Affiliate marketers live and die with links.
In affiliate marketing, you only earn commissions when someone makes a purchase through the unique affiliate link provided by the advertiser. On the contrary, disorganized and mismanaged links create a chinese wall between tracking links and desired conversion. It directly hits negative impact on your affiliate marketing success.
Affiliate links may look simple and short, but those are both the lifelines and red flags for your affiliate marketing business.
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Roles of affiliate links for affiliate marketing success
Affiliate links serve as the primary tool for tracking and rewarding affiliates for their promotional efforts. These unique links connect the affiliate’s campaign to the merchant’s product or service, allowing for tracking of clicks, conversions, and commissions.
Here are some key activities of links noted down in the field of affiliate marketing :
Accurate tracking and attribution: Affiliate links act as unique identifiers, enabling the merchant to track the source of each referral and attribute the sale to the exact affiliate. This tracking system is essential for ensuring that affiliates are rightly compensated for their contributions.
Getting paid: Affiliate links contain embedded codes that specify the commission rate for each affiliate. When a customer makes a purchase through an affiliate link, the merchant’s system automatically calculates and records the commission due to the affiliate. This automated process ensures accurate and timely commission payments.
Monitoring Performance: Advertisers can analyze click-through rates, conversion rates, and commission payouts to identify which affiliates are generating the most sales through affiliate links. These metrics ultimately help to optimize their affiliate marketing strategies accordingly.
Fraud Prevention: It is very important to ensure that commissions are only awarded for legitimate referrals. Advertisers implement various techniques, such as IP address tracking and cookie management, to verify the authenticity of clicks and conversions.
Multi-channel Promotion: Affiliate links can be embedded in various online platforms, including websites, blogs, social media posts, and email newsletters. This flexibility allows affiliates to promote products and services across multiple channels.
Brand Promotion: Affiliate links encourage brand promotion by incentivizing individuals to promote products and services they genuinely believe in. It enhances brand reputation and boost customer loyalty.
Affiliate marketers agony and loss for wrong link management
- Manually adding and updating links take huge time and slow down productivity.
- Your customers click on the link and stumble with a 404 error message – The page you requested could not be found. This broken link error is a nightmare for many affiliates.
- Links are not tracking information or doing misleading attribution.
- Proper tagging affiliate links with sponsored and no follow mark is time consuming.
- Affiliate links hijacking. Some spammers may target your links and steal your hard earned commission.
- Too many links from too many affiliate programs. It’s hard to categorize and organize.
- Insertion of various code frome Meta, Google etc in your site is time consuming and a little tricky. A wrong tweak may break the whole site structure.
- Not able to create a all in one platform for all links( including social media profiles, YouTube channel link,Checkout page links etc)
- Cookies can be deleted by the end user and therefore cookie duration will not count.
- Fines can be imposed for not maintaining GDPR and FTC guidelines.
Which tools are effective to manage the links?
You see, inaccurate management of links may ruin your credibility and trust to users and thus you can experience a sharp cut down of affiliate revenue. If links are not tracked well, all your hard efforts will go down the drain.
We have gone through the same pains also. And we were actively looking for a solution to organize links very well. We went through many options like Pretty Links, Linktree, Wonderlink in this case. But we were not able to match them with our budget and desired output.
Some are too costly and some are difficult to use. Some lack advanced features like visual customization of link pages, integration of 3rd party links, click tracking etc.
Subsequently, we came across ClickWhale, and found it the right fit for effortless affiliate link management. It is built by the same team who built the Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin.
No more sleepless nights worrying about tracking clicks and frustration over getting detailed statistics of links. Consider ClickWhale as your best friend and a one stop solution for managing all affiliate links.
3 major ways ClickWhale can help with effortless affiliate link management
1. Links management
Link shortening
Many affiliates use long form affiliate links that may look spammy or untrusted to users.
Let’s have a look at this link- https://clickwhale.pro?aff=123xyxo1
This link is hard to read and might look untrusted to readers. With ClickWhale you can easily shorten the link and customize the link with short words like this- clickwhale.
The shortened link now looks clear and user friendly. It is also SEO friendly.
Link Cloaking
Link Cloaking is a more advanced way to decorate your weird links to be memorable for users and give a more professional look. ClickWhale also helps to add your own domain instead of words.
Thus it becomes more professional and trusted to users.
Make the previous affiliate link like this- https://getbusinessmap.com/clickwhale/
Here, I have used my own domain getbusinessmap with ClickWhale. My customers will feel more comfortable clicking on this link as it creates trust and shows my brand liability to them.
Link categorization
As an affiliate, you might join different affiliate products and services. With ClickWhale you can categorize all these links and track them separately.
