How to Use Affiliate Marketing in WordPress
Once you’ve chosen an affiliate network, it’s time to add your links and banners to WordPress. This can be done a number of ways depending on how you want the affiliates to appear in your content.
Here are a few of the more popular methods for sharing affiliate marketing programs in WordPress.
Pasting Affiliate Links in WordPress
Affiliate networks like ShareASale provide code to add to any website. Most of these networks require you do not change the code at all. So essentially, you can simply copy and paste the links into almost any section of WordPress including most custom post types.
How do you go about pasting the links into WordPress ?
Use In A Sidebar
A common place for ads is the sidebar. You can use the Custom HTML widget and paste the code. You can then move the widget to various sidebar locations using the drag and drop feature in WordPress.
Use Within Content
Most of the codes you get from affiliate programs are friendly to the WordPress editor. This means you can paste them directly into your content, whether it’s an image banner or a text link.
When it comes to adding coded elements like affiliate links, WordPress is pretty versatile. You can place these almost anywhere on the website as long as it fits and looks right.
I mean, you wouldn’t want your site to look horrible because a banner doesn’t seem to fit the niche or visual appeal.
Thirsty Affiliates (Plugin For WordPress)
This tool also comes with shortcodes to use in WordPress, turning on nofollow links and allowing your own images for banners and ads. If you buy the pro version, you can even target certain ads to show to specific geographic locations.
WP Product Review Lite
Writing reviews are some of the best content to drive traffic to your site. And WP Product Review Lite adds an attractive breakdown using pros, cons and a star system to show ratings to visitors.
Not only is this tool SEO friendly and uses rating markup schema, but it also adds an affiliate link section so your visitors can buy the item themselves.
This means the plugin helps you create a review to attract readers from Google as well as promoting an affiliate link for making money.
Amazon Auto Links
Should you decide to go with the Amazon Affiliate Program, you can always install Amazon Auto Links in WordPress. You can choose to select specific items to show to your visitors or let the system select goods for you.
One of the neat features of this plugin is its ability to scan through the text of your post and choose items best suited. This means you are more likely to gain a sale as the visitor is already interested in the content.
As an added bonus, you can also select certain items to be blacklisted from showing on your site from Amazon.
8 Affiliate Marketing Tips And Tricks
While it may seem simple to just copy and paste a link from an affiliate network into WordPress, there are a few ways you can maximize the experience. In reality, using systems like the above often benefit from marketing strategies.
Here are several tips that can help you get started:
- Don’t Saturate Your Posts or Pages
You don’t want too many ads on any given page. In fact, a lot of affiliate networks forbid this practice. Your ads shouldn’t take away from the visitor experience of your site. - Keep Affiliate Links Relevant to Your Content
You want to link to items that are relevant to the content of your WordPress post. If you’re writing about chicken recipes, you wouldn’t want to show an ad for computer hardware. - Use Review Posts in WordPress
Creating reviews are among the best types of content on the Internet. Use them to your advantage by selling the goods you review. This will drive search traffic and influence people to make a purchase. - Use Your Own Hosting for Images
Systems like ShareASale let you use your own images. This saves on bandwidth since you don’t have to pull graphics from a third party. In other words, it keeps your site fast. - Pay Attention to Affiliate Link Placement
You may have to experiment where you place banners and links. Some areas are going to have more of an impact than others. For instance, placing an affiliate at the bottom of a post might be bad as fewer people actually read an entire article. - Pay Attention to Mobile Users
How many mobile users access your website? If you put an affiliate banner in the sidebar, those users may not even see the ad. This is because themes often shift the sidebar below the post for mobile device users. Make sure visitors using smartphones are still able to see the links on smaller screens. - Try Using a Landing Page in WordPress
A lot of experts will use landing pages specifically for WordPress and affiliate marketing. Some will even pay for Adwords ads to drive traffic to the page instead of the affiliate. This helps boost traffic and helps sales by giving you a platform to better describe the product. - Become an Influencer
By working to become an influencer, you can attract businesses. This means you can cut out the middlemen of affiliate networks and get paid directly from companies. Of course, this often requires a massive amount of traffic to the website.