How to manage your affiliate links smartly
Affiliate marketing is hands down the best method to earn online in my personal opinion. 80% of my online income is from affiliate marketing and related sales.
There are various methods to deploy affiliate marketing on your blogs, few of the methods I use are:
- Affiliate banners on sidebars and web pages
- Affiliate banners within posts
- In post affiliate marketing
- Affiliate marketing through email newsletters.
Out of the above methods, the most effective method is to promote affiliate links within posts that are published in your articles. The steps involved in setting up a successful in post affiliate campaign are:
- Write unique high quality article
- Insert related affiliate product link within the post
- Promote the article
- Drive traffic to the article and sales will happen.
The above methods is the best suitable for earning online through affiliate commissions. As the article popularity and traffic increases, the sales gradually increase as well.
Major Challenge in Affiliate marketing
When you promote several affiliate products over a time period and write a huge number of blog posts, it gets difficult to manage your affiliate links and metrics. The major difficulties are:
- Tracking of affiliate clicks and sales become difficult
- Management of affiliate links and keywords become complicated.
- Manual insertion of affiliate links to each post is a tough task.
- Most tricky one is to tackle the situation when an affiliate program is discontinued.
All the above issues are equally complex, but the last one creates the biggest trouble for a webmaster. After promoting a product through 100s of blog posts, if the affiliate program is discontinued by the product development team, it is almost impossible to find and remove all the affiliate links.
In addition, most of these links turn out to be either broken or useless links. There is one single solution that I use to handle these entire situations.
I use an affiliate management plugin or software
I have deployed an affiliate link management plugin on my blog called Affiliate Ninja. The major advantage of this affiliate management program is that it automatically tracks down keywords and converts them to affiliate links as per your configurations. Some key features are:
- Auto convert keywords to affiliate links
- Cloaks links automatically to search engine friendly links
- Converts links to user friendly link formats( website.com/recommends/software)
- Generates reports of click and impressions in your WP admin section
- Allows you to export and store the back up of the affiliate links added
- Permits import of these links configuration to another blog
- Remove all the affiliate links with on click.
- Pause and play features of affiliate campaigns.
With this useful plugin, my affiliate management has been completely automated and it is now effortless to do in post affiliate setup, simply use the keyword.
Take Home: If you have serious plans on affiliate and internet marketing, set up Affiliate Ninja plugin at the earliest, once you follow the wrong method, it is very difficult at a later stage to undo. Hope you have understood How to manage your affiliate links smartly
Hi Josh,
have a question, Does this plugin require any yearly membership like linktrkr plugin or something or is it one time investment.
This looks amazing. I have to try this one..
regards
Bob
Great article. But you already told us this once in another post and am using affiliate nija for almost an year now.
I really back you on this. Its THE best plugin ever developed. worth more than that money 🙂
cheers
B
Josh,
Wonderful article.
Thanks much for sharing the detailed feature list and the screen shot. Looks good, its on my wish list.
cheers
Stacey
Josh man,
You have a very good and important point here man! The fact that there is a real possibility that any affiliate could just discontinue their program and either you are promoting them for free or its a broken link.
Finding and fixing all those link is like getting screwed up. Its a good idea to plan well ahead. thanks for bringing this up. It happened to me once as the DigWP book was discontinued from their affiliate program, but i had very few links so lucky 🙂
Cheers
Aaron
@ Robert: No it is one time purchase. LinkTrakr is a great tool as well, but of a different type, its web based portal.
@ Bob: you bet buddy! Cheers 🙂
@ Stacey: Thanks for your kind words..
@ Aaron: Very true! See they are real life examples..
Cheers
Josh
Josh,
Ive purchased Ninja Affiliate, Great tool man! Thanks a lot for sharing. The best part i loved about the tool is the import export option, infact you can use the same links on any of your blogs with the mysql import and it saves you a lot of time when you are seriously into affiliate marketing..
cheers
Smith
@ Smith: Am Glad you are on top of it. Yes, i usually recommend only tools that i have tried, tested and is working well for me. Am sure you will increase your affiliate performance by saving your valuable time on silly chores.
cheers
Josh