If you’re new to affiliate marketing, you may be wondering how to get affiliate links on your website. Joining an affiliate program and placing banners, links and other affiliate marketing sales materials on your website is an easy way to add an income stream to an existing web presence.
To do this, you need to have joined an existing affiliate program. If you know what you want to sell, do a search online for “{your product/topic} affiliate program”. The product you sell from your website needs to align with your audience. This sounds obvious, but if you try selling something totally unrelated to your website topic, it’ll be very unlikely to sell.
Once you have joined an affiliate program, you should have access to back end tools, and marketing materials. To get your affiliate link, visit the affiliate program you have joined. There should be a section inside the login area where you can get your affiliate link.
How To Get Affiliate Links On Your Website – Placing Your Links
Once you have navigated the “back-end” of your affiliate website and found your link, copy and paste it into your website text. Ideally, find an image or banner which you can place into your website in an appropriate space.
You can also highlight text and place your affiliate links directly into text. Here’s a link to the free video series on this website to learn more about affiliate marketing. Highlight the text you want to use in your link and copy/paste the link into the link box. See pics below:
How To Get Affiliate Links On Your Website: Using Banners On Your Website
Most affiliate programs will have banners and images you can use to promote the product/service that you have chosen. Here’s one from the program I promote on this website:
Once you have uploaded your image/banner to your website, you can use the same process to place your affiliate link into the image. It’s also worth using an affiliate link “shortener” for your affiliate link. I use TinyUrl.com to do this as it makes the links much tidier and you can also track your sales and hide your long, messy looking affiliate links.
The Pre-Sell
Most affiliates use a technique called the pre-sell. The “pre-sell” means the affiliate will encourage people to buy a certain product before they hit the sales page. Unless the customer is ready to buy, they will usually only visit a sales page and leave. But if you spend some time explaining the value of the product, for example, then the customer is more “geared” to make a purchase.
An example of a pre-sell created by an affiliate marketing is a review website. The review attracts buyer traffic towards the affiliate links and when the link is clicked, the customer has already been prepared to buy through the reading of the review.
The pre-sell is an important part of selling online if you’re an affiliate because most online visitors aren’t looking to buy on their first visit of a website. More often than not, a customer will take their time, read reviews and make sure the decision to buy is the right one for them. This is why attracting buyer traffic with information, reviews and pre-sales material is a good idea if you’re an affiliate marketer.
Simply placing a banner on your website seldom does the selling for you unless your website already attracts the kind of visitor who wants the product already.
Affiliates create content which the customer might want to read just before they make a purchase, like the example of a review.
Summary
Successfully selling affiliate products from a website is more about attracting the kind of audience who wants what you have to sell. If you can successfully match your website with the right kinds of products and services, you’re on to a winner! When people can buy from you directly from your website, you’ve just added a new income stream to your website with very little work! Make sure you carefully align the right products through. If there’s a misalignment between your audience and whatever you’re trying to sell, you’ll find it difficult making sales.
Most affiliates work hard attracting the right audience to their affiliate links and products. Some will use paid advertising and some will attract traffic organically. But whatever method of traffic generation you use, it’s definitely worth building an email list.
With an email list, you can keep in touch with your website visitors for much longer. With most online consumers needing 6-8 touch-points with a website/product before they buy, it pays to build relationships with those people over the longer term. This cannot be done simply from a website where most visitors come and go within a few minutes, most of them never to return.
With an email list, you can connect with your would-be customers again and again through email marketing campaigns which can ultimately be automated. Learn more about affiliate marketing here.
