If you have a website, it's likely that you're familiar with redirecting your visitors to other sites using external links. Now, imagine if you could earn money from these links. That's where affiliate marketing comes in.
Whenever you place a link to a partner's site, you can earn money if your visitors take action on that site using your link. However, to ensure that you maximize your earnings, it's important to know how to properly place these links.
What is a CTA and why is it important?
The CTA, or "Call to Action", is a graphical element that invites clicking. In the affiliate marketing field, its role is crucial as it is the starting point for generating revenue: it invites your audience to visit one of your partner's sites.
How to optimize CTA to generate better revenue?
To optimize your CTA and generate better revenue, it is important not to neglect the placement and promotion of these affiliate links. If you have already studied the marketing mix, you probably know the 4P rule: price, placement, packaging, and promotion. This rule applies to CTA! You need to consider them as products in a store and make sure your visitors notice and click on them. Here are some elements to consider to achieve this.
Check your CTA
It is important to regularly check your links to ensure they work properly and lead to the target pages. Test your links before publishing them online and do not hesitate to check them regularly, especially if you place them statically by hand. It may happen that advertisers change platforms, or that product pages on shopping sites are updated or disappear. This can lead to the need to migrate your links, a tedious but necessary task.
Choose their location wisely
The location of your links is also important. You should not place them everywhere, lest you appear too commercially aggressive, but you should make them accessible in the right places. The most obvious is to place a link at the bottom of your article. On a desktop site, you can imagine a cartridge in a column that scrolls down as the visitor scrolls down the page. In some cases, it may be wise to place links at the top of the page, for example if you offer a summary of your article that covers the key elements of the product.
Create deep links
Deep links can become your best friends in affiliate marketing. As mentioned in our article on affiliate commission rate, some advertisers have no digital marketing expertise and rely entirely on you to promote their products. Often, these advertisers will provide you with links that redirect to their homepage, but it's more effective to convert by reducing the number of clicks to the shopping cart by redirecting to product pages. If these pages are in another language, don't hesitate to translate them to English.
There are deep link generators on all affiliate platforms, but some advertisers don't activate them. If you have difficulty finding deep links for a given advertiser, don't hesitate to contact your account manager who can help you. In the case where the advertiser has a wide variety of products, it may be impossible to find links for each product on platforms. To make it easier for affiliates, many advertisers make catalog files available in CSV or XML format.
Provide information in full
It is important to clearly communicate information to your visitors in the CTAs. When describing the benefits of a product, three pieces of information can be useful to your visitors: the price, shipping costs, and the merchant's name. A fourth piece of information can be useful if you do not abuse it: this is the crossed out prices that indicate a promotion. These prices can trigger clicks, but they are double-edged because promotions are not eternal and you will have to change the displayed price later.
By providing this information, you avoid disappointing your internet users when they arrive at the target page. By not displaying it, you can generate more clicks, but this is pointless if people do not make a purchase because they are missing one of the key pieces of information. As always, it is important to be honest with your visitors and prioritize the quality of clicks that convert rather than the quantity of clicks that do not generate commissions.
Choose the type of CTA carefully
The type of link can also influence the effectiveness of your CTA. A highlighted text link is a good start, but buttons are usually more effective, especially on mobile where it can be harder to click on a text link. If you're not comfortable with code, you can use a customizable button generator to tailor the buttons to your site's colors.
Price comparison can also be an asset for generating clicks. If you only offer one price, there's a good chance your visitors will go elsewhere to compare prices. Price comparison sites, therefore, benefit from the content you write for free. To avoid this, it's better to offer multiple links to different merchants where possible, using, for example, a mini price comparison table.
Display up-to-date data
It can be tricky to keep your CTA data up to date. To have prices always updated, you need to generate your links dynamically. While some advertisers used to provide widgets for this, this is no longer the case and you'll need to develop solutions to keep your data current. Affiliate platforms all offer data feeds, product catalogs or APIs to automate data retrieval, but this requires a human and/or financial investment to set up these developments. Affilizz offers widgets to simplify these tasks.
Key points to remember
Treat your CTAs just like you optimize your articles.
Provide essential information on your CTAs.
Optimize both the content and the form to make your content attractive.
Summary
To encourage your visitors to click on your links, it is important to work on your CTAs. Not everything works on the first try, but take the time necessary to find a method that works for you. Before becoming an expert in outbound links, you will need to test different approaches to find the one that performs best with your audience. For example, simple text links in the form of bullet points like the ones you will find below that invite you to continue your reading can be effective:
