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Affiliate marketing has become more popular than ever, and the competition has increased equally. If you run an affiliate website, promoting your affiliate links through blogs is just not enough these days.
That’s where link building strategies for affiliate marketers come in!
Link building serves as the backbone of your website’s overall authority and visibility. On top of that, link building boosts your online credibility to the audience. Visibility and credibility will be your two most essential weapons in making sales beyond your expectations.
In this blog, we’ll go over some proven link building strategies that will help your affiliate marketing business skyrocket. We’ll also talk about the challenges you might face and what can help you to overcome them.
But first, let’s enlighten you a bit more about the importance of link building for affiliate marketers.
Importance of Link Building for Affiliate Marketers
Affiliate marketers juggle countless tasks: managing hundreds or even thousands of affiliate links, crafting engaging blog posts, strategically placing links, and driving website growth.
Amid these responsibilities, it's easy to overlook crucial to-dos like increasing online visibility and establishing topical authority.
While numerous tools assist with SEO and affiliate marketing, true visibility in search results hinges on effective link building strategies.
Here’s how link building can help your affiliate business:
Supercharge Your SEO: In the field of SEO, high-quality backlinks from reliable websites are extremely valuable. They increase your overall ranking by indicating to Google that your website has helpful content. Thus, it pushes your content higher on search engine result pages (SERP), and you get more visitors.
Increase Brand Visibility: The higher you appear on the search result page, the more visible your website becomes to your target customers. Reputable websites that link back to you expose your brand to their audience, increasing your reach.
Strengthen Your Credibility: Both your website and brand gain credibility when they have backlinks from reliable sites. Customers are more likely to click on your affiliate links because point to a domain they already trust.
Expand Your Traffic Sources: Relying just on one type of traffic, such as social media or sponsored advertisements, can be dangerous. By diversifying your traffic sources with high-quality backlinks, you can lessen your reliance on any source and guarantee a consistent stream of visitors over time.
Reap Long-Term Rewards: Link building has long-term advantages over other marketing strategies. Over time, high-quality backlinks raise rankings and increase traffic, giving your affiliate business continuous value and return on investment (ROI).
5 Effective Link Building Strategies
Now that you know how important link building is for an affiliate marketer, it’s time to prepare your link building strategies.
There’s no guaranteed strategy that’ll surely work, and that’s why every affiliate business customizes its own strategy based on its niche.
But we’re not going to leave you halfway through. We have done the research and put together a list of the most effective link building strategies that have helped many affiliate marketers.
1. Analyze Your Competitors’ Links
Link building is not something you can master overnight. You need to make continuous efforts, starting with analyzing your competitors' links.
First, you need to know where you stand among your competitors and understand who’s doing better than you and how.
There’s plenty of SEO tools that can help you with carrying out the research. Take notes on who your competitors are getting backlinks from, what topics or keywords they’re covering, and most importantly, which of their posts bring in the most traffic.
Based on this data, plan your outreach strategy and come up with proposals no one can refuse. This way, you won’t be asking for links from random websites, rather you’ll be getting the links that really matter.
2. Guest Posting
Remember: link-building is a two-way street. You can't simply ask for links; you need to provide something valuable in return. A great way to do this is by offering to write a guest blog post.
This effort goes hand in hand with another crucial strategy: staying active on the comments and community platforms of the brands whose links you desire.
This engagement shows that you’re not just familiar with the industry but you're actively contributing to discussions in your niche. As a result, when you send your proposal, it’ll be tough for them to say no.
Don’t forget to make sure the guest posts you write are not entirely focused on your own benefit. Sure, get the backlink, but don’t spam your whole blog with links. Rather, always write for the readers.
Who knows, you might get the chance to write another guest post and get a few more links again.
3. Influencer Collaborations
Influencers are increasingly becoming the power players in digital marketing. Their blogs, videos, and posts often go viral, making every affiliate marketer eager to secure a link from such popular content.
But first, you must identify the right influencers for you. Figure out who the top voices are in your niche, and reach out to them with an offer they can’t refuse.
Go the extra mile and get content ready for them that organically integrates your affiliate product or link.
Get this: With ThirstyAffilaites, you can create a customized affiliate link for the influencer to use, which you can also track to get a clear understanding of what returns you're getting though an influencer collaboration.
4. Authoritative Content Creation
Being sensible with what content you publish on your affiliate site goes a long way. Apart from helping you drive traffic, it also earns higher topical authority for your site.
For example, if you populate your affiliate website with content that is low-quality, big brands will often reject your link proposal. Because they don’t want their users to go to a spammy website.
On the other hand, authoritative content can turn the tables for you. Say you have the following types of content on your website:
- In-depth industry guides offering actionable insights.
- Opinion pieces addressing industry trends or debates.
- Visual content such as infographics or interactive data.
- Original research studies presenting unique findings.
- Listicles with honest reviews.
