Author: Hassaan Khan

Affiliate marketing is a lucrative monetization method for bloggers and marketers. However, affiliate marketing isn’t just for bloggers and marketers. YouTubers, podcasters, and live streamers also make money off of affiliate marketing. If you’re looking for affiliate marketing guidelines, you’re at the right place as I’m about to spill the beans.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular money-making strategies in the online marketing world. However, most blogging beginners start their blog monetization through Google AdSense or a similar ad network, but later on, transit towards affiliate marketing. 

Affiliate marketing comes in handy for beginners who can’t make a ton of money on ad networks due to fewer monthly page views on their blogs. Therefore, the majority of them pursue affiliate marketing to find a better ad alternative.

You don’t always need a blog or website to make money with affiliate marketing. Instead, you can use multiple platforms to promote products and make money. I have a bunch of ideas in mind to share with you so that you could make the most of your affiliate marketing campaign.

Let me tell you a fact right off the bat: it doesn’t work out for every blogger or content creator. You’d find some affiliate marketers complain about the conversion. On the flip side, some affiliate marketers go gaga over this money-making strategy. It all comes down to finding the secret sauce that works for you.

Don’t worry, I’ll try to my level best to help you understand how to develop a perfect synergy between your affiliate offers and content to make the most of this monetization opportunity.

Some of you might be beginners in affiliate marketing, so the chances are, you don’t have a clear idea of affiliate marketing. Don’t panic as I’ll dig deeper into the topic and share some fundamental steps that would take your affiliate marketing to the next level.

But first things first, you should know the basics.

How Affiliate Marketing Works?

It’s a process of promoting the products and earning commissions when people buy through affiliate links. The majority of affiliate programs don’t have strict requirements and pretty much anyone can join them. However, a website or blog or social media account is mandatory in some programs. They make sure that only legitimate and serious marketers join in. 

Furthermore, some companies have an affiliate program limited to their paid customers, which means you can’t get access to their affiliate program unless you buy their product. In most cases, there aren’t any hard and fast rules for someone to join the affiliate marketing program. 

Moreover, all brands define their own terms of use that affiliate marketers must agree and oblige to for being a part of the program. There are several clauses in the terms of use, but one of the most important ones is that the brand has the right to terminate the affiliate marketer’s participation over any suspicious activity or violation of the terms of use.

That’s it.

Keep reading because you’re about to find out:

• How a beginner can get started with affiliate marketing
• Where you can promote affiliate products to earn commissions
• How much affiliate marketers can earn from a single affiliate sale
• How to choose the best affiliate product to promote
• How to get more clicks and sales in affiliate marketing

So if you’re serious about your affiliate marketing initiative, then don’t miss out on the steps I’m going to share with you.

Without any further ado, let’s get right into it.

A Step-by-Step Guide on Starting Affiliate Marketing

Here we go:

#1: Choose Your Niche

To make sure you’re off to a good start, choose your niche wisely. It’s a prerequisite not just for starting successful niche websites, but it’s also for authority blogs. 

The niche is a category or genre of the blog or website, which determines the type of content a reader can expect on the blog or website. 

A niche website or blog caters to a specific audience by solving their problems through their content.

A website’s niche and affiliate marketing success go hand in hand. It’s essential to choose the right niche. Otherwise, it’s highly unlikely that you’d rank on the first page in the SERP as it’s impossible to dominate the niche without having know-how on the subject.

Some multiple factors and metrics influence the search engine ranking. Nobody exactly knows what all of those factors and metrics are, so most bloggers and digital marketers kept on testing different techniques.

The more you bring the right audience to your website, the easier it would become to make money from your affiliate website. However, delivering value through your content makes a lot of difference. 

Affiliate marketing works on trust, authority, and reputation. People usually don’t buy recommended products quickly. Instead, they do their due diligence before opting for the product. Therefore, if your emphasis is selling, you might end up suffering in the long run.

There are two parameters of choosing the right niche:

• Exposure

It’s impossible to randomly choose a niche and grow a website. Bloggers and affiliate marketers get their hands dirty before they start to make money with affiliate marketing. You can’t promote a product if you haven’t had some experience with it. The experience gives you the exposure which differentiates an expert user and a rookie. Always try to get familiar with the product you’re going to promote. 

I’m a big fan of the ContentStudio tool; it’s my go-to software for scheduling social media posts. When I wanted to write the ContentStudio review on my blog, I started using it so that I could write the review with an authoritative voice. I didn’t want to write a review right off the bat. After using it for a while, I sat down to write the review. I’m not subscribed to the mentality of writing content just for the sake of publishing it. I always put my heart and soul into every piece of content. You can’t sign up for a new tool and instantly write a review.

