giving away everything for free, then no one is ever going to buy. Then when you finally muster up the courage to sell, you’ll get a ton of subscribers.

Selling your affiliate products via email is kind of like doing it via your blog posts. You want to link naturally to the link or you can send them to your blog post.

How to Promote Affiliate Links on Facebook

If you have a Facebook page that has a ton of followers, you could send people to your affiliate reviews on your blog posts. The important thing is to try to get them off of Facebook and direct them to your blog.

Facebook has been cracking down and trying to get people to pay for advertising. This is why so many people are upset with Facebook’s Recent Algorithm Update.

Just make sure that you’re using a link shortener like Bitly, TinyURL, or Goo.gl, or Clickmagick, which is the paid option.

You’ll be able to track your clicks and see which links are actually sending traffic to your blog posts.

If you don’t have a huge Facebook following, you can try joining some Facebook groups and start answering people’s questions.

Unlike a Facebook page, you can’t just blatantly post your affiliate links inside of the Groups. The only way it will work is if you spend time answering people’s questions. You can do this by sending them to a post that is related to the question they need help with.

This has worked really for me and will always work. If your blog post can answer their questions, you’ll have a much better chance of making a sale or getting a new subscriber.

Using Other Social Media Sites

There are several ways to increase your affiliate commissions, not just these methods. You can learn how to promote your links on Craigslist, Instagram, YouTube or Quora. I’ve personally never tried any of these channels to advertise my links.

But just because I’ve never done it, doesn’t mean that it won’t work for you. The truth is that just because one method works for so and so, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work for you.

You need to take the time to find out what’s going to help you increase your conversions. It takes time to learn how to make a profit online, this is why so many people quit.

Final Take Away

Making money online is not as easy as some people make it seem. Yes, the concept is easy, but there’s a lot of work that goes into making it work.

If you want to succeed online, you’re going to have to develop a big dose of persistence. There are going to be days when all you do is work and you’re not seeing the results you want.

However, just know that all the work you put in today is kind of like planting a seed. It takes time to see the fruits of your labor.

So whatever you do, just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Don’t’ give up and don’t compare yourself to others, especially, if they are further in their blogging journey than you are.

Hand Picked Articles for You

Are you using any of these methods to drive traffic to your affiliate links? If so, which method do you prefer and why?

I’d love to hear about your experience and what’s working for you.