How to Prevent Link Hijacking & How to Sell Affiliate Products With Top Lists
Prevent Link Hijacking & Sell Affiliate Products With Top Lists
Affiliate marketing offers a very powerful way for anyone to make money online. What makes this simple business model so powerful, is the fact that the marketer doesn’t actually need to create or acquire a product or service of their own. All they need to do is to find one that they like the looks of and then promote that. Seeing as some affiliate programs offer as much as 70% or more commission, that can potentially be just as lucrative as developing something from scratch but with none of the risk, none of the overhead and none of the barrier to entry.
But that’s not to say that you can sleepwalk your way to success this way. You still need to be vigilant and many people will overlook the smaller details that are so crucial for this to work.
For example, what are you doing right now to protect your affiliate links? What can you do to prevent people from simply using the URL to buy products without you getting the commission you deserve? And what about those that would use the link to create their own affiliate link and profit instead of you??
Here are three easy things you can – and should – do right away!
Use a Redirect
One of the simplest and easiest ways is to use a redirect. This might mean setting up a web page that acts as an ‘intermediate’ page and then simply sends the visitors onward to the product or offer. That way, you can ensure that the cookies are stored on the user’s computer but they won’t be able to spy the destination URL without clicking.
Masked URL
You can take redirecting one step further by making sure that the user never even sees the address of the destination site. You do this by using URL masking which is also known as a ‘stealth redirection’. Although the user is redirected, the URL will never change!
Use a ‘Pretty Link’
A pretty link is a link that is shortened to be more attractive and shorter while of course also hiding the original URL. This works just the same as a redirect, except that you’ll be using a ready-made service like Tiny URL or Google’s link shortener.
Either way, this also harder to peak at and is also more accepted. Many people use TinyURL even for non-affiliate links, so this is a good way to fly under the radar!
Sell Affiliate Products With Top Lists
Looking for an innovative way to sell more affiliate products? Then consider creating a “top list.”
A top list is of course a countdown of the best something. So this might mean the “Top 10 Irritating Things About Flying in a Plane” or it might mean “The Top 10 Laptops Packing an RTX 2080 GPU.”
These lists are ideal for SEO for selling affiliate products, and in this post we’re going to see why.
The Idea
As you may have already guessed, the idea behind this strategy will be to create a list of top products, with each one linking to an affiliate link. Alternatively, you might list services, online software, or anything else you can grab affiliate links for. If you are thinking right now that this won’t earn you as much money as promoting a digital product (seeing as digital products typically offer much higher commission), then keep in mind that you can circumvent this issue by selling things with very high ticket prices. That laptop example? Some of those gaming PCs will sell for $3,500 and above! Even 4% commission on that is still $140. That’s a lot more than you would get from an ebook.
Or how about selling an MBA course? Yep, you can do that through EDx (which has an affiliate program) and this could stand to earn you thousands of dollars for a single referral. Likewise, if you promote a service with a recurring fee, you could earn income indefinitely that grows over time.
Why It’s Perfect
The reason this works so well, is that it allows you to use SEO to find people with the ideal intent. Intent is what the person is hoping to achieve by searching for a phrase, and our hope is that they will be looking to buy something.
When someone searches for the top products in a certain category, that almost certainly means they are hoping to buy those products!
What’s more is that people enjoy top ten lists, and so does Google. This is especially true if you use rich snippets, or if you add a bulleted list near the top of your page. Do this, and you can get Google to show your list right in the SERPs along with an image. This massively increases CTR.
Of course, you also need to carefully research the right keyword. Do this though, and you will be set to go!
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