Are there some good tips for adding affiliate links in your blog posts?

[aceofadsense]

Earning an income by building authority blogs are really attracting me and I am wondering there are some good ways to insert affiliate links in my wordpress blog posts? on top, in the middle or the bottom of blog post?
Has any one tried to add affiliate links in your blog posts please share some tips to make users clicks on them without doubting it's an affiliate link.

 

[elcidofaguy]

Masking your affiliate links i.e. display link -> redirects to affiliate link is bread and butter basics when it comes to affiliate marketing... There are a ton of resources out there as well as scripts, plugins etc which helps you cloak your links...

With regards to where to insert your affiliate links you got two approaches:

1) Ad placements on your webpage e.g. above the fold, side bar etc... The higher up the better normally with the best one located at the very top of your page... With placing ads don't stress out about it - use your common sense...

2) With placing text links within a post... It should be natural e.g. provide a review of said product <add your link> .... and finally call to action - for more info <add your link> etc ...

 

[dustinthigpen]

One of the best WordPress plug-ins for cloaking links is "Pretty Link". The lite version is free.

It let's you use your own domain name as the cloaked URL.
(For example- [URLnofo]www.yourdomain.com/hostgator[/URLnofo])

It looks very nice and it also tracks clicks to your link which is awesome.

Hope that helps.

 

[sharonbreemj]

I'm not a great affiliate expert but I know you should really be cautious when implementing affiliate links in your site. I had a website for fashion affiliating with Amazon, because I've put too many affiliate links and didn't do anything to "mask" them I got really bad ranks on Google. There are some Wordpress plugin that can help you 301 affiliate links.

 

[PTTed]

Here is what I do to mask affiliate links and also to nofollow them so that Google doesn't care about them:

1) Create a folder on your site that you are going to use for affiliate redirects. Call the folder "recommends" or "recommended" or something else that will look good in the URL structure and help improve click throughs
2) Use a robots.txt file to disallow robots from crawling that folder
3) Create a 301 redirect from a URL inside that folder to my affiliate using my affiliate link
4) When I create affiliate links on that blog I will point each one to a different link inside that "recommends" folder which then redirects to the affiliate with my affiliate link.

This makes it look like when a person is going to click on the affiliate link, instead of looking like an affiliate link, it looks like they are going to be taken to another internal page on my site. That helps increase click throughs.

And the links are safe from Google because the Googlebot is blocked from accessing the "recommends" folder and therefore the link is the same as if it was rel="nofollow"

It depends on the site though. If I am doing a product comparison/review site where I am comparing different products and reviewing them, then I will just show the actual affiliate link on the regular blog page where the product is mentioned. I just nofollow the links. If your affiliate link is going to some place like Amazon, then it won't hurt click throughs. It can even help them because people really trust Amazon. It depends on your niche and who the people are that you are targeting.

People with knowledge of the IM industry hate to click on affiliate links when they can tell that they are affiliate links. People who have no knowledge of the IM industry don't even know what an affiliate link is and therefore they will click on them anyway. So it doesn't matter so much for them.

 

[davidfrost]

Hi, with Pretty Link, is there a significant difference between free and paid versions?

 

[vishwa]

If you are using WordPress than you can use plugins named thirsty affiliate and cloak your affiliate links. This will increase your sales percentage with any negative SEO effect because plugin will automatically put nofollow attribute to it.

 

[dustinthigpen]

HI David,

Sorry, this took so long, I didn't see you responded.

There are a few advanced features you don't get with lite. The main one I care about being cloaking. If you use pretty link to redirect to a gotowebinar page or some other website, the cloaking makes it look like it's part of your own site. Which is pretty awesome. If you have lite, it would simply redirect to the page and they could see the url change after the redirect.

Other Pro Features-
Double Redirection
Keyword Replacements
URL Replacements
URL Rotations
Split Tests
Meta-Refresh, Javascript, Pixel and Pretty Bar Redirection

Honestly though, if you're not going to use the cloak, I would stay with the lite version.

Hope that helps!