Becoming an affiliate is an easy way you can make extra money every month. It’s becoming more and more popular for several reasons. It’s a low-risk venture that people can try out right from the comfort of their own home. I want to teach you how to grow your website and promote your affiliate links properly to help you make the most money possible. 

There are several SEO tips and tricks that you can apply as well as plenty of marketing strategies. Below, I will talk about both of those things and what exactly website promotion is. I’m hoping by the end of this article you’ll have plenty of new things to apply to increase the traffic you see on your website and get more clicks on your affiliate links. 

What Is Website Promotion?

Website promotion is a curated combination of marketing tactics that are used to help increase the traffic of your website. Without website promotion, no one will know that your website even exists. This is why it’s not only important to promote your website, but do it in a way that will allow you to achieve the most success.

There are several other reasons why you want to focus on promoting your website. Are you an online entrepreneur? If so, you’re likely selling goods or services online. With website promotion, you are much more likely to increase your sales. If you run a blog, you can gain website promotion via sponsorships and affiliate marketing.

Pros And Cons Of Affiliate Marketing

While I think affiliate marketing is an incredibly useful tool, there are some drawbacks. I wanted to provide you with an honest list of pros and cons when it comes to incorporating affiliate marketing into your business. 

Pros 

• You’ll be able to tell if you’re making or losing money
• You very rarely end up losing money unless you get involved with an unethical affiliate
• It is a low-cost way to get your name out there to an audience you may not have yet

Cons 

• You may not have control over the message the affiliate puts out
• You don’t know what type of traffic will be coming to your website
• The lead quality may not be as high as you’d like

Types Of Website Promotion

Several things can fall under the category of website promotion. There is both online and off-line website promotion. Let’s take a look at what each of those includes.

Offline Promotion

• TV advertising
• Newspaper advertising
• Article writing for magazines
• Public speaking engagements
• Public promotions such as billboards or flyers
• Radio advertisements
• Direct mail
• Networking
• Trade shows

Online Promotion 

• Blog marketing
• Article writing
• Guest blogging
• Social media
• Email marketing
• Search engine marketing
• Having or being a guest on my podcast
• Making your own or appearing in someone else’s YouTube videos

How To Grow Your Website To Promote Affiliate Links 

Keywords

One of the most important things about affiliate links being used on your website is to use proper keywords. While you will want to go with the most popular keywords in your market, there are also what are called long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are designed to be more specific to your website. 

This will allow Google and other search engine platforms to easily find your website when someone searches a long tail keyword. This will not only increase your search ranking and help potential customers find you, but it will increase your traffic as well. Use long tail keywords in the title and heading of your blog post. The more traffic your website gets, the more people that can find affiliate links through you.

If you don’t know what keywords correlate with your website, look at websites similar to yours or see what comes up when you Google a topic related to your website. If you have a blog dedicated to interior design, one of your long tail keywords is likely: “best room design ideas,” or “cheap ways to decorate your…” Using these keywords is a great way to get the right people to your website who will not only click on your affiliate links but use them to make a purchase.

Blog Regularly

Another way you can grow your website to use affiliate links is by blogging regularly. Blogging is one of the easiest ways to get traffic to your website. Doing this regularly not only improves the chances of gaining more traffic, but it will also keep people coming back to continually use the affiliate links you have throughout your blog. With the Internet becoming more and more popular along with social media, people expect things as fast as possible. 

Have you ever ordered something online and saw all of the different shipping options? People are willing to pay more to get something to them faster. That being said, creating content regularly is something your audience wants from you. This will help your website stay relevant and appear high and search engine rankings. 

When you’re an affiliate for a product, being aware of what products are popular at what times can help you use your website to push more sales on a specific affiliate link.

Use Links

I couldn’t talk about growing your website to promote affiliate links without talking about internal and external links as well. Internal links are links you put throughout your website and blog posts that link to other pages on your website or blog. This will reduce the balance rate and improve the click-through rate. 

You don’t want your audience going to another website and using someone else’s affiliate link. That will quite literally cause you to miss out on a sale. For this reason, using interior links is a must. 

Then we have external links. These are links that you have throughout your website or blog that will link people to related content. This content will be from an external source. 