So make yourself familiar with the niche before you jump into it. Don’t hesitate to invest a little bit of money into trying out the stuff before you talk about it on the blog. It’ll give you the exposure that might turn things around for you. 

• Strength

The strength means you have an interest in something or it’s your skill. It’s essential to choose a niche that’s your strength. If you play soccer and you have the basic knowledge of the game, and you start a blog about ice skating, which you haven’t done in your life, then it won’t be a wise decision.

Anyway, my niche is freelancing; I mostly write about freelancing on and off the platforms.

You can see most of the articles on my blog revolve around the freelancing niche. It didn’t happen on a whim, but instead, I discovered my blogging niche along the way. I kept on publishing content on the blog and freelancing-related content took off.

Plus, people reach out to me to ask freelancing questions all the time, so I decided to pay close attention to what people want from me. And, that’s how I choose my blog’s niche. 

Hence, it’s vital to choose the blog niche based on the exposure or strength to earn money from affiliate marketing. 

#2: Handpick online platforms

Affiliate marketing success isn’t possible without a bunch of tools and platforms. You got to be careful with the selection of tools and platforms. Presumably, you’re an affiliate marketing beginner and trying to hone in on your online money-making craft.

The most important tool for affiliate marketing is the primary platform. In most cases, bloggers and affiliate marketers choose a blog. So I’ll stick to the blog as our main tool for publishing, but I’d shed some light on other options too.

Once you’ve chosen your niche and you’re crystal clear on the audience targeting, the next move should be handpicking the online platforms to put out content and build an audience.

It’s the most crucial part of the process. You might find affiliate marketers solely rely on the YouTube or Facebook page, but you must future-proof your affiliate marketing business. 

There are different ways to go about it, but most of you might be first-timers. I’d highly recommend setting up a publishing platform as well as a social media platform to start on the right foot. 

Let’s take a look at the publishing and social media platforms:

Publishing platforms

There are various publishing platforms out there, but here are three of the most common ones:

• WordPress [Recommended]

You can either choose the wordpress.com platform or self-hosted wordpress.org to launch your website. WordPress is by far the most popular content management system out there. According to an SEJ’s article, the data revealed by W3Techs showed that WordPress powers 39.5% of overall websites.

• Squarespace

It’s an online website builder which allows users to create websites without having any coding knowledge whatsoever. It’s a drag and drop-based tool for businesses, e-commerce stores, bloggers, and entrepreneurs.

• Medium

Medium has a publication feature that lets you set up your blog on the Medium platform. Affiliate marketers and bloggers could use the Medium publication for putting out content.

Jeff Bullas is a popular blogger and marketer. He publishes content and promotes products on the blog as well:

There are hundreds of thousands of such examples of beginner and expert-level bloggers who primarily use blogs to earn money from affiliate marketing.

Social media platforms

Affiliate marketers drive traffic and attract a new audience through social media. Not only do they run social media ads, but also engage the audience through sharing content. Let’s take a look at three wildly popular social media platforms among affiliate marketers:

• YouTube

YouTube is famous for bringing a lot of eyeballs to the business. The secret to winning at YouTube is making videos that the prospective audience might be interested in and then use the description box to further engage the audience. Affiliate marketers put the landing pages and affiliate product links in the YouTube description and earn a lot of money from affiliate marketing. 

• Quora

Quora is one of the most underrated social media platforms that could bring website traffic to your platform. It’s a questioning and answering platform that allows you to put links into your answers. Make sure that you aren’t misusing the links feature as its spam detection is quite effective. Your account could get banned over spamming. Affiliate marketers don’t share direct affiliate links on Quora, but instead, they occasionally add content links that may contain affiliate products. 

• Facebook

Facebook is a major social media player on the market. Affiliate marketers tend to build communities mostly in Facebook groups. They don’t focus much on getting sales by sharing links, but instead, they nurture the audience and drive them to the website from time to time. So don’t underestimate the power of Facebook groups; they’re very much relevant, active, and effective.

There are several other publishing and social media platforms out there which you should explore, but the above-mentioned are quite popular among pro-bloggers and expert affiliate marketers. 

Here’s an example of creating a community on social media.

Problogger is a popular blogging tips blog founded by Darren Rowse. He is an Australian blogger, author, and public speaker. 

Problogger has an active Facebook group of over 29k members. It’s a community where bloggers communicate, interact, and help each other out:

You won’t essentially find a team of Problogger pushing ProBlogger content or products all the time, but instead, they rarely share offers or announcements from Problogger. It’s mostly fans and readers that interact.

