Your aim as an affiliate
Your job as an affiliate is to presell. The reader should already be sufficiently interested enough in buying the product before clicking on your affiliate link to visit the product website.
Increasing affiliate link click through and conversion rate is all about creating great content, relevant links and building trust with your site visitors.
You should make the affiliate link relevant to the page content and include a description about the product or service that you’re linking to, to make clicking the link and buying more attractive.
In yesterday’s article on affiliate marketing I talked about how review websites are really good candidates for affiliate marketing. A really good example is MTB 198, a mountain bike review website, by Robb Sutton. Robb has been given around $100,000 of gear to review, and has been able to keep around $50,000 of it.
Even when you give a negative review to a really bad product, if it’s something fairly low cost such as a book, game, CD or DVD, your readers may be interested in giving the product a go just to see how bad it is!
You should make the affiliate link text descriptive.
Bad
Buy cheap web hosting at http://www.somehost.com/aff?13569.
This just looks messy, the reader shouldn’t have to see the URL itself.
Better
Buy cheap web hosting by clicking here
Better, because the reader isn’t left trying to read the URL. This method still has it’s problems. The link text itself doesn’t describe what is being linked to.
Best
Buy cheap web hosting at Somehost
This is the best way to display an affiliate link because it doesn’t interrupt the flow of the article. The link text isn’t intrusive and the whole thing makes sense as a sentence. You know you’re going to be sent to a website about cheap web hosting because the link says so.