Affiliate links are often external links. If you have an affiliate link for a book on Amazon, you’d link that book’s URL. When you have an affiliate link, it takes that URL and customizes it so that when someone uses it, you make money. 

It is important to make sure that these links do not lead people to your competitor’s sites or blogs. When it comes to links, it is important to put them in the best places possible. If you have an interior design blog where you’re writing a post about how to decorate your first home, you might have a section about decorating the dining room. If you have another blog post dedicated to that subject, you’d want to link it in that area of your new blog post. 

Self-Promotion 

You don’t always need a website to use an affiliate link. You can use social media platforms and word of mouth to incorporate self-promotion as a way to lead people to your affiliate links. 

If you’re talking with someone over social media about skincare and you have an affiliate link for a skincare product, you can use one of your own links to guide them to the product. When doing this, it is important that you disclose that you will make a percentage from the final sale.

Marketing Strategies For You To Apply

Below you will find a handful of the most popular and proven marketing strategy practices that will help increase traffic, which will lead to more people who will click on and use your affiliate link. 

Find Your Niche

For starters, one of the most important things when it comes to marketing is to know your niche. This will make it easier to make blog posts, make money, find like-minded business partners, and more. For this strategy and all of the ones you’ll read about below, we are going to use the example that you run a blog online all about interior design. 

If you have a blog dedicated to interior design, you want to keep in mind other things that fall into that category. You could write a post about how to store your winter clothes during the summer, ideas about what you can do to a room after your child goes off to college, and more. 

Even though writing about a wider variety of topics could bring in more traffic, you’ll want to make sure the topics are in relation to what your blog and brand is about. You wouldn’t want to make a post about diet tips on your interior design blog. 

Your audience is looking for ways to improve their home or office, not how to improve their health. This is especially crucial when your affiliate links correlate to your blog posts. You wouldn’t put a link for a new diet pill in an article about bathroom design tips. 

Knowing Your Audience

Knowing your audience is absolutely crucial to any entrepreneur, influencer, or an online business owner. If you don’t know who your target audience is, it will be much harder to make any money from your affiliate links.

If you reach an audience of 10,000 people and they don’t fall within the demographics of your target audience, how many sales do you think you will get out of those 10,000 visitors? To turn as many of those visitors as possible into customers or clients, they need to be in your target audience. 

There are several ways you can find out who your target audience is. When trying to find your target market for your interior design website, think about those who are likely to read what you post. You wouldn’t want to promote your website to children or teenagers. Your best bet is to aim your website at college students and people in their 20s and 30s. 

These people are more likely to have their own space to decorate or are buying their first home and looking for ideas. When you sell it to the wrong audience, you’re actually wasting a lot of your own money and time. It’s important to take the time to think of how old your target audience is, their gender, what they do for a living, and maybe even where they live.

Utilize SEO

If you’re reading this, it’s safe to assume that you already know quite a bit about search engine optimization or SEO. If you use the tactics in the above section you are practically guaranteed to gain a lot more sales. 

Use Social Media

Social media is easily one of the best things that has happened to online marketing. For starters, your business or blog needs to have social media. If not, after you’re done reading this, make the appropriate accounts necessary. Especially when you’re in a field like interior design that is mostly visual, this will not only drive people to your website and lead them to your affiliate links, but it shows that what you’re writing about can be applied to real life. 

Social media is practically free marketing. If you are a start-up, attempting affiliate marketing for the first time, or a company that has a smaller budget, social media will be your new best friend. You can easily post photos on Instagram, videos on YouTube, or tell people about sales on Twitter or Facebook. 

Showing people evidence of you using the product that you’re an affiliate for is a great way to boost sales. With that being said, it is important to stay engaged with your online audience, whether that is on your actual website or on social media.

This will show people that you are heavily involved and care about what your audience has to say. Lastly, social media simply allows you to share something that you’re passionate about with a myriad of people. Have fun with it and maybe even get in touch with your creative side.

Create Content

If you have an affiliate website, you’re already making content. There are a few things when it comes to your content that can increase the number of sales you make from the links you provide. First and foremost, you want to make sure that the content you put out is of high quality. If you have a blog about interior design, don’t just post a blog post with only writing. 