The point is that choose your platforms and stick with them. You’ll eventually start to see traction over time. And once the traction happens, it starts to drive affiliate sales as well.

#3: Do keyword research

Keywords have a significant role in establishing an effective affiliate marketing strategy whether you’re a blogger or YouTuber. However, the caveat is that it’s nearly impossible to find the exact keywords data. According to SEO experts, even the most popular keyword tools aren’t accurate when it comes to the number of searches against keywords. Don’t worry, you can still do keyword research. Here’s how:

Once you’re done with the niche and platform selection, the next up is keyword research. I’m not a fan of traditional keyword research through keyword tools. However, I’ll share some top-notch keywords tools that SEOs and content marketers use for finding the keywords. 

On the flip side, I’m more into search analysis through different ways, which I’ll uncover shortly. Before I mention the popular keyword research tool, I want to shed some light on the idea of doing keyword research. 

Most SEOs put in the keyword in the keyword research tool and look at the competition and number of searches. It’s also a fact that the number of searchers can’t be accurate since only Google holds that information. 

Therefore, I follow a different approach called search analysis. The way how it works is that we analyze the search query through certain ways and create content around that. 

A) Autocomplete

Autocomplete is Google’s intelligent search feature which provides recommendations upon typing in half of the search query. It usually recommends the search terms that are popular among the searchers, meaning people are using those search terms.

Analyzing what Google Autocomplete is suggesting gives you a good idea of what people need to know. Using those search terms in the content or writing content around those topics could bring a lot of search traffic. 

Tip: the same autocomplete strategy also works for YouTube search.

B) Google Trends

The second most important part of the search analysis is looking at Google Trends. Go to Google Trends and type in your search term or keyword. If you’re using an upward trend or numbers are taking off, then it means there is a demand for this topic or keyword, and you can focus on this.

If Google Trends analysis doesn’t show any traction whatsoever, then you should think twice before covering that topic or keyword in your content. 

C) Popular Content

Thirdly, analyze your popular content in Google Analytics or any other tracking software you use for your analytics. I use Google Analytics for analyzing the site performance as well as finding the top pages of my website in terms of page views. It helps me focus on the right topics and understanding the popularity of my content.

You can double-down on the popular content, meaning create similar content of what already working and gain momentum. Not only would it increase your page views, but it would also increase your ads and affiliate revenues. 

That’s my search analysis approach. I know a lot of bloggers and affiliate marketers follow the same approach.

However, you can try out the typical keyword research tools, but I won’t recommend relying only on the keyword research tools:

Here are three popular keyword research and SEO tools: 

• Ahrefs
• Long Tail Pro
• MarketMuse
• SEMRUSH

Once you find a bunch of keywords through keyword research tools and search analysis, get down to writing some top-notch articles and publish them along the way. 

#4: Select affiliate products

Affiliate marketers and bloggers have mixed opinions about the timing of selecting affiliate products. There isn’t a right or wrong way of doing it. 

Some expert bloggers and affiliate marketers think it’s wise to focus completely on finding the right topics/keyword and rank the articles in the SERP. On the other hand, a lot of bloggers teach and preach to choose the affiliate products beforehand. I tend to focus on the latter. 

It’s good to have a list of products in mind before getting down to writing articles in bulk. I have done the mistake of writing articles in bulk without keeping the affiliate products in mind. So I have learned this lesson the hard way.

One of my blogs has 81 blog posts published so far, and more than 80% of the blog posts get fewer visitors every month. The good thing is that I realized my mistake a while ago and started focusing on the right topics, and it’s changing the trajectory of this blog. 

So here are three recommendations on selecting the affiliate products:

• Relevance:

Keep the relevance factor in mind while selecting the affiliate products for your blog or another platform. It means the product must have coherence with the content. You can’t promote a juicer machine on a mortgage blog.

• Personal Experience:

A personal experience with the products goes a long way. You can’t talk about a product with confidence if you haven’t had a chance to try it out. On the contrary, when you have experience of using the product, you can share the details with authority because you know the product inside out. 

• Affordability:

Pricing matters in the affiliate products’ conversion rate. If you’re targeting beginners through your content, but promoting $500 to $800 products, it won’t work out. You have to keep the price affordability factor in mind while choosing the affiliate products.

Here are some of the popular affiliate marketing networks to find the affiliates:

1. ShareASale
2. Impact
3. FlexOffers
4. DigiStore24
5. JVZOO
6. ClickBank

#5: Put out content

Putting out content means publishing content online to attract, engage, and convert the audience. It’s nearly impossible to generate affiliate sales without putting out content. 