The chances of getting links from well-established brands will increase. Because they’ll feel your content will add value to their users as well.
5. Capitalizing on Broken Links
Finding broken links can be an excellent way of approaching your target brand for a backlink.
Here’s your game plan on how to go about that: Go through your target websites from where you want the links and analyze their broken links on respected pages. You can do it manually or use any tool to save time.
Now, if you have content that can replace that broken link, you can suggest that through an email. This way, the website owner will be very delighted to accept your offer and you’ll get yourself the link from the website you want.
Here’s an example of what the proposal email might look like:
Link Building Challenges You Might Face as an Affiliate Marketer
While we tried to make the strategies seem as easy as possible, we don’t want you to get the idea that link building as an affiliate marketer is going to be super easy.
That brings us to giving you a heads up about the obstacles you might face in your link building journey.
Lack of credibility: As an affiliate marketer, the first thing you might struggle with is earning credibility for your website. Most people consider affiliate websites as spammy and try to avoid them. And why wouldn’t they think so if your website is full of low-quality content with thousands of never-ending random links?
Not knowing which links to share: Many affiliate marketers struggle with outreach because they don't have clear data on which links are performing well. Without this information, it's tough to know which pages are worth promoting through link building.
Producing low-quality content: Yet another common problem for affiliate marketers is overloading their posts with links, hoping to increase earnings. However, too many links can make the content seem less trustworthy. Instead of cramming in links, focus on creating useful content with just a few well-placed links that fit naturally with the topic.
The solution: ThirstyAffiliates
It’s understandable if you feel a bit demotivated or overwhelmed when you learn about these challenges. But the good news is, we also have a solution for you.
And that is, ThirstyAffiliates.
The ThirstyAffiliates WordPress plugin is an essential tool for both affiliate marketers and content creators focused on building a powerful online presence.
With advanced features like link cloaking, granular tracking, and autolinking keywords, this tool not only protects and optimizes your affiliate links but also supports your overall link building strategy.
Discover how ThirstyAffiliates can simplify your link management and boost your marketing strategy.
Link Cloaking to Make Your Website More Credible
A cloaked link is simply an affiliate link disguised. It's a method to condense that long, cumbersome URL you receive from an affiliate program so that it's more credible and looks less spammy.
To your visitors, a cloaked link is more clickable because it usually appears to be any other link, if not even shorter and self-explanatory about where it's taking them.
Now imagine all your affiliate links are changed to these short, sharp, and to-the-point links. Your website will look so credible that other brands might end up buying from your affiliate links on top of giving you a backlink.
Link Tracking Features to Aid You with Decision-Making
You want to focus on sharing posts that already drive good sales. ThirstyAffiliates makes this easy too.
With just a few clicks, you can set up link tracking and start gathering these insights. Once everything is in place, you can access a variety of metrics through detailed reports.
To get even more granular tracking information, you can integrate ThirstyAffilaites with analytical plugins like MonsterInsights.
With this data, you can easily identify which affiliate links are the most effective. Armed with this knowledge, you can strategically choose which blog posts to prioritize for your link building efforts.
Create Customizable Links for Influencer Collaboration
Asking influencers to link back to one of your content is too old school. What if you could give them a customized link that their users will find credible as well?
Say you're an affiliate marketer specializing in eco-friendly home products, and you've just crafted an engaging blog post about sustainable kitchen practices.
Eager to amplify your reach, you decide to collaborate with an influencer renowned for their commitment to sustainability.
You craft a friendly and engaging proposal to reach out to this influencer, sharing your blog post and highlighting how it aligns with their values and would interest their audience.
You explain that by sharing this post, they wouldn't just be promoting a product but spreading valuable content that resonates with their followers.
To make the deal even more appealing, you create a customized redirect for this blog post that includes the influencer’s brand name in the URL. This personal touch often acts as a deal sealer, as influencers are more likely to share a link that prominently features their brand name too:
Impressed by your article, the influencer agrees to share it on their blog and social media channels.
As their followers read the post and engage with your affiliate links, your content gains exposure to a new, engaged audience, while also driving traffic and sales through the affiliate links embedded in the post.
So the collaboration turns out to be doubly beneficial. Not only does your blog reach a broader audience, but the affiliate links within the post also see increased activity.
Start Building Links for Your Affiliate Site Already!
Link building is more than just a strategy; it's a necessity for thriving in the competitive realm of affiliate marketing.
By enhancing SEO, increasing visibility, and building credibility, effective link building ensures your affiliate links reach a broader audience and gain the trust necessary for successful conversions.
Throughout this blog, we've explored a range of strategies from analyzing competitor links to engaging with influencers and creating authoritative content.
Each method is designed to fortify your website's presence and secure its reputation as a reliable source within your niche.
What’s the most creative way you’ve secured a backlink for your site? Drop your experiences and tips below – we’d love to hear your success stories!
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