By Hanan Maayan, Co-founder and CEO
Cha-ching! That’s the sound of your content making money for you. Want to learn the trick?
Today’s fast-moving world of digital media is competitive, so advertising alone doesn’t deliver as much revenue as before. Publishers found numerous ways to monetize content but still struggle to craft an ideal combination of channels and methods.
At the same time, the decline in publishers’ revenue introduced new technologies and monetization ideas. Publishers like you test new strategies and integrate dozens of tools to measure performance, but staying ahead of the latest ways to cultivate new revenue streams is still challenging. See your content monetization options and learn how to shuffle them into a solid, revenue-generating strategy.
What’s content monetization and why is it important?
The whole idea of content monetization started from traditional affiliate marketing. Today brands and publishers power their programs via modern affiliate management tools.
The term “content monetization” implies many possible strategies and channels. You may have heard of methods including:
- Native advertising (like Taboola and Outbrain)
- Sponsored content
- Programmatic/display advertising (like Adsense)
- Influencer marketing
- Automated affiliate link services (such as Skimlinks)
You’ve likely heard the phrase “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” This phrase also applies to content monetization. If you want to craft a strong strategy with backup options and proven methods, you’ll need to use multiple channels to get maximum results for your program. The suitable model depends on your audience, vertical, and program maturity.
Why you should use affiliate links for monetization
If you’ve read even one murder mystery novel, you know that the answer to any question is usually the simplest. In this case, affiliate links are the first proven solution for publishers to generate revenue.
Affiliate links have been at the heart of content marketing for several decades. Though it may seem like an outdated solution compared to all the innovative tools in the industry, don’t overlook it just yet. Of all the channels in the marketing mix, affiliate partnerships still bring brands up to 30 percent of their total revenue.
Automated affiliate marketing has many other benefits that complement its easy-to-use, foolproof nature. Let’s see four reasons why using affiliate links to monetize your online content can be a lucrative strategy.
1. You can shape your readers’ experience
“A satisfied customer is the best strategy of all,” business writer Michael LeBoeuf once said. In this case, your best strategy is to satisfy your readers. Affiliate marketing provides a reliable revenue stream that doesn’t compromise this core mission.
Readers consume online information to meet their needs. They want to learn about a topic, find relevant products, compare different offers, and so on. Creating content around those needs can incorporate contextual and relevant affiliate links to make money.
Affiliate links don’t look like advertising or automated marketing solutions. Instead, it’s a helpful recommendation or advice to the reader that generates value. That creates a sense of authenticity and strengthens the reader’s trust in the publisher and the brands they promote.
Once readers stumble upon a helpful recommendation and buy the linked product, they’ll remember that valuable experience and turn to you, the publisher, for even more suggestions. If you use affiliate links in your content, you’ll receive a commission from these purchases while benefiting from the trusting relationship you’ll develop with your readers.
2. You can measure the impact of your affiliate links
Affiliate marketing doesn’t work without data, and that’s one of its top advantages. As a publisher, you can measure, track, analyze and improve any content with affiliate links based on your return on investment (ROI). You and your partner brand can see tangible results and act from here.
Modern solutions like Trackonomics’ Funnel Relay give you actionable data from every piece of content you have. The platform collects deep insights about your content’s performance, allowing you to optimize it and make even more money from affiliate links.
3. The more you optimize, the more you can monetize
Speaking of optimization, all that data you collect from your campaigns opens massive opportunities for improvement and growth. Integrate your affiliate sales data with your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to optimize traffic source generation efforts. You can also import your affiliate network sales data into Google Ads and run complementing campaigns.
Most importantly, you can learn what kind of content your readers prefer and what posts bring in the most profit. Find ways to replicate the content’s success and even craft your strategy around it. Minor tweaks make significant differences that reflect on the generated revenue.
4. Automated affiliate marketing works like magic
Fear not if your memories of affiliate marketing involve labor-intensive URL tags, manual searches for broken links, and endless hours constructing reports. Current affiliate marketing solutions make it possible to automate most of these processes. That way, you can focus on the strategic development of your channel instead of tedious manual tasks. You can use Trackonomics by impact.com to:
- View sales and performance data from all your affiliate networks in one dashboard with a data consolidation tool
- Check your affiliate links for errors (including out-of-stock pages, 404s, etc.) automatically by integrating them with any of the 100+ available tools
- Streamline your URL parameter tagging
Still wondering how to monetize your content?
The answer is simple: use targeted, data-driven affiliate links in your existing and new content. You will drive traffic, connect with your audience and grow your revenue.
To truly harness the advantages of affiliate marketing in 2022, choose a data management platform that gives you deeper insights and automates your usual manual tasks so you can focus on growing your channel.
Learn more about Trackonomics by impact.com and reach out to its team of monetization experts to get started.