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Best Practices for Affiliate Marketing

If this year’s Prime Day is any indication, consumers are spending more money. With an over 10% bump in spend from 2023, Amazon recorded $14.2B from Prime Day this year. According to Numerator, the average household spend was over $150. 


With so many deals available, many consumers rely on curated lists and roundups from publishers they trust. And we’ve seen publishers take real advantage of their position of trust to make affiliate marketing a viable revenue stream. The levers that drive success in affiliate marketing are ones that publishers can largely control - creating high-quality content, optimizing SEO, and creating a strategic user experience.


Here is Pushly’s guide to the best practices for Affiliate Marketing. 


Content Strategy

This is where publishers shine! No one creates quality content or with more of a perspective than publishers. This is why and how they build an audience in the first place. The balance publishers must always strike is curating content and products that are in line with their editorial voice and align with their brand. Some considerations:  


  1. Quality Content: Focus on producing valuable, high-quality content that captivates and retains your target audience. For instance, Wirecutter by The New York Times is renowned for its thorough and meticulously researched product reviews. Their articles are a testament to the power of well-crafted content that informs and engages readers.


  2. Product Reviews and Comparisons: Provide detailed reviews and comparisons of products or services. Trusted Reviews excels in this area, offering in-depth reviews and comparisons that highlight the pros and cons of various tech products, helping build trust with their audience through honest and unbiased opinions. In a world of too much choice, product reviews are particularly welcomed, especially in the technology space where features/functionality seem endless. (Technology also happens to be one of the more profitable categories for affiliate marketing.)


  3. How-To Guides and Tutorials: Create content that demonstrates how to use a product or service effectively. Lifestyle publishers like Conde Nast excel in this space as they often publish “how to wear a chunky loafer”, “how to perfect a smoky eye look”, etc. 

  4. Diversity: While it’s tempting to link to the same major brands and retail outlets, or ad sales teams may want to layer in preference for a key advertiser, diversity in affiliate links does help with discoverability. Per Search Engine Land, smaller brands can also post their participation in a curated roundup, for example, on social media, forging more paths for the search engine crawlers to come back to your content. 

SEO Optimization

  1. Keyword Research: Identify and use relevant keywords that potential buyers are searching for. Use a tool like SEM Rush or Google Keyword Planner to find high-traffic, low-competition keywords, ensuring their content is discoverable and relevant.

  2. On-Page SEO: It’s very important to optimize content with proper headings, meta descriptions, alt texts for images, and internal linking. Dotdash Meredith is a great example of a publisher that is consistently optimizing their pages to ensure quick load times and mobile-friendliness, which enhances both user experience and SEO.

  3. Link Placement: Be ruthless about integrating affiliate links across your content to drive affiliate revenue. Keep in mind the many journeys a reader has across your content, so linking provides a service to the reader. Right product, right time. 

User Experience

  1. Responsive Design: The world is increasingly mobile. To optimize time spent and engagement with your property, ensure your website is mobile-friendly and visually appealing on all devices. Nearly all of the publishers in the Pushly network use responsive design, and it’s a key contributor to their success. 

  2. Visuals and Multimedia: It’s one thing to talk about products; it’s another to show it. Use of  high-quality images, videos, and infographics makes content that much more engaging, and often allows a customer to see themselves in/with the product, triggering a sale. AllGearDigital does a great job bringing the reader along to an outdoor lifestyle

  3. Clear Call to Actions (CTAs): Use compelling CTAs to guide users toward clicking on your affiliate links.. During Prime Day 2024, across the Pushly network, our clients focused on CTA. Push notifications increased by over 50% this year, and publishers saw an increase in CTR of almost 20%. Customers noticed - and they appreciated the timely reminders. 

Analytics and Tracking

  1. Track Performance: You can’t improve what is not measured. Utilize analytics tools to monitor the performance of your content and affiliate links. Affilimate provides a comprehensive suite of analytics tools that help publishers see KPIs for each affiliate link, incorporate revenue per link and add custom tags for each link allowing for better segmentation, personalization, revenue and retention. 

  2. A/B Testing: Continual optimization is critical for improvement. There are many tools out in market that can support affiliate marketing, and we encourage content teams to experiment with different headlines, images, CTAs, link placements, etc. Solutions like Optimizely and Qualtrics are great resources to conduct diagnostics and A/B testing, helping optimize content for better performance.

Monetization Strategy

  1. Diversify Affiliate Programs: Diversification across affiliate programs provides opportunities to maximize affiliate revenue while minimizing risk. RedVentures’ The Points Guy is a great example of this with various credit card partnerships. 

  2. Niche Focus: Specialize in a particular niche to establish yourself as an authority. RedVentures’ Bankrate focuses on personal finance, attracting a targeted and engaged audience through specialized content.

Transparency

  1. Disclosure: Always disclose your affiliate relationships. Trusted Media Brands’ Family Handyman sets a standard by clearly disclosing their affiliate relationships, which helps build trust with their audience.

  2. On-Brand Promotion: Again, one of the greatest levers that a publisher has is the trust it has built with publishers, so always remember to curate and recommend content that is authentic to your brand. Readers seek you out for your perspective on the world, so product recommendations should align with that perspective. 



By focusing on quality content, SEO, user experience, analytics, and transparency, publishers can create a robust and effective affiliate marketing strategy. And continual review and analysis of data will enable publishers to optimize their affiliate marketing setups. Because, after all, strategy is nothing without execution. 

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