If you are an affiliate, you want readers who click on your affiliate links to buy so that you receive a commission. But typical conversion rates are very low. Even if four percent of people who click through your link eventually purchase, you are considered an effective affiliate. Four percent! That is an awfully low standard to be considered good.
Based on such a statistic, you can conclude that in order to make money with affiliate commissions, you need lots of clicks on your links. The more traffic you have, the more eyes you have on your site and the more potential clicks and purchases.
So how can you get more eyes on your affiliate links? The answer is to include them in evergreen content.
- Evergreen content is always relevant, always fresh and shareable. It may be a post that is two years old, but it still surges in popularity on Pinterest and Facebook. It never gets stale.
- Evergreen content is a post that helps readers solve a problem. It is something they search for and are happy to find, so happy that they share it via social media.
- Some people call it epic content. But Evergreen goes beyond epic content because it continues to be epic even 18 months after it was written.
If you can integrate affiliate links into evergreen content, you will get high traffic, more clicks, and more commissions. Forget one-off review posts where you try to push a product. Readers can smell those a mile away. And most of them aren’t interested in being sold to.
People love to buy, but they hate being sold to. (This is something I learned from Chris Guillebeau in $100 Startup. affiliate link) So you need to remove the appearance of being sold to while giving them an opportunity to buy.
You will find success with affiliate marketing when you incorporate affiliate links in a natural way into content that does not appear to be a sponsored post or a review post. It’s simply good content which happens to have an affiliate link because that particular product fits the scope of the post.
Go jump out of the review post mentality. Or at least jump beyond it. Write review posts, but also write evergreen posts that incorporate affiliate links organically.
1. List posts
What kind of list could you feature this product in? Write a list post and add your affiliate links. Don’t make every single item in the list an affiliate link. You aren’t writing a shopping list but a valuable post that helps someone.
2. How to posts
Write a tutorial with lots of images that includes the use of the product you want to sell via affiliate links.
3. A slant on the product
Look at the product from a different slant. How can you integrate a mention of it into a helpful post that answers someone’s questions? Don’t get stuck in the rut of gift guides. There are more options than that. Think broader than the product to the category it fits into. Then write about that category in more general terms.
For example, the product is an educational video about geography.
You write a post about ways to make geography fun. You talk about much more than just the video. You give lots of specific examples that don’t involve buying anything, but also in the post you share how much your children love these particular videos.
For example, the product is a fancy hair clip.
You write a post about keeping romance in your marriage. One of your points is investing in your physical appearance. These hair clips make it easy to look good even when you don’t have lots of time to style your hair.
Keep the mention of the affiliate product short and relevant, and you will see clicks.
4. Comparison posts
Can you tell why to switch from a competitor’s product to this one? People love posts that compare two alternatives.
These are just four possible angles for evergreen posts that can incorporate affiliate links. There are dozens more. Go ahead and write that standard review post, but then supplement it in future weeks with epic content that includes reference to the products you love. Besides getting more clicks, you also show your loyal audience that you really do love that particular product because you frequently mention it when it fits. Your authenticity is confirmed when you consistently promote a certain brand.