Some affiliate marketing gurus create email marketing funnels and use online advertising to drive traffic. It could work as much as any other strategy, but the problem is that the majority of us won’t be able to spend a thousand dollars right off the bat. Therefore, putting out content essential becomes a viable option to pursue.

Once you have done some due diligence on the keywords and topic clusters to target, it means you’re all set for creating content. You’d primarily be using written content, but you’d also need to use other types of content along the way.

Let me breakdown different articles you should be writing on the blog to boost your affiliate marketing sales:

• Informational content:

These are types of articles that would purely be providing information to the audience. For instance, if you have a furniture blog, then an article like “how to clean your sofa without hiring an expert” could be an informational piece of content.

• Buyer guides:

Buyer guides are typically product guidelines that explain to buyers about the products and help them make a buying decision. Such articles could focus on both single or multiple products. Furthermore, these articles are intended for generating affiliate sales.

• Response posts:

Response posts are published to cater to audience questions that are discovered through search analysis, keyword research, and audience feedback. 

The story doesn’t end here, but instead, you shouldn’t just rely on the text content. Stretch your content plan further towards other types of content such as videos and images. 

Use the power of image platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram. These platforms are massive from an attention standpoint. A lot of bloggers use Pinterest to drive traffic to their blogs and websites. 

Similarly, YouTube is the second most popular search engine. Use the videos to drive traffic to your website as well as generate affiliate sales. 

Income School once revealed a brand new YouTube channel in their video that they started around shooting sport.

The channel took off fairly nicely; they were able to get 9k subscribers in just four months. It didn’t end here because they also shared that they were able to generate a lot of affiliate sales through that YouTube channel. So it just validates my point of using a platform like YouTube to build a brand and generate affiliate sales.

#6: Run SEO and outreach campaigns

Affiliate marketing seems easy on the outside, but it’s quite tricky on the inside. If you ever come across someone who is making a good income from blogs or niche websites through affiliate marketing, then investigate what else that marketer is doing to stay ahead of others.

There are competition analysis and spying software such as Semrush and Spyfu that marketers and companies use to dominate search ranking.

What I mean is that most affiliate marketers whether they’re running authority blogs or niche websites build links from time to time even if link building isn’t an important part of their strategy. 

Many bloggers believe that some niches are competitive enough that it’s becoming harder to outsmart the competition without building a few quality backlinks.

For instance, Carl Broadbent is a British blogger who asked an SEO company to analyze his niche website and report back on ranking against a search term. The SEO company revealed that top-ranking sites against that search term have 60 DA on average and his site needs 250 backlinks to compete with them. 

What I’m saying is that I’m a big advocate of getting backlinks naturally, but in some cases, you need a little push to leap. Most affiliate marketers I know take link building very seriously, but they never compromise on the quality of the content. 

You don’t need to spend money on outreach for SEO if you’re just a beginner, but if your site is taking off rather slowly due to fierce competition, then you could try out an outreach marketing strategy to see how it works out for you.

It doesn’t necessarily mean you should completely ignore on-page SEO. I’d highly recommend paying close attention to the following on-page SEO elements:

• Page loading speed
• Keywords targeting
• Topic clusters
• Page caching
• Images compression
• In-depth content

#7: Add social media shareability

You have to have a social media sharing strategy in your mix. What I mean by adding social media shareability is that you should create a system of maximizing social media.

You might not be aware of the power of social media posts when it comes to readers’ engagement. Have you ever heard of the phrase “social proof”?

Social proof is a public validation from the audience which puts any product or brand in the good books. People don’t share bad content because nobody cares about it. Plus, if you keep pushing hard bad content, people consider it spam and may start to unfollow you.

It’s vital to know for affiliate marketers how to leverage social media to their advantage. Clearly, shoving low-quality content down the followers’ throat doesn’t work out for anyone. 

Here are four things you can do to make the most of social media:

• Create compelling yet useful content:

To make sure that your content gets shared by followers, you must create helpful and effective content for the audience. A high-quality content works like a charm, for instance, you never know who comes across your content and shares it to hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. Similarly, when good-quality content gets ranked or goes viral on social media, it also brings backlinks, which plays a vital role in building site authority.

• Engage followers on social media:

Engagement matters a lot on social media. What happens is that when someone engages with your content, their followers or friends get notified on the social media platform. Thus, it exposes your content to more people. That’s how engagement brings in more eyeballs and attention.

