When it comes to revenue generation, affiliate marketing is a great strategy for people with a strong creative streak and a passion for their personal brand. But while this form of marketing has a lot of upsides, it also comes with some pretty big challenges in maintaining the spirit of that personal branding.
Affiliate marketing is a type of online advertising in which a company rewards an affiliate for every customer they win over or every visitor that they drive to their site. In order to track how much traffic these affiliates are producing, most companies utilize unique affiliate links. These links often contain long strings of random characters, which can make them difficult to remember or type out, and can clutter content that would otherwise be neat and clean.
But with TinyURL’s wide range of services—not just limited to link-shortening, mind you!—you can overcome these affiliate marketing challenges with ease. Here’s how TinyURL can help you out.
1. It allows you to become a more data-driven affiliate marketer
Creativity and persuasion are only half the battle when it comes to affiliate marketing. In order to really maximize your efforts, it’s important to have a firm handle on the numbers side of things as well. You need to know which of your campaigns, strategies, and techniques are actually working, which ones could use some improvement, and where you should focus your energies going forward. And that takes a data-driven approach!
TinyURL’s link-tracking capabilities can give you that crucial data capability, which you need to make informed decisions about your affiliate marketing campaigns. Our link management dashboard gives you at-a-glance information about the performance of each of your affiliate links, without having to comb through Google Analytics or other data sources. This way, you can quickly adapt your strategies on the fly to get the best results.
2. It allows you to track your distribution channels
Even if you do have a centralized data dashboard like above, you might still pack your links with all the tracking parameters appended to the URL. These unwieldy UTM tags are often thought to be a necessary evil when it comes to tracking the performance of different distribution channels of affiliate links.
Yes, they’re ugly, and yes they’re barely readable even by marketers, making them a pain in the butt to manage—but how else are you going to know whether people landed on your page from Facebook, a guest post, or a random poster you slapped on a wall at a bus stop? You just gotta deal with UTMs, right?
Wrong! With TinyURL, you can simply create different aliases to the same destination link and assign them to your channels. Then, you can view all the traffic data for each of these channels in one neat and tidy place. The result? More readable, UX-friendly links, no more hassle, and no more headaches—just easy-peasy affiliate link distribution channel tracking.
Alternatively, you can continue to run your UTM tags–then just create shortened versions of those links with the same effect (minus the clutter).
3. It allows you to deploy trustworthy links
When it comes to affiliate marketing, your links are your bread and butter. If people can’t click on your links and reach the intended destination, you’re not going to make any money! So it’s important to have links that people feel they can trust. And those UTM parameters embedded on the edge of your links? They scream “I’m being tracked!” and turn potential customers off.
With TinyURL’s branded and customizable links, you can create affiliate links that look clean and professional, without sacrificing any of the tracking capabilities. Not only will your links look better, but you’ll also get the opportunity to create a more consistent and trustworthy marketing journey. You’ll even be able to add a custom message or call-to-action in the link text, further increasing your click-throughs.
4. It allows you to take your brand offline
In today’s digital world, it’s easy to write off traditional marketing that takes place away from screens. And believe it or not, affiliate marketing can be a great way to take advantage of opportunities in the real world.
For example, say you’re attending a trade show or conference related to your niche. You could use TinyURL to instantly generate a QR code that links to your affiliate destination, and then slap it on a poster or flier. When people scan the code with their phones, they’ll be taken directly to your link—and our analytics feature will clue you in on exactly how many people scanned your poster.
This is a great way to get people engaged who might not be online all the time, or who might not be as comfortable making online purchases.
On top of this, we also support a variety of domains that we can use to truly make your brand your own—and .com is just the tip of the iceberg. For example, you could run apartment.rentals to grow your own multiple listing service (MLS). Or, you could manage an investment website with stock.broker. There are infinite, creative choices out there that make your key websites easy to remember when shared through TV or radio ads, and you can import any of these domains right from within TinyURL or even register one straight from the dashboard.
Conclusion
At TinyURL, we take the ancient history of link-driven marketing and supercharge it with solutions that make life easier in lots of tiny ways for our customers—all while opening the doors to more data and greater control over their campaigns. So what are you waiting for? Get started with TinyURL and elevate your links today!
