How To Make Affiliate Links: Benefits and Examples (2024)

Today’s shoppers expect to be able to access products wherever they spend period online. Whether scrolling through social media posts, reading a blog, watching a video, or visiting a website, product links are now a ordinary sight.

As a outcome, consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with referral links—especially when they arrive from trusted companies, creators, and brands.

The affiliate marketing industry is projected to reach $15.7 billion by 2024. Here’s how you can unleash the benefits of affiliate links in your own marketing efforts.

discover how to make affiliate links, the benefits of using them for your brand, and real examples of links in the wild.

What is an affiliate link?

An affiliate link is a URL with a distinctive ID that allows brands to attribute traffic and conversions for the purpose of paying percentage to marketing partners.

When an affiliate associate—the creator, influencer, or publisher posting the link—signs up for a brand’s affiliate marketing program, they receive a distinctive link to the brand’s website or product pages. These links contain the affiliate associate’s distinctive ID to enable the tracking of conversions.

When a potential customer clicks on the link, it’s attributed to the affiliate, allowing the brand to record the source of the traffic. If someone buys a product using an affiliate link, the brand will pay the affiliate marketer percentage on the sale.

Affiliate link examples

Creator and affiliate marketer @nailsbyalsn creates content using the affiliate products she promotes. In the caption, she encourages her followers to use her distinctive coupon code to purchase from Le Mini Macaron.

When Alison’s followers navigate to her profile, they can click on her link in bio to open a stack of affiliate links.

Clicking on the Le Mini Macron link opens the brand’s website.

If you look in the browser bar after clicking an affiliate link, you will view tracking information, in the form of a UTM parameter. Alison’s affiliate link for Le Mini Macaron looks like this:

Shoppers and affiliate partners don’t require to worry about the tracking information in an affiliate link. In this case, the extra elements in the URL simply indicate that:

• The affiliate link directs to an online store: “www.leminimacaron.com”
• The affiliate has a distinctive code: “dt_id=526842”
• The affiliate was sourced using Shopify Collabs: “utm_campaign=shopifycollabs”

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a referral marketing technique in which affiliate partners earn a percentage by promoting a product or service for a business—typically a retailer—through affiliate links.

The business rewards the affiliate associate with a payout for providing specific results, like clicks and conversions (e.g., when website visitors sign up for a newsletter or become paying customers). Affiliate marketing can occur through various channels including TikTok video content, email marketing, blogs, and podcasts.

What is an example of affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing can receive many forms, but it is generally a collaboration between a brand and a creator, tracked using distinctive affiliate links to promo codes.

In this example from TikTok influencer Valerie Sanders, her bio link directs to clothing rental brand Haverdash. The bio contains tracked affiliate links that credits Valerie with the sale if potential buyers complete a purchase through that link. Valierie would then make a predetermined percentage, usually a percentage of the sale worth of the item or order.

The tracked affiliate link looks like this and includes a distinctive code to identify Valerie for attribution:

To push her followers toward the affiliate link, Valerie promotes the brand in video content like this:

In another example, the affiliate marketer and Instagram user @weimaraner_blue_est2020 uses a distinctive promo code to promote a product. This is an alternative to using an affiliate link.

6 benefits of using affiliate links

1. Increased authenticity
2. Projected growth of affiliate marketing
3. Added accountability
4. chance for connection-building
5. Ease of use and efficiency
6. SEO improvements

Brands use affiliate marketing as a way to strategically and organically expand their customer base. Potential benefits to your brand in using affiliate links include:

1. Improved authenticity

Affiliate marketing can feel authentic to your customers because they’re likely clicking on an affiliate link through a website or source they already depend. Therefore, successful affiliate marketing typically reduces the period it takes to construct customer loyalty, since there’s already a mutual connection—with the affiliate associate.

2. Projected growth of affiliate marketing

Affiliate sales are likely to encounter continued growth. Estimates put the industry’s growth at around 10% per year. More than 80% of US companies use affiliate marketing as part of their sales way.