Suppose, you can place all your service or product offering links under one category. Again you can place all social links under another category. Got the point, I hope.
SEO for links
Have you heard the terms nofollow, noindex and sponsored?
These tags are commonly used to tell search engines on how to treat hyperlinks.
Nofollow is one kind of backlink that tells search engines not to associate your site with the referred website link. You are not endorsed or paid by the referred link.
Noindex prevents any pages from appearing in the search results. With this simple seo trick you can link less meaningful pages without hammering SEO.
Sponsored tag indicates you have received money for placing the link in your site.
So, why are these attributes important to you?
According to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, all paid and sponsored links must be tagged as nofollow. Following the best practices of these tags, you can boost your page ranking, increase website traffic and do link building effectively.
ClickWhale offers you to easily select or deselect these tags for any links with a single click. No need for manual input or breaking the HTML codes!
Links analytics
Tracking links and analyzing those data are super easy with ClickWhale. You can find your most clicked links and when they were clicked in a nice visual presentation. The stat will also show you the number of times the links clicked.
This will help you in two ways- locating the most powerful content and understanding the audience’s needs. You will also gain insights on where to put more stress and develop a smooth user experience.
2.Link page creation
Some of my fellow affiliate marketers often expressed frustration over managing their numerous links, too many social profiles, YouTube channels and newsletter sign up links in a sigle place. They were on a hunt to cut their workload and were actively looking to place all their important links under one hood.
I felt my friends and their pains. But I couldn’t help them at all.
After a close look at ClickWhale, now I can go up to them and say, “Hey, my friends, Try ClickWhale to create your One-stop link page”.
But do you know what the heck is this One-stop link page?
A One-stop link page is a central location where you can list all of your important links, including your website, social media profiles, blog, portfolio, and any other relevant online destinations.
This makes it easy for visitors to find all of your information in one place, without having to search through multiple websites or social media profiles.
ClickWhale enables you to create unlimited One-stop link pages and streamline your digital presence. You can showcase your most attractive CTA links in an organized and clutter-free workspace.
Here’s a little glimpse of what you can do more with ClickWhale link pages-
- Customize Link page title and description texts.
- Upload your own brand or company logo and add backgrounds, images and brand colors.
- Fetch your blog posts feed in your link page so that the audience never misses you!
- Add the link page to your own domain.
- Link your social media profiles and watch more engagement.
3. Code insertion and tracking
As an affiliate marketer, you might face this situation many times. Insertion of various tracking codes.I was also in a dilemma at those points. I had no technology background or expertise. Placing those Google analytics code, Facebook pixel or any other site verification code seemed too challenging for me.
I still remember those days- looked for various code insertion plugins and sought help from developers. Finding out how and where to put those tracking codes manually were the most terrible and time wasting experiences I have ever had.
Take a look how ClickWhale can benefit you in this field-
- Embed any kind of tracking codes( Google analytics code, Google conversion tracking, Facebook pixel, UTM code etc) into your website without any coding knowledge!No intervention on existing codes!
- Place your codes where you wish. You can place them on any single post, on any single page or even on the whole website. You can also exclude specific posts and pages.
- As an admin, you can set user roles for your website to execute the code snippets.
Pricing plan for ClickWhale
ClickWhale Pro comes with three packages.
You get ClickWhale pro license for 1 site with $49/year.
For managing 3 sites price is $99/year.
Want to get it for 10 sites, pay $199/year.
Every plan includes 30-day moneyback guarantee and 1 year of update & support.
You can also start with zero payment by installing the free version of the plugin.
You can also buy lifetime license by paying only once. It’s $149 for 1 site( A true savings indeed)!
The lifetime offer is limited. Get it before offer expires.
Cons of ClickWhale
- Free plugin has very limited features.
- Affiliate disclosure option, Privacy policy generator and other GDPR related topics are missing.
- There is no QR code generator for links.
Alternative to ClickWhale
We always encourage you to explore alternatives in the market. A close look at the competitors will help you to find the right product for your business.
Search on Google by writing alternatives to ClickWhale. You will find a lot of list and reviews for better understanding.
From our point of view, you can go for Pretty Links as a close alternative to ClickWhale.
Goodbye with some final words
Affiliate link management is an essential and integral part of any affiliate marketing strategy. By using the right tools and techniques, businesses can enhance the effectiveness of their campaigns and achieve their marketing goals.
Investing in a Link Management tool like ClickWhale will certainly step up your affiliate marketing success and generate consistent revenue.
Useful resources
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Disclosure: Our team writes about stuff we think you’ll like. We aim to highlight the products and services you might find interesting, and if you buy them, we may get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our partner.