How to Promote Affiliate Links in 2024

The goal of an affiliate is to bring traffic to the advertiser’s website. To do this, you need to force the user to follow the link. Sometimes you can do this with ads, but you can also just spam links in comments. In our article, we will talk about how to promote affiliate links.

What is an affiliate link

An affiliate link is a link to the advertiser’s website, which contains a unique partner identifier. So the site owner determines who exactly attracted traffic and who needs to pay a reward.

The unique identifier here is XXXXXXX. The advertiser will pay rewards according to how many users clicked on the link and performed the target action. Statistics are kept using the company ID.

How to advertise an affiliate link

Own a website

Advertising through your own website is convenient and relatively free. For link promotion to be effective, the site itself must be useful and popular.

It is worth noting that organic traffic is a long process. Even if you have a ready-made site, you need to seriously do SEO and create dozens of text materials. Search materials will index pages for some time and traffic will appear at best in a few months. In this case, the content will have to be written constantly.

Also, promotion using your own website is associated with high competition. There are already sites in almost any subject, so it will be quite difficult to compete with them from scratch. You will have to hire a whole team of copywriters to fill the site with primary content and keep the blog up and running.

Text blogs

An affiliate link can be promoted not only through your own website. To minimize costs, an affiliate marketer can use text blogging platforms, such as Medium.

Medium is a platform for social journalism. It is used for publications on any topic, but Medium was especially chosen in the cryptosphere. Link promotion using Medium works the same way as with your own site, the blog is “flooded” with articles on certain topics, taking into account SEO.

The advantage of separate platforms is that you don’t have to spend as much money on a blog as you would on your own website. You can save on hosting, and you won’t have to pay a layout designer and you can compose the material for publication yourself.

Email distribution

Promoting affiliate links through email runs into several significant problems. The main one is where to get the base for mailing. In order for the source to actually bring traffic, the address base needs to be collected, for example, using a website. This is a long process, a loyal base can be recruited for years.

But if you already have a website, then it will be easier to collect organic traffic using SEO. At the same time, to get traffic, you won’t need to do anything – users themselves will get to the site and follow the link. With mailing, you have to work constantly. If the letters did not come for some time, you need to reactivate the database. It turns out that email-mailing, other things being equal, is too time-consuming source of traffic.

Facebook

Considering the volumes of social media traffic, Facebook seems to be one of the most effective ways to promote an affiliate link. The main thing is to choose the right product theme and develop your business page.

However, it is worth noting that Facebook has a negative attitude towards affiliate links, especially “gray verticals” – erotica, cryptocurrencies, and some financial services. Direct links are simply blocked, so you need to hide them using cloaking or a smartlink.

A good promotion option is to work through the creation of Facebook event pages where you can put an affiliate link. This method is not very popular, because social network algorithms are not yet able to deal with it. If you prepare an interesting event, users will be more interested in it than in an advertisement.

Instagram

An even bigger source of traffic compared to Facebook is Instagram. To promote affiliate links here, you will need to regularly post photos and videos, and work on your own brand.

Instagram’s main problem is high competition. There are a lot of users trying to attract traffic in one way or another, from affiliates to opinion leaders. The content you post should be interesting. That means you will have to analyze trends and adapt to them. If you only post affiliate links, Instagram may hide or block your account. Both make further work with the social network impossible.

Pinterest

This is not the most obvious source of traffic, but the more interesting and effective it can be to work with. It’s good to choose Pinterest can be used as an additional source, for example, if you already work with Instagram, you can duplicate content there as well.

Working with Pinterest, you need to create classified ad boards. Describe the boards and photos in detail, and leave affiliate links in addition. The better the selection and its description, the more likely it is that the user will follow the link left.

Forums

First of all, we are talking about Reddit, but the same rules can be followed when promoting an affiliate link on any forum. Forums are closed and relatively old-fashioned communities. Some of them set restrictions, for example, you cannot write in a particular topic until the user has reached a certain rating.

Nobody likes spammers on forums. If you leave an affiliate link in the right place and in the wrong place, your account will be quickly banned. The point of promoting through the forums is to help other users. For example, answer their questions, including a link in response. Alternatively, you can make guides and collections – then it will not look like frank advertising.

YouTube

YouTube is the king of affiliate links. The platform practically does not limit content makers in any way so you can leave almost any links.

Affiliate links are most often left in the description of the video. Most often they are used to promote any product offers. I shot a video with the unpacking of equipment and immediately left a link. The same can be done with computer games, less often with financial products.

Alternatively, links can be spammed in the comments. They are moderated rather weakly, there is a chance to collect some traffic. But this approach makes sense only for offers that violate YouTube rules.

Podcasts

Referral links can also be promoted using podcasts. Podcasts are conversations in audio or video format: hosts invite a guest and discuss a topic. It is assumed that this format is quite personal, it is not customary to bring the sound and picture to the level of television.

However, most podcasts don’t make money on their own, with very few exceptions like Joe Rogan. Therefore, users are calm about sponsorship and referral links in the description.

Webinars and educational materials

Webinars are a source of traffic not only for affiliates, but for experts. It is they who, due to interesting and understandable training materials, manage to collect traffic to their products. An expert must have a developed personal brand in order to promote this kind of affiliate links.

It is important not to overdo it with referral links and partner instructions. Users of courses expect from you not advertising, but knowledge so links should be only on the topic of the training itself.

P2C advertising

P2C, pay to click, that is, advertising with pay per click. It includes dozens of different formats such as banners on websites, contextual advertising on Google, ads on social networks and applications.

The advantage of p2c advertising is that it does not have to be disguised as content – users do not expect this. In addition, you will have to pay only for clicks – that is, this format can be called relatively effective. You will understand how well this or that ad works. Moreover, the result from such advertising appears much faster than, for example, from developing your own blog.

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