3. Added accountability

Working with affiliate partners can provide access to sales metrics and data. Brands can capture sales analytics data from their affiliates through a variety of tracking methods, including cookies, pixels, and postback URLs that track conversions. This information can assist brands refine their marketing campaigns based on what works and what doesn’t.

4. chance for connection-building

Making the selection to use affiliate links in affiliate marketing is beneficial for affiliates and brands alike. It allows businesses and affiliate marketers to construct turnover—the business benefits from increased traffic, while the affiliate marketer earns money through percentage. This helps strengthen your connection with valuable brand partners.

5. Ease of use and efficiency

Upfront costs associated with affiliate marketing are low, making the potential yield on resource (ROI) high. There’s no require to hire an advertising firm or purchase advertising space. Instead, you can depend on your affiliate partners to trade your physical products or services for you—and you only pay your affiliate partners a percentage of sales when they successfully direct consumers to purchase your product or service.

6. SEO improvements

Using affiliate links boosts your search engine optimization (SEO) since other websites link to yours. This sends a positive signal to Google about your site’s relevance and rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). In turn, increased search traffic can drive more people to your brand’s website. Established affiliate partners are in the business of generating current, straightforward-to-discover content, and likely recognize how to rank highly on search engines—an significant part of a successful marketing way.

How to make affiliate links

1. Log into your affiliate dashboard
2. Add affiliates
3. make an affiliate link
4. Customize the URL
5. Define the promotion

Leveraging affiliate links can boost your business’s visibility and assist generate recent turnover. Here’s how to make your own affiliate links in a few key steps:

1. Log into your affiliate tool

Log into your affiliate management app or tool. This is where you track your affiliates and their act. If you use an affiliate management platform, you’ll use the dashboard to post information about your affiliates’ sales, products, and affiliate campaigns. Here, you’ll also generate links, discover recent affiliates to work with, and study metrics and data.

🌟 Just getting started? discover how to set up a successful affiliate program for your brand, step by step.

2. Add affiliates

Add recent affiliates to your affiliate program. Affiliate management platforms can provide large affiliate networks, which you can browse to discover recent partners. Search by name and trade niche to select affiliates you ponder are suitable ambassadors for your products or services. The affiliates you choose to work with have access to an affiliate dashboard to keep both parties aligned on your affiliate marketing way.

3. make an affiliate link

Visit your affiliate dashboard to make distinctive affiliate links for all your affiliates. provide your links descriptive names according to the product or service you’re advertising. Some affiliate platforms let you make SubIDs—customized link elements that direct customers to specific features or places on your website—such as custom-designed landing pages. Each affiliate link is associated with a cookie (internet name tags that allow websites to recognize you), which can be traced back to the associated affiliate.

4. Customize the URL

Many affiliate platforms allow you to customize your affiliate link URLs. Most auto-generated URLs are random strings of letters and numbers. Customizing your affiliate links means you can make them more memorable for customers (and less complicated). For example, the Amazon affiliate program generates a custom URL product link for each affiliate in its program. While this isn’t a essential step, it can be a enjoyable touch for your affiliates and their readers.

5. Define the promotion

Define the promotional structure that best motivates your affiliates and your potential customers. This could include:

• Tying links to promo discounts or giveaways
• Deciding which channels are high-priority for the campaign
• Determining if the campaign is evergreen or period-based (for example, campaigns that run for a limited period only might make a sense of urgency to click on affiliate links)

Experiment with your percentage structure to discover the proper yield on your resource. The Federal Trade percentage (FTC) requires affiliate partners to disclose their connection to your product or service.

💡Tip: If you don’t have the period or capacity to manage your own affiliate marketing program, consider hiring an affiliate manager to oversee your affiliate campaigns. They can recruit recent affiliates, manage onboarding, and provide customer service on your behalf.

Your business needs an affiliate program

Affiliate programs are an effective way to drive ecommerce traffic, develop sales, back your marketing campaigns, and boost awareness for your brand. With little to no overhead costs for marketing, it’s relatively straightforward to commence an affiliate program.

Key steps include identifying your niche trade, researching affiliates that are the best fit your brand (or collaborate with an affiliate network), and creating affiliate links to assist your business construct turnover and your affiliates earn commissions.