Affiliate Teacher

As innocuous as they may seem, links are the very building blocks of the web and without them, it would be practically impossible to navigate from one site to another… or even from one page to another within a single site for that matter!

Corporates can be very particular about who links to their sites, and in what context, with guidelines on precisely how they want in-bound links to be formatted.

Search engines place great value on the links within a website (the actual text within the link, the address of the target page, the HTML markup used to outline it), but also on the links to a website. Links from more ‘important’ sources are worth more than those from the lesser sites, but a link from even the smallest of sites is a form of marketing for the target site.

There is an entire market place for people to bid for the position of their links at the top of the search engine listings.

Clearly, links are a big deal.

With this in mind, what is the value of a link?

A literal value could be calculated by taking the average value per unit of traffic to a particular site. The various sources which provide the traffic and their resultant revenue would need to be considered in isolation as the value might be higher or lower depending on the specific context and content of the link.

In CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) affiliate marketing, merchants only pay commissions for traffic which actually generates sales and the amounts paid are based on figures negotiated and experimented with in the past few years. Typical commission rates range from less than 1% to over 20% depending on the merchant.

As a publisher using affiliate marketing to generate revenue for your site, the value of your out-bound links is going to be a function of the likelihood of the user converting into a sale and the number of click throughs your link gets.

To maximise your chances of generating revenue from the links you create, use the following tips:

1. Make your link part of a call to action – rather than saying “click here” or “more info”, try using positive, descriptive text such as “the best book I ever read” or “my favourite clothes shop”.
2. Place your links within original, interesting and keyword rich content. Optimising copy for the search engines is an article in itself, but the more effort you put into making your content both search engine friendly and interesting for human readers, the more traffic you’ll generate for your site and the more click-throughs your links will receive.
3. Be genuine – try to avoid placing links in your content for the sake of it and make sure that the readers will see value being added by what you write. This will make them more likely to trust you when you suggest a good deal that you’ve seen.
4. Quality over quantity. Although you have to be ‘in it to win it’, simply filling a site up with lots of out-bound links is no way to make a success of your affiliate marketing activities. Make sure you are diluting the number of out-bound links down with editorial content.
5. If marketing via social media such as Twitter, don’t post a link with every single update. Try to maintain a ratio of 1 affiliated tweet for every 5 general updates – noone is interested in following a user who simply spams them with link after link!
6. Take your time – you can’t build a high-value, affiliate marketing supported site overnight – be patient and experiment with your linking strategy. Make sure you have a suitable web analytics package installed so that you can monitor your visitor trends and use heat maps to highlight where the hotspots are in your content. Continual improvement is the way to ensure that your site provides you with the best possible return.

To conclude, the value of a link is the value you give it. Follow the above steps to have the best chance of maximising your potential revenue whenever you add affiliated links to your website and you’ll be making commissions in no time.