Do you want to make more money from your blog?
Do you have a good steady flow of traffic coming through to your website that you would like to utilise?
Are you already promoting other businesses in your niche on your website without making any commission from them?
Then you should look into Affiliate Marketing.
Especially if your website is bringing in at least 10k traffic each month, you could set yourself up nicely with a passive income. Just follow the guide below to find out best practice when it comes to monetising your vegan website.
Why our affiliate marketing guide? Well, we are a vegan web design studio who have built affiliate websites for ourselves and for our clients.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Imagine walking around your favourite market and coming across an enticing stall. It is practically shouting out to you. You walk over to it and find an array of products all tailored towards you.
That particular stall is selling products made by various different brands.
They’ll still be making money from selling these – a commission on top which would have been agreed upon with the original maker.
This is essentially what websites with affiliate links are doing. They build attractive websites that bring niche relevant traffic to their sites, provide their readers with worth, and then draw them to links of products which the reader can buy.
Whenever a reader clicks on that link and purchases, that website owner will make a commission from it.
What Commission Do You Get From Affiliate Marketing?
This completely depends upon the business that you are promoting. Some have smaller commissions (and cheaper products) at around 5% of the purchase amount. Others will go up to around 30-40% commission.
We cover the commission rates of many popular brands in our blog on the best vegan affiliate programs.
Why should you use Affiliate Marketing?
To Support Businesses
By promoting a business’ products/services on your website you are helping them to reach a wider audience. And businesses in your niche deserve to be found by more people!
The reason businesses do affiliate marketing is that it is easy promo for them, and a real win-win situation for both parties involved.
To Create a Passive Income
If you have a good steady flow of visitors coming to your website who are likely to buy what your affiliate program is selling, then you can make a good passive income out of affiliate marketing.
For instance, if you have a vegan recipe blog and you want to provide your readers with links to specialist ingredients and equipment you use, you can add affiliate links here. That way you won’t only have people reading and using your recipes, but they’ll also be buying the necessary ingredients through your link – earning you a commission!
To Provide More Worth to Your Readers
Your readers are on your website for a reason, they are enjoying the content that you have on there. So if you are able to provide them with even more worth, they’ll definitely stick around even longer.
Why else do we have websites!
Which Affiliate Links Should You Use?
Use Relevant Affiliate Links
The temptation is to stick as many links into your blogs as possible, but this won’t work. You want to make sure the affiliate link is relevant to the content around it.
For instance, if you have a vegan recipe that requires a blender, adding an affiliate link to your favourite blender here will be really useful.
Or, if you have a guide page on say, the best vegan gifts, you can easily stick many affiliate links in here as you’ll be linking to vegan gift products anyway!
On the other hand, let’s say you sell vegan protein powder, you wouldn’t want to add in affiliate links to another brand’s vegan protein powder on your website.
Use Affiliate Links That You’d Support Even Without Being Paid
Once again, don’t get tempted to stuff your website with affiliate links. This is your opportunity to select products that you’d like to promote.
Unlike using Google AdSense you have complete control over who you promote on your website. So make the most of it!
Add links to vegan products and/or services that you would buy yourself.
Where should you publish affiliate links?
There are many places you can publish your affiliate links, but first and foremost, make sure to check the terms and conditions set out by the brand which you’ll be advertising. Some may prefer you not to push any of your own advertising towards the affiliate link, and some may even only be looking for links to be shared on social media.
Once you are familiar with their terms you can consider the following placements for promoting your affiliate links.
1. On your website
One of the most popular ways to promote affiliate links is on your own website. You can add links in various places around your website alongside relevant content that will help to promote the brand you are linking to.
Here are some of the best places to add affiliate links on your website:
Blogs
Writing high-quality relevant blog content that naturally leads up to an external brand link is probably one of the most effective ways of succeeding in affiliate marketing. Some of the most effective blogs are full-page reviews on a brand, how-to guides on using a product or service, or even listicles of the best products in a niche.
If you are promoting your own brand on a blog post and you don’t want people to leave your website then try to avoid promoting other products/services that could distract your reader. It is much better to put affiliate links into any non-brand related blogs that are on your website.
Guide pages
If you are building a guide page for your website, like a vegan travel guide, or a vegan food guide, then these are great places to add in affiliate links. As the name suggests, a guide is where people go to find out more information.
Well placed affiliate links help to provide your readers with more relevant information.
Discount pages
This isn’t always the most popular option with many people due to discount websites often being seen as ‘dodgy’, but if you have a reputable website then you could create a discount section on your website that highlights discounts for brands that are related to your niche.
Many big brands and editorials do this as a brand name + ‘discount’ search is very popular on search engines.
We'll design you a vegan affiliate website!
2. To your own network
Whilst we have focused primarly on affiliate marketing for websites in this blog, you can also share affiliate links elsewhere. You may already have a wide network of people who you promote to in some way. With affiliate marketing, you can start earning from this by sharing your links.
Word of Mouth
Maybe you have a community group either online or in person, share your affiliate links here when you are recommending a product or service. Avoid promoting brands you haven’t tried though, you wouldn’t want to ruin that community you’ve built.
Social media
Social media is a very popular place to advertise affiliate links. You may have probably clicked on quite a few before.
If you have a good following on social media you may find your followers are keen to buy the products and services you use and love.
How Do You Place Affiliate Links on Your Website?
Adding ‘nofollow’ Links
Having links to external websites on your site is good practice, especially when you are linking to trustworthy sources.
However, if Google crawls through your website and notices loads of links to external websites that they deem as spammy, then they will penalise your website (meaning lower rankings and domain authority).
Luckily, there is an easy solution for this. Always get into the habit of putting ‘nofollow’ attributes on your affiliate links. This way, it puts you less at risk.
For most sites all links are automatically classed as ‘dofollow’ links, which means that you are telling search engines to recognise this link – giving that link more power and authority. So, you’ll need to make these links ‘nofollow’ every time you add one in.
So how do you put a link as ‘nofollow’?
This depends on the platform you are using.
If you are using WordPress, then we recommend downloading the Yoast Plugin. With Yoast, when you add in a link to your text it’ll display some handy tick boxes asking if it is a sponsored link – tick this and Yoast will sort out the rest!
Yoast also allows you to make a ‘nofollow’ blanket on all links on one whole page.
If you aren’t using WordPress, you can easily add ‘nofollow’ into the HTML – just follow this handy guide.
Affiliate Link Placements
1. In Text
You can please the links within text but make sure people don’t miss them. Use words that notify the reader that there is a link there for them to follow.
You can also structure it so that it is easier to find the text link. Like this:
Where can I buy this product?
BUY IT HERE – add link into this text.
2. In a Button
A button is one of the most obvious ways to place a link in your blogs. When people see buttons they know that they are to be clicked on.
3. In an Image
If you have an image for the affiliate product/service you can always add a link into the image as well to increase the chances of your reader clicking through to it.
Do make sure to ask the brand if you are allowed to use their images first.
