Five Ways to Spend Less Time On Your Affiliate Links

You might think the life of an influencer is glamourous, and that it’s all creativity and content creation. But unless you’re one of the very few content creators that have an entire team behind them, you’re going to spend a LOT of time doing administrative work to make sure your links are getting those clicks. 

By now, your readers are used to using these affiliate links and if they trust you, they will be more likely to take your recommendations directly from your post. But how do you know what to link, how do you link it, and how do you monitor it afterwards? What even IS a “link in bio”??? There is so much to consider!

Shared Vision understands this burden, because you’ve only got so much capacity. To help you out, here are our top five ways to spend less time producing and managing your affiliate links.

We’ve done the math: let’s say it takes 4 minutes to find a product link, make the link a deep link, upload the link to a blog and then publish it. If you have two posts a week with ten products each, that’s 80 minutes a week, or almost 70 hours a year. And that’s without doing extensive research, write ups, or all of the other work that goes into an affiliate link. 

Think of all of the other things you could accomplish with an extra 70 hours! 

That’s where Shared Vision’s Noah comes in, the AI powered “assistant”. Noah will check links, fix broken links, and find suggested products and add them to blogs automatically. Keep ahead of the curve and sign up for Shared Vision today so that artificial intelligence can ease the stress on your human brain.

You’ve heard of Amazon, and so have your readers; there are a ton of benefits to the enormous size of this company, so most affiliates would think twice before they forgo being an Amazon Affiliate. But have you considered the benefits that might come with adding a smaller affiliate partner that matches your niche and perhaps is limited to a certain brand? Depending on your focus, these companies will give you product recommendations, discount codes, and information on their offerings.

While we encourage you to still review the products and give your genuine feedback to your audience, utilizing these ready-made tools and scripts by the people who know the product best is a no-brainer. Doing research ahead of time on which companies put these resources into their affiliate partnerships can save you work down the line.

For example, let’s say you specialize in entrepreneurial advice and have an informational YouTube channel. Microsoft Office 365 has an affiliate program that speaks for itself and can provide passive income. Since anyone in business will probably need Microsoft Office, this type of product already has an established quality and brand recognition, which means less explaining for you and might be successful with just a simple name-drop in your YouTube script. This also means it can be organically incorporated into your content. 

Think about your own niche and try to discover what trusted brands you can easily join as an affiliate.

Remember that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every post. When you find your voice as a content creator, while you will want to run tests and try new variations to see what works best, you can still stick with a general structure of posts or promotions that work well for you. 

Ask yourself, do you want to go in-depth and give lots of information with everything at all times, even in an Instagram post? Do you always need a review with a pros and cons list when you advertise a product? Do you prefer to utilize hashtags? Maybe you’ll just let an amazing photo speak for itself! 

Figure out what is driving your audience to click and save yourself a headache by relying on that winning formula.

Maybe you’re in a rut and you can’t figure out what products to link or how to structure that link in your posts. Just look around! What are other affiliate marketers doing? How are they introducing their links, and what language are they including around it? You can get ideas from anywhere, not just in your own niche. 

If you’re a recipe blogger, don’t be afraid to get inspiration from a DIYer, because you might just see something you’d have missed by looking at your more comparable peers. Or, when you check out your direct competition, you might notice that they are promoting a particular product a lot. This could be a signal for you that it’s popular and will generate a good income, so you can either promote it or find something comparable. 

Familiarize yourself with other creator’s strategies to inform your own.

Let’s say you already have all of your affiliate links. We all know that with the extra code that “links” the customer back to you, these website addresses can be quite long and unwieldy, making them totally inappropriate to drop into a post. Instead, you will have to embed the link in everything—but not so fast, because that can work differently across platforms. 

One option is to create the language ahead of time and manually incorporate it everywhere. We prefer the option behind door number two, which is that you can simply link to one Shared Vision shopping list. After dropping your affiliate links into this list, you’re basically done. Not only will this shopping list work across your platforms and feed all of your data and metrics into one place, you can even choose how it appears—from a simple link for your social media, to a full shopping cart on your blog post, to a QR code. 

Shared Vision empowers you to easily combine these links and use them across all of your social media. Check it out for yourself, sign up now by clicking here.