It is important to incorporate photos, videos, and other art forms in your blog. When using photos and videos, you want to be sure everything is high quality and up to your brand standards. Make sure that this content draws people in. This will help to lower your bounce rate. You’d be surprised at how much aesthetics play a part when it comes to the traffic you see on your website. 

People don’t want to see an outdated and hard to navigate website. If they do see one, they’re likely to choose another more user-friendly and sight-pleasing one. So, make sure that your content pulls people in. This will help to lower your bounce rate. You’d be surprised at how much aesthetics play a part when it comes to the traffic you see on your website. 

You also want to make sure that your website is well organized. If you have affiliate links for different categories, make a menu with those categories to make the links as easy as possible to find. 

Another way to incorporate high-quality content is by using unique, yet easy-to-read, fonts. Be sure that it is easy to navigate around your website and have a search bar for the reader’s convenience when looking for a certain blog post.

Guest Posting

You read a bit about how collaboration can be an important marketing strategy to employ; guest-posting is in the same realm. Whether you are just posting on someone else’s blog or someone else is coming to yours, it is a great way to reach a new audience. This will also help your authority increase in your specific niche. 

It is important to note that when using guest posting to your advantage, you want to be very careful with who you guest post with. Try to aim for someone who has around the same numbers when it comes to traffic. This will ensure that you have enough of a reach to a new audience and your guest post isn’t going out into the void. Another tip when it comes to guest posting is to make sure that whoever you’re working with has a similar audience as you do.

You may not want to have someone who has a car maintenance blog make a guest post on your website for interior design. This will waste both your time, the guest blogger’s, and the audience’s. When you’re working with someone who is a good fit, you will gain a larger audience and maybe even make business friends in the process.

Check Your Surroundings

Just like how it’s important to know your audience, it is important to promote where your audience will see it. If you have an online blog about interior design, you may not want to promote your links on websites that are dedicated to topics that your audience is likely not interested in. 

Why? 

Simply put, you will not gain any sales if you’re advertising in the wrong places. Let’s say you watch a YouTube video about the top 10 interior design ideas for college dorms. If you have a blog post about a similar topic, you can comment on the video letting people know. This is self-promotion, but it’s to your target audience in a place where they will likely see it. 

Be Relatable

A great way to grow your website is to make sure that your brand is relatable. The majority of people who visit your website will likely be blue-collar folk. Unless you own a high-end business, you likely won’t see many people of higher status. With that being said, it is much easier for the average person to relate to a brand or business when whatever they’re promoting or selling isn’t out of reach. 

Another part of being relatable is to make sure that you’re honest. The people visiting your website and using your affiliate links will love to see how genuine your brand is. This will increase their trust in you and show them who they are supporting by buying products or services using your specific link. If you’ve ever watched one of those popular shows where entrepreneurs try to sell their ideas to investors, you’ve probably heard quite a few of them have quite the sales pitch. 

During the sales pitch, they’ll make sure to talk about a problem their product will solve in your daily life or tell you how this product will improve your life. This is done to help people relate to the product, the brand, and put the idea in their head that they need what you’re offering.

Analytics

Another way to increase the number of sales on your affiliate website and gain more traffic is to track your results. Taking a look at analytics will help you see whether or not the marketing strategies you’re putting in place are working. You’ll be able to see your click-through rate, the average time someone spends on your website, the most popular page people click away from, what time of day or night you have the most visitors, and more. 

If you notice certain trends, this can help you market better. Let’s say you see the most traffic on your interior design blogs on Sundays at 3 p.m. You can now use this information to make sure you are posting new blog posts around that time. 

You can also use this to promote an upcoming post and tell people what products they can expect to see linked. This will help them prepare for what they can look forward to. After you implement this, check your analytics a month later. See if this strategy has increased your traffic and gained you sales via your links. 

Final Words 

I hope that by now you have the tools you need to properly promote your affiliate links on your website. It’s important to realize that not all affiliate links will bring new traffic and customers the moment they are first used. 

Set a time frame and make goals to meet within that time frame. Remember to incorporate several links throughout your blog, use social media to your advantage, and place keywords all throughout your website and blog post. 

Applying several or all of these techniques will almost guarantee an increase in traffic to your website, which will increase the number of people who use your affiliate links. Test out a couple of these methods, and if they don’t work for you, try a few more. You won’t know what doesn’t work for you until you try everything available.