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Want to drive traffic and add brand new revenue streams?
Affiliate programs are powerful accelerants for both. And affiliate links are the vehicles bringing in users within the thriving affiliate marketing industry. In the U.S. alone, spending is expected to hit $8.2 billion by 2022, according to Statista – more than three times what it was in 2012.
Whether you are an affiliate earning passive income by referring traffic to businesses, or a business launching an affiliate marketing program, you have to understand exactly what affiliate links are, how you can use them to optimize your affiliate research and strategy to bring in more traffic, revenue, and high-paying customers.
We’ll answer these questions and will close with tips for affiliate partners looking to use links most effectively.
What are affiliate links?
In simple terms, affiliate links drive traffic and revenue.
Affiliate links are unique URLs that Photo Editing Services identify the specific affiliate partner responsible for a website visit, and they’re generated by joining an affiliate partner program or affiliate network.
affiliate links definition
Before the 90s, handing out business cards for referrals is effectively an affiliate program. With Amazon Associates launching as early as 1996, affiliate marketing moved online.
Using a unique identifying ID or username, a referral site can receive credit for each visitor directed to the target website. For every referral, whether it’s traffic or a sale, depending on the partnership agreement, affiliates receive a commission rate per click or a payout based on a proportion of a purchase.
Affiliate links make it possible for businesses to track the traffic channels where they receive the most affiliate traffic. Using affiliate research, businesses can maximize their marketing efforts and find monetization opportunities by assessing the performance of competitors, online businesses, and individual affiliate outlets.
What does an affiliate link look like? (URL breakdown)
What does an affiliate link look like, exactly? How is it different from a regular link, in terms of structure? And why does it matter to you in real life?
To the untrained eye, an affiliate link might look just like any other link you find. But they matter, precisely because they are making money for affiliate partners and businesses.
Depending on the industry, affiliates may be running tutorials, become bloggers, or building subscribers on social media to promote links to a greater target audience and drive traffic to gain an affiliate commission and eventually passive income. This type of online marketing matters. What’s behind it? A remarkably simple link structure. Here’s a look:
Even the shortest of links might contain additional information, either in the form of a marketing tracker such as an urchin tracking module (UTM), or an affiliate ID. That ID will be unique to one partner, making it easy to assign traffic to its source.
An affiliate link will include details as a URL parameter, which refers to any text that appears after a question mark in a web link. Essentially, this is a capability built into the fabric of the internet.