In an attempt to make money through affiliate marketing, most beginners just publish some random content and insert affiliate links within the article.

This strategy may or may not work, but if you really want to increase your affiliate income, you need to make sure that the content you publish reaches your target audience.

Your target audience is someone who wants to buy a product but isn’t sure if the product is worth it.

Sometimes, users don’t even know which product to buy to meet their needs.

As an affiliate marketer, your job is to help users discover the right product with high-quality content for their needs, help them make a purchase decision, and then navigate to the product’s website to complete the purchase.

This means your article should target exploratory intent keywords — the kind of keywords your target audience uses on Google to research the products they want just before making a purchase.

For more details, you can check out our guide on choosing the right keywords.

Promote your affiliate products in the content

Now you know what type of content you’re going to create: investigative. You are looking for topics that revolve around your target audience looking for answers to the problems they are facing.

Once you’ve done your keyword research and have your content ideas, it’s time to start inserting affiliate links into your content.

How you insert your affiliate links will depend on the specific article you are writing. Adding affiliate links to 5 different products doesn’t make sense if you’re reviewing one product.

On the other hand, if you are displaying “Top 10 Tools to Solve X”, you will want to have multiple affiliate links to increase your chances of making more sales.

The goal is to insert your links as strategically as possible.

Here are some tips you can use to get the most out of your affiliate link placement:

Link only where appropriate: Don’t add an affiliate link if it doesn’t fit your content. This will negatively impact user experience (UX) and cost you more lost sales in the long run.

Add links as soon as possible: If you have showcased many products in one article, make sure you add your affiliate products at the top of the list. Most people won’t take the time to read an entire article. You want to make sure they see your affiliate links early on.

Get more out of your site space: You can use floating bars, inline banners and sidebar widgets to promote your affiliate products. These increase the impact of your content and lead to more sales over time

Here’s an example of affiliate links from a post by IsItWP on the best recipe plugins for WordPress:

You will notice that there are many options in the list, but the first few are affiliate links. This gives the user the opportunity to research all the options while increasing the odds that IsItWP’s affiliate links will be seen.

Again, you want to promote your links as appropriately—and as powerfully—as you can.

Pro-tip: Before you start adding hundreds of affiliate links to your site, invest in an affiliate link plugin.

Imagine sorting through and updating hundreds of expired affiliate links while you have no idea where you placed them on your website.

You’re looking at hours of headaches and tons of wasted profit from expired links you forgot about.

Fortunately, this is a nightmare that can be avoided with an affiliate management plugin. And one of the best ones

Link is an affiliate marketing management plugin that allows you to keep better track of your affiliate links. It’s easy to set up, super user-friendly (even for less tech-savvy marketers) and allows you to put your marketing on auto-pilot.

This allows you to keep affiliate links short and neat for easy sharing via email and social media platforms.

And if the day comes when you’re asked to update old affiliate links from your partners, you’ll be able to get it done in minutes, not days.

Plus, if you find you run into any issues, they’ve got an amazing support team to help you every step of the way.

Now that you’ve created the right kind of content and strategically placed your links (while using affiliate management plugins), it’s time to kick things up a notch with targeted conversion campaigns.

Turn your visitors into affiliate customers

One of the biggest mistakes new affiliate marketers make is assuming they need to 10x their traffic if they want to 10x their profits. It doesn’t actually work that way, which is great news for you.

For example, let’s say you’re promoting a product on your site that pays you $50 in affiliate commission for every sale you make. And imagine that your affiliate conversion rate is 2%, which means for every 100 visitors you send to that website, 2 of them buy the product.

That means the CPC (cost per click) you earn is $1 per click.

(CPC = Total Affiliate Income / Total Traffic You Send)

But can you send 2X more visitors to your affiliate product site? Based on the CPC value, you can double the affiliate income. And the best part… you don’t have to drive traffic to your site. Instead, you can simply set up a conversion optimization campaign that increases your revenue.