•  Make sharing easier for the readers:

Adding social media sharing buttons that are visible on both desktop and mobile versions of the site goes a long way. When a blog doesn’t have social media sharing buttons, it’s highly unlikely that most readers would go the extra mile to share the content. Sharing a piece of content through a sharing button is much easier than copying the link and title manually and then pasting it onto the social media platform. So add social media sharing buttons to your blog.

•  Share others’ content for more attention

Everyone shares their own content, but sharing others’ content puts you on the pedestal. When you share others’ content on social media, not only does it bring value to the followers, but it also helps the original creator of the content.

Replug is a top-notch link shortener that provides click tracking feature to its users. It’s an excellent link optimization platform for bringing the audience back to your website. When you shorten an article’s link and share it on your social media, the followers start to click-through and land on the article. Furthermore, they’ll see a small pop-up of yours that could take them to your website or profile.

So the takeaway from this step is that it’s good to focus on the keywords selection and putting out valuable content that people like to share, but it shouldn’t end here. Instead, making it easier for the audience to share your content does the trick.

Affiliate marketing success doesn’t only achieve by putting out content. Otherwise, every single affiliate marketer would have been a millionaire. One of the secrets of affiliate marketing success is assisting the audience whether it’s through a free ebook or by recommending a suitable product. Once you start doing that, you won’t be an affiliate marketing failure.

#8: Analyze site performance

No matter what approach of content creation, SEO, and affiliate marketing you adopt, you would ultimately need to analyze your campaign’s performance at some point. Otherwise, you won’t be able to find conclusive evidence of what’s working and what’s not working on your website.

So it’s important to do a little bit of sniff testing after deploying the strategies, but don’t start analyzing the performance of your website after a week or so. Give a good one month before you start examining the performance.

Here are three key indicators that you should look out for in your affiliate site performance analysis:

• Clickability:

Analyze the number of overall clicks on your links; you can use the heatmap tools as well as check out the clicks on your in-content affiliate links. If the number of clicks is rising every month, then it’s a good sign.

• Conversion Rate:

The conversion rate is the most important indicator to see whether or not your site is performing well. If your affiliate sales are increasing, then it means your tactics are working. In some cases, clicks increase but conversion doesn’t go up, it usually indicates that there is a problem with the audience targeting. Simply put, the right visitors aren’t landing on your website, so you need to fix your content strategy.

• Total Pageviews

The number of pageviews is also an essential indicator of how well or poor your search analysis, SEO strategies, and audience engagement are on the site. When page views increase and you’re bringing the right audience to your site, you’d surely see an increase in clickability and conversion rate. 

Affiliate marketing beginners must know when and how to analyze their affiliate marketing strategies. I don’t want to indulge you in the analysis paralysis, but you should analyze your blog monetization strategies once every quarter. 

Did you learn something about affiliate marketing?

I have shared the lessons I learned over the course of 10 years. Had I known all these things a decade ago, a lot would have been different for me today. 

That’s why I shared all these affiliate marketing strategies for beginners so passionately because I know it could turn the table around for anyone who is getting started.

I’m curious to know whether or not you’re taking away something valuable from this blog post. 

Please do me a favor and let me know in the comments section.

Did this blog post on affiliate marketing help you in some way?

Over 10 years of blogging has taught me a million things about launching, optimizing, growing, increasing CTR and selling websites. What if I told you figuring out two things that could turn things around for you? The first is “how to bring visitors to your site” and the second is “how to push them to click on your website.”

If you have been running a website, you’d know that clickability is a massive factor of engagement and conversion. You can’t sell your product or convert a reader into a subscriber if visitors aren’t clicking. It does look so simple on the outside, but it’s a game-changer in conversion optimization.

What if your website visitors don’t know where to click? Or what if they know what exactly you’re offering but they don’t want it?

Wait. No need to feel depressed.

I’ll walk you through the whole process that will surely help you maximize the website conversion. All you need is to be ready to churn the information I’ll throw at you as I’ve got several ways to increase CTR to improve your website conversion.

You should know that every e-commerce store, website owner, and blogger wants more conversion on the website. Some improve their website designs, while others internally link their website pages. The goal remains the same; they want prospects to convert into paying customers.

But when visitors aren’t clicking anywhere on the website, then it got to be something wrong with the website. The primary suspects could be the website speed that may be affecting the ranking, the quality of content that isn’t impressing the readers, or the wrong audience targeting that result in producing irrelevant content.

If you’re wondering why it would matter so much, then you should know that less or no clickability affects a lot of things, such as:

• Total page views
• Email list growth
• Affiliate commissions
• Product sales

Since we’re discussing how we can improve the click-through rate for better conversion, it’s imperative to know where website visitors are clicking and where you want them to click. Placing a banner ad on the sidebar or installing an exit-intent won’t make a difference unless you aren’t getting the right traffic to your blog or website.

