When promoting affiliate products, a great way to greatly increase the money you are making is to link words or product names in your content with your affiliate links. While banner ads are decent at making money with affiliate products – I have found that text links far outperform their image counterparts. The reason why text links tend to work so well when promoting affiliate products is two-fold:
- People are becoming increasingly banner-blind and clicking on images less.
- When promoting affiliate products via text links in your site’s content you are referring them to relevant, related products, that they have a high chance of being interested in buying.
Take a subtle approach
The key to using text links in your content for affiliate products is to take a subtle approach. Your content is first and foremost, with the affiliate links providing some context and an additional way to generate some income. If every page you have or post you make, has affiliate links plastered all over them – your readers will start to notice and your trust factor will start to diminish.
The links must be relevant
When using this method, you want to only promote or link to products that are extremely relevant to the content on the page and could be helpful or interesting to your visitors. If you’re talking about convertibles and place an affiliate link to flat-screen televisions – you will start to lose your credibility.
If you have products with a more mass appeal, then you are probably better off placing banner ads that are displayed on every page of your site compared to inserting random text links.
Don’t overdo it
You don’t want to bombard your readers with content that has every few words hyperlinked to an affiliate offer. A great example of how to effectively link is by taking a look at a page on Wikipedia and see how words are linked there (take a look at this page on Wikipedia about “Affiliate Marketing“).
Let your content determine your links
While there are times when you will create blog posts or pages that are primarily designed to promote affiliate products, you don’t want them to start crowding out your content. If each new piece of content you produce is filled with affiliate links (with blogs in particular) your readers will come to trust you less and less because every post or page feels like a sales pitch.
Build trust for higher conversions
The most effective affiliate links are those that are built based upon trust. You don’t want to abuse this trust by promoting sub-par products or unrelated offers. Focus on things that could be beneficial to your readers and you will have a more satisfied audience – and higher revenue-generating site.
