Deep Linking in Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a great activity to engage in for most websites and companies. It is oftentimes based on a classic win-win situation. The reason for this is that if you own a website and have spare inventory, you can start up affiliate partnerships for example and make the most out of the inventory you have. You might think you would gain more if you signed up on some banner network for a lower CPM or CPC, but this might not always be the case. If you managed to set up a good affiliate partnership with a relevant company, this might generate a much higher eCPM than traditional networks offer.

Banners are however not the only tools you can use in affiliate marketing. For the advertiser, banners might be a good way to get exposure, but in affiliate marketing you shouldn’t really be interested in the exposure but the conversion or final goal of your whole affiliate campaign. One of the best ways to get good conversion and reach the set target is by using deep linking.

The method of deep linking is very simple. Let’s say you have a blog or a website where you can post news or articles. The idea is to link directly to the product or service you’re talking about. So instead of linking to www.somerandomwebsite.com you link to www.somerandomwebsite.com/fantasticproducts/themostfantasticproduct/. This way the readers will be able to reach the product directly, and are literally just one click away from a potential purchase. The advantage of deep linking over a regular homepage link is pretty obvious. You save the visitors time and effort by saving them from having to look around for the product you’re talking about.

This might seem as a really obvious method; still you would be surprised to see how many people ignore this strategy. My suggestion is that if you’re running an affiliate campaign as an advertiser, then make sure you enable your affiliates to use this method. You should actively push them toward methods that stand the best chance to work instead of just supplying them with some random banners.  The same goes if you’re an affiliate and a publisher. Try to figure out what ways you can use deep linking and if there’s any good posts you can write about specific products. Please note that I’m not encouraging you to hype products and services you have no experience of. Instead, you should try to write reviews of products you actually have used yourself, and maybe you can get the advertiser to send you test samples etc. Or you can simply say that you’re thinking about buying a certain product, and explain why. This might make others interested as well.

As you can see, there are numerous ways of using deep linking, and it’s a really simple method that virtually anyone can implement. All it takes is a copy-paste and some imagination, more or less.

Soheil Amorpour, CEO @ CPerspective Online Marketing Agency