In the online marketing world, click-through rate (CTR) is crucial to understand various factors that indicate whether or not the content strategy is working, and those factors include but limited to:

• The intent of the publisher mirrors in the way content is presented
• The interest of the visitors in your content is determined by the engagement
• Relevance to the audience reflects in the bounce rate report
• Quality of the content can be judged through the conversion

So we’ve established that it’s necessary to have clickability on our website or blog. Therefore, now you need to know is how you can increase clickability on your site.

Let’s head over to the cream of this article.

7 Ways to Increase CTR for Better Conversion on the Website

Let’s change the way website visitors respond to your websites and blogs for the better. Take a look at the methods to increase CTR on your website:

1. Link to sales page multiple times
   One of the common mistakes website owners and bloggers make is that they add a single call-to-action button or link once to their sales page in the article. They should know that it isn’t going to cut it. On the other side, what smart marketers do is that they use psychology to push visitors to click-through by adding multiple call-to-actions.
   
   It’s human nature that when something appears frequently, it goes into our subconscious mind and influences our behaviours. Brands know this very well. They’d spend millions of dollars on TV commercials, social media ads, and influencer marketing to build brand recognition.
   
   The point I’m trying to make is that you need to link to your sales pages more often. This linking shouldn’t be limited to the blog posts, but instead, you can do this in other content mediums as well. Here’s how you can link to sales pages on various platforms:
   
   Since our goal here is to improve the website conversion, so the first thing you should do is start linking to your sales page more often.
   
   When I promote products, I tend to link to those affiliate products more often.
   
   

   Take a look at the example:
   
   Ever since I started linking to the affiliate promotes multiple times in the blog post, my conversion rate needle has started to move. So don’t waste this opportunity to improve your CTR on the site.

   Add various call-to-action buttons on the website. You can try out multiple CTA variations such as buy now, free trial, sign-up now, get access, et cetera. It increases the clickability when the call-to-action button appears in multiple places on the website pages.
   
   Link to money pages multiple times in the articles. One of the underrated engagement techniques that bloggers and digital marketers don’t capitalize on is linking to money pages. Income School once revealed that they increased their conversion just by adding links multiple times in the blog posts.
   
   Mention CTA at least twice in a podcast so that the listeners could remember your brand or offer once they finish listening to the podcast. I’m a big fan of podcasts, and I know how much attention listeners pay to their favourite content. Almost every podcaster has a specific call-to-action, whether it’s a freebie or a discount coupon.
   
   Highlight the product at the beginning and at the end of the video. Video is a popular content type on social media. So when you put out a video on YouTube or Facebook, try to plug in the call-to-action at the beginning as well as at the end of the video.
2. Add a comparison table
   
   You got to be on your toes when you’re trying to increase your website click-through rate. There are several factors that determine how good or bad your clickability is going to be on the website.
   
   One of the key factors is “stopping people from leaving your site.”So when you essentially stop people from leaving your website, then it means they’re either enjoying your content or interested in your product. Therefore, you have to try out every single method to stop people from hopping to another website.
   
   Adding a comparison table is a fantastic way to retain the visitors on the page and engage them further on your website. What comparison tables do is that they provide data, statistics, or specs, which essentially help the website to keep the visitors engaged.
   
   It’s easier to engage the website visitors when they’re digging deeper into the information you’ve provided in the content.
   
   There are various comparison tables you can create to make this engagement happen:
   i) Products comparison
   ii) Pros and cons of a product
   iii) Head-to-Head brands analysis
   iv) Different variants of a productIt reminded me of the Wirecutter website; it’s a product review website that puts out a lot of content related to IT, tech, and gaming. They’re so good at using comparison tables.
   
   

   

   
   Take a look at the comparison table from Wirecutter:The point is that sometimes when you need compelling information or data to tie readers to your content. The longer they stay on your website, the higher the chance of clickability.
   
   However, in some cases, you need some call-to-action in your tables, for instance, read more or buy now to make sure that the engaged visitors take action. So don’t let go of any chance you get to retain the audience on your website.
   
3. Use attractive call-to-action buttons
   
   The attractive call-to-action buttons have a lot to do with the click-through rate on the sign-up pages and online forms. Besides building a narrative, it also sends out a psychological message to the viewer. Digital marketers, web developers, and bloggers know how important the text, colour, and size of the call-to-action buttons are. Therefore, they pay close attention to testing out various versions of the call-to-action buttons.
   
