Where to Put Your Affiliate Links

Affiliate networks act as the middleman between the merchant who wants his products to be endorsed by an affiliate marketer and the affiliate marketers themselves. They ensure that you the affiliate marketer is paid by the merchant whenever your client/follower buys their product.

To have a list of affiliate networks in your country you can simply search in Google “affiliate networks” plus the country you want to check for affiliate networks. The number of affiliate networks is simply too many to list but you can try to research shareasale.com which consistently tops the list of affiliate networks with a very good reputation to give you an idea of affiliate networks.

How to link affiliate networks to your website or social media? The best way to know how to link your website or social media to your affiliate link is to actually do it as each affiliate network and company have different ways of doing it.

Research Google and YouTube Videos and you will see a ton of information on how to do this. Affiliate Marketing doesn’t require an IT degree (No pun intended) and I can assure you that you can easily do it with a little research and practice.

The Importance of Having Your Own Website
Having your own website mean you have the most control of your work and also the most ease in doing your work. The problem however is that you will have to pay money to a trustworthy web hosting company who will ensure that your website is available for your clients to see and use with little problems.

When you are first starting out it is very important to calculate how much you can spend to maintain your website for a set number of time usually a year or more to ensure you do not run out of funds and cause your website to be shut down and cause you to lose all your initial investment in time and money in developing your website.

You will have to pay an upfront fee and then monthly fees to your web hosting provider. I cannot emphasise this enough that you should have enough funds to pay website ownership associated fees with your own funds as affiliate marketing and/or online ad revenues usually takes more than a year to become profitable enough to pay your maintenance costs and to pay yourself as well.

Youtube Linking
You can create a video presentation about the products you are endorsing and then you can embed the affiliate links of the products you are endorsing in the video description at the bottom of your YouTube Videos.

I have tried making Youtube videos and can tell you from experience and from research of other content creators in Youtube that it is work intensive as creating videos with mostly original content is very work intensive and the earnings may not match the resources used to make the video in the first place which is like many startup businesses in general.

Facebook Linking
The platform is ideal for endorsing products as it is assumed that the user knows the persons they are referring their products to because they have a relationship with them in some form or another. There is already a high "trust factor" between endorser and the persons being endorsed to which is essential in selling anything.

One major problem though is that your business, personal life and contacts will mix together which can be confusing to everyone involved. Make sure you plan your Facebook affiliate and referral campaign carefully to avoid this problem.

Instagram Linking
Most ideal for lifestyle related items such as fashion and vacations because of its use of pictures to convey ideas. Instagram is one of the top social media platform for affiliate marketing but can be tedious to do just like YouTube because it requires you to do a lot of image processing.

Conclusion

Although the most popular social media platforms could initially give you the boost you need to make affiliate sales you need to take note that you do not own these platforms and cannot control their behaviour towards your business. Do not completely put all your efforts in these platforms but also make your own website.

By owning your own website you gain a partial independence from these platforms and also gain your own identity. You are also free to do what you want with regard to your affiliate sales business. Perhaps one of the greatest advantage of owning your website is you get to sell other digital products and services while also doing affiliate sales.