Disclaimer:
While this post discusses key aspects of SEO, please note that War Room does not offer these services. However, we believe in a holistic digital approach, where various tactics like paid, social, SEO work together to complement your overall marketing strategy. Our focus is on programmatic advertising, using data-driven strategies to optimize paid media campaigns. If you’re looking to boost your ad performance, we’re here to help!
When it comes to improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and online presence, building affiliate marketing backlinks is vital. That’s because links from authoritative sites are among the most important ranking factors.
Moreover, these backlinks also make it easier for Google to discover new content. However, you also need to have a system to monitor the effectiveness of your SEO and link-building campaign.
Thankfully, you can utilize various affiliate marketing programs and SEO platforms to make tracking easier. To decide, you can go to review sites with SEO tool collections. They compare different software to help you pick the best one for your needs.
Developing a Better Understanding of Affiliate Link Building
If you sell a product, you can start an affiliate program, make influencers promote your goods, and get more sales in return for a small commission. You can join a network and create an affiliate link, which influencers/marketers will use to direct referral traffic to your site.
However, when we talk about “affiliate link building”, we mainly focus on how affiliate websites promoting someone else’s products can build backlinks to draw more traffic and improve rankings. SEO has a significant role here because affiliate marketers rely heavily on creating keyword-optimized content, which helps them be more visible and generate more traffic.
Identify Affiliate Opportunities for the Ultimate Success
If you already have a website where you want to promote products through affiliate links, you need to choose programs that suit your target audience. There are many different options to consider. For instance:
- Amazon Associates: It’s the largest e-commerce platform with over 900,000 affiliates worldwide and offers exciting opportunities for those new to affiliate marketing to earn commissions for every qualifying purchase. If you go with this option, remember that commission rates differ for diverse product categories.
- ShareASale: It hosts thousands of merchant programs with an extensive range of digital and physical products. Commission rates vary wildly, usually between 5% and 10%. It’s an excellent choice for bloggers mainly because of its impressive merchant options.
- CJ Affiliate: With over 3,000 merchants, CJ Affiliate is among the oldest affiliate networks with a global reach and localized platforms in Europe, Latin America, and the UK. It works great for businesses and influencers because of its impressive real-time reporting tools.
Other than these, it’s possible to find many different affiliate networks, including Impact, Rakuten Advertising, FlexOffers, ClickBank, and so on. Therefore, it’s crucial to conduct your research and evaluate these solutions carefully. Always consider commission rates along with payout models, which could be pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale, or pay-per-click. Also, it would help if you thought about cookie duration for each platform as well as relevance to your audience.
Use Social Media and Influencer Partnerships for Impact
For businesses selling unique products, it makes great sense to join forces with influencers by offering them some lifetime incentives. But, even if you have an affiliate website with various affiliate products, you can still benefit by partnering with social media influencers, as they have a loyal audience to support them.
Partnering with influencers can change everything if you are an established business or affiliate marketer. This allows you to tap into a completely different audience, which can help drive affiliate sales. You can understand the importance of influencer marketing, considering that the ad spend for this will likely reach $47.80 billion by 2027. Moreover, it’s found that over 59% of brands rely on influencers as affiliates to boost sales. So, be sure to utilize this option whenever you can.
Utilize SEO Tactics to Build Links to Your Affiliate Marketing Site
SEO plays a big role in making your affiliate marketing campaign a success. Here are some SEO tactics that work for businesses with products, as well as affiliate marketers with blogs and websites.
Optimize Content as Carefully as Possible
Whether you have a landing page for your product or are a blogger creating affiliate content to promote a product, always begin by conducting keyword research and optimizing content accordingly.
In most cases, it’s a good idea to go with long-form articles that educate readers about the products and help them choose.
When optimizing, use descriptive titles, add keywords to titles and headers, and write engaging meta descriptions. If you have affiliate landing pages, ensure they’re responsive and load quickly, as Google’s Core Web Vitals are among the most critical ranking factors now.
Publish Guest Posts for Backlinks
Businesses already placing their products on affiliate networks can publish guest posts with those affiliate links to get more traffic. However, the tactic works just as effectively for affiliate marketers who can write guest posts and add links to their sites.
Be sure to look for relevant domains first and choose sites with a Domain Authority of at least 30. They should also have a high trust flow, and it should be higher than 15. It’s also important to choose reputable sites with high traffic if you really want to get a good return on investment.
Get Media Links Whenever Possible
To make your affiliate website rank higher in Google, you need to get backlinks from high authority sites, and that’s when you can consider getting links through media requests.
A good idea is to go to HARO (Help a Reporter Out), one of the best places to get backlinks from reporters. Here, you can find reporters who ask for insight for a story, and if you give them the information they need, they’ll link back to your website. Make sure to monitor backlinks regularly to verify that the links are still live and providing value to your site.
Considering that many of these journalists work for popular print publications, like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, their links become much more valuable and work wonders for your rankings.
Leverage Customer Testimonials
If you have sold your products through an affiliate network, it’s a good idea to ask your customers to leave a testimony. You can add those reviews to your product page, which helps build authority and brand. This also allows bloggers to promote your products through affiliate links because people are likelier to buy after reading those reviews.
Compliance and Disclosure Guidelines
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has made it mandatory for affiliate marketers to disclose any connections they have with the seller of a product. Here are a few things to remember:
- The disclosure needs to be clear and never hidden behind links.
- It needs to be around affiliate links you may be promoting.
- It should be simple and free of jargon.
- It must inform the visitors that you may receive commissions for their purchase.
Not only this, it’s also vital for affiliate marketers to maintain transparency when promoting products. There should always be a dedicated affiliate disclosure page on the website, and your goal should be to promote quality products only. When reviewing, it’s important to give balanced product information, including pros and cons.
Examples and Success Stories
Many affiliate websites have shown practically how you can promote products and earn money in return. For instance, Gear Patrol is an eCommerce affiliate that encourages its audience (130K+) to make money through its products on Facebook.
Similarly, CNET offers expert product reviews and roundups, including affiliate links to the content, to make people buy and earn commissions in return. Anyone can do that as long as they know how to build an audience and get more traffic from Google.
Truly, affiliate marketing is a great way to earn life-changing money; all you have to do is start a website and build an audience. You can then promote hundreds of thousands of products and make money in return. A great example of this system is Wirecutter’s product review site.
It offers detailed reviews of products with affiliate links to each of those products. It’s owned by the New York Times and wasn’t as impressive in the beginning as it is now. That’s mainly because it now has a team of reviewers who spend weeks testing those products before writing all the pros and cons. The information helps people make a choice, and they keep coming back for more advice.
On the other hand, a business can also benefit from the same concept. A great example is Kajabi, a platform where you can find course creators and entrepreneurs come together. It grew its customer base extensively when it focused more on its affiliate program in 2023.
Conclusion
Whether you talk about your products that you sell through affiliate networks or are more interested in affiliate marketing through blogs and websites, you can also benefit by focusing on reseller link building. Getting more links boosts your rankings and helps you get more traffic, increasing your chances of making more sales. Be sure to use the right software to track your link-building campaign and make changes whenever needed!