   The importance of building attractive CTA buttons isn’t limited to websites, but they also matter in online ads and mobile app interfaces. Have you ever wondered what makes good CTA buttons better than the average CTA buttons? Here are three key factors that differentiate good and bad CTA buttons:
   
   i) Intent
   The CTAs must align with the intent of the publisher. Suppose a blog is about making money online, and the CTA button is about health and fitness, then it won’t work. There has to be coherence between the content and the text of the CTA button.
   
   ii) Clarity
   It’s true that mundane and regular CTA buttons go unnoticed, for instance, “get updates” and “subscribe” are the most common ones. Sometimes, websites and blogs try to fashion CTA buttons and end up writing a word or phrase that doesn’t give out a clear sign of what to expect from the sign-up process. So try creating a clear CTA button that helps the visitor in moving forward.
   
   iii) Message
   A core element of the CTA button is the message it carries. Not only it matters in understanding the context but also influences the clicks. The clearer the message, the better the CTA.
   
   Call-to-action buttons are essential everywhere on your online real estate whether it’s a website, newsletter, landing page, or article copy.
   
   The team at Elegant Themes understands the importance of attractive call-to-action buttons.
   
   
   Look at the CTA button in one of their newsletters:
   
   They used a rather large CTA button and clearly hinted “read the full blog post” on the call-to-action button, which explains the point.
   
   
   Similarly, Appsumo also has an interesting call-to-action button on a popup option box:
   
   Not only did they use the discount offer in the CTA button, but they’re also using a contrast colour for their call-to-action button.
   
   

   Both of these examples sum up what I’m trying to tell you, which is to make attractive call-to-action buttons for more clickability and better conversion.

4. Maximize internal linking in the content
   Internal linking is a vital SEO tactic to keep visitors engaged and tell search engine bots about the relevance of your content pages. SEO experts and bloggers internally link their content or pages because it transfers link juice to other pages as well as keeps visitors and bots remain on the site.If you have done SEO before, you might have an idea of what internal linking does to any blog or site.
   
   On the contrary, if SEO isn’t your cup of tea, then you might not have paid much attention to it.Anyway, I’ll be keeping it digestible for you. The reason I’m discussing internal linking is simple: it increases click-through rate and engagement on the site.
   
   Does this mean you should internally link your pages even if they aren’t relevant?
   
   The answer is no.
   
   You shouldn’t do internal linking of the pages that aren’t relevant or won’t be helping the readers.When your website visitors get engaged on the site, they either convert into a lead or buy the product. The key here is to somehow keep the visitors busy on your site.The following three elements ensure that your internal linking strategy bear fruit:
   
   i)Content Relevance
   The internal linking doesn’t matter if you aren’t linking to the relevant content. If you’re connecting two pages for the sake of internal linking, and there is no justification whatsoever, then the reader who would end up clicking on the link might not feel clicking on any other link. So keep the content relevant in mind.
   
   ii)Problem-solving Info
   Your blog posts must be solving the problem. It does look so simple, but in reality, it’s not that easy. First, you’d have to identify a problem, and then you’d have to come up with a solution. Internal linking comes naturally in the content curation and creation process when you’re absolutely sure about the resources you’re linking out to in your content. Remember that the mission is to solve a problem, not to link out to other pages or resources. Once you keep this mindset, you’d succeed in internal linking.
   
   iii)Clean Page Layout
   Some of you might not agree with this, but I do believe that a clean page layout is worth it. If your blog post or website page is cluttered with ads, popups, and opt-in forms, then visitors might leave the site without clicking on any link. Don’t underestimate the power of having a clean layout on your site.
   
   
   Copyblogger does internal linking so well:I have been noticing their internal linking strategy for a long time. Often they hyperlink a full phrase, while sometimes they hyperlink a single word.
   
   
   
   Hubspot is a popular inbound software services company. If you want to learn the basics of content marketing, you should follow their editorial techniques.They nail it with their internal linking as well.So what I’m trying to say is that internal link your pages and blog post wisely. Remember that the core reason behind internal linking is the delivery of value, not just drag the reader from one page to another. Once the readers start to discover helpful and meaningful resources through your internal linking, they’re likely to trust your content more than ever.
5. Reduce banner ads on the page
   Most beginner bloggers don’t realize that adding more banner ads on the page could drastically reduce the clickability on the website, let alone reduce conversion. Understandably, they want to make quick bucks, so they put a lot of banner ads on the site.
   
   As a result, they may end up getting a few clicks on their ads, but they could potentially lose the visitors they’d leave the site and land on the advertiser’s website.
   
