You’ve
started an affiliate program and have begun to recruit affiliate users. Now you just need to provide them with a link to your website, right? WRONG. The link destination and link text is just as important as your affiliate marketing banners, ads, etc. According to the Nielsen Norman Group’s study of e-commerce usability, more than a quarter of all user failures occur as a result of not getting from the home page of a website to the correct product page, which in turn translates into a high bounce rate. Another study by the same company has shown that e-commerce businesses can double their sales just by improving their site linking structures. As an affiliate marketer, it is important to pay attention to your links and ensure that your prospective customers reach their targeted pages.
One way to direct users to a certain page on your site is to use deep linking, or pointing hyperlinks to specific pages or images instead of your site’s homepage. If you have multiple products and services, a good destination for a deep link is a page that lists and describes each product. As a way to foster navigation around your site, you can also create sub-pages for different categories of products and services, which are linked from your product overview page. Once these pages are created, provide your affiliate users with the links so that potential customers will see all the products and services you have to offer as soon as they visit your site.
Your decisions about links do not stop with destination, however. Oftentimes, the link text is just as important as the destination, since the text can persuade a user to click the link. Obviously you cannot completely control the link text, since your affiliate users have the option of changing the text to their liking, but you can provided your affiliate users with recommended link text. A good source for link text is using keywords from your keyword research, or reviewing search queries, if you have a search box on your site.
Using deep links and clear, concise link text are proven link techniques for affiliate marketing, but are by no means the only way to successfully get potential customers from a link to your targeted page. The fact is, if you are actively thinking about your links and link structure, you are on the right track. Feel free to use the comments section to talk about what affiliate linking techniques have worked for you.
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