   One of the disadvantages of having a bunch of banner ads on a site is that visitors’ attention gets diverted towards the banner ads. Seemingly, it could reduce clicks on the internal links.
   
   Furthermore, having more banner ads on your website means your page loading speed would increase, and that doesn’t just affect the user experience, but it could also affect your SEO.
   
   
   Take a look at the screenshot from Millennial Money blog:It’s one of those blogs that have a minimalistic approach when it comes to their website designs. What I like about the Millennial Money blog is that they don’t have a single opt-in box or a banner ad on the sidebar of the blog posts. There are so many other blogs out there who follow the same approach.
   
   So what we take away from this example is that sometimes having less number of banner ads could also lead to getting more clicks or higher conversion through internal links.
   
6. Make your text links standout
   
   It’s fascinating to understand that users’ behaviour changes when our strategies to engage them to change. Plus, how small changes make a huge difference in the conversion rate and clickability.
   
   So I’m about to share another element of content marketing that would help you increase your website CTR, and therefore, impact the conversion.You’re putting out great content on the blog and you have a fantastic internal linking strategy, but if your links aren’t prominent enough, then it’s a problem.
   
   I’ve seen several blogs that don’t have a distinctive colour for their in-text hyperlinks, which prohibits the links from standing out from the rest of the content.It’s necessary to know why we need to make our text links stand out in the first place. The reason is that we want clickability on the website and blog. Therefore, we add a bunch of internal links along with affiliate links and outbound links.
   
   The goal is to push readers to click on all types of clicks so that they go ahead and complete a specific action.
   
   When a website gets more clicks, the following things happen as a result:
   
   i) The website or blog gets more page views
   ii) The engagement increases on the site
   iii) More chances of affiliate conversion get created
   iv)Display ads generate more money due to page viewsSo to make your text links stand, you need to choose the right combination of the following things:
   Font: The font of the blog or website must be clean and decent. The font style and size play a vital role in pushing readers to read the blog or leave the page early on without finishing the blog post.
   Text colour: After the website’s font, the next thing is the text colour, which should be prominent and in contrast to the body of the website body. It’s usually black in most of the blogs and websites.
   Link colour: The link colour is a big decider of how clear and appealing a hyperlink appears in the content. If the link colour is the same as the colour of the text, it might hurt the clickability on the links.
   Site template: The blog or website templates have settings where you can change the font size, colour, and hyperlink settings. You can adjust the text link colour if it doesn’t seem appropriate to you.
   
   
   Look at the screenshot from the Kinsta blog:It seems like they know about this so well. When I was going through their blog content, their hyperlinks were looking so catchy and clickable. The reason is clear, which is they’re standing out.Try experimenting with your text link colours. If you have no idea where to change the colour of your hyperlinks in your site’s CSS, consult a website developer for this task. It’ll only take a few minutes to change it.

7. Use a Short Branded URL

Most of you would think, how come a short branded URL would bring website visitors or increase click-through rate? Well, all I can say is that you should keep reading.

First things first, what’s the short branded URL? If you have no idea what exactly a short branded URL is, then let me tell you. It’s a short version of the same domain with a different extension. Companies use short branded URL versions to reduce the length of the links as well as record different statistics.

If you’re into affiliate marketing, you might have noticed that Amazon and ShareASale allow users to generate the short URL of the affiliate products to promote.

The exciting part is that any company or blog can use a short branded URL. Now you’d think, why would someone want to use a short branded URL?

The answer is that a short branded URL could increase your CTR as well as land more website visitors on your website.

Well, Replug is a fantastic short URL shortener that does so much more than just creating shorten links. Not only does it allow users to use branded URL, but it also helps users drive visitors to their websites.

If you’re a social media expert or a pro-blogger, you might want to get your hands on this tool. Here’s why: when users shorten the article URLs with Replug.io and share on social media, and their followers click on the short links and land on the articles, they also see a small snippet of the users that could bring those random visitors to their websites.

What it means is that you’re sharing others’ valuable content with your followers after shortening the article URLs with Replug, and those articles could bring people to your website as well.

As a result, you could increase CTR on your website and end up improving your website conversion.

Did You Learn Something New About Increasing CTR on the Website?

I’ve shared seven ways to increase CTR on your website for better conversion. The goal was to help you out by sharing tactics that push visitors to click-through on your website.

I’m sure you’re going to take away a couple of strategies from this blog post. I’ll be thrilled to know what strategies you liked the most. Feel free to share what else readers should do to increase CTR on the website.

Furthermore, if you learned something good from this blog post, do let us know in the comments below.