Should you use affiliate links?

George Jacobs
Aug 22, 2017 · 4 min read

The question of whether or not to use affiliate links in content comes up often. The typical drawbacks that we hear are: 1) I don’t know how to use affiliate links, 2) it takes too much time to do links for all my posts, or 3) I’m not making enough money with affiliate links. We’ll go through and address all these points in this article:

1) I don’t know how to use affiliate links

If you don’t know how to use affiliate links, you’re not alone. This is actually a key reason why we founded Weave. So many of the content creators we talked to didn’t have any of the tools they needed to easily create links and post them to their social channels or blog. All you have to do on Weave is type in the name of the products or services included in your content, and we give you a link that pays you commissions from our partner retailers when your viewers click and buy. We handle all of the tracking and reporting and allow you to easily cash out to your PayPal account from within our platform once you’ve started earning.

2) It takes too much time to create links for all my posts

We’re sorry about that and we have felt this frustration firsthand. Here’s how much time it takes on Weave:

3) I’m not making enough money with affiliate links

For creators that have are having trouble with their affiliate income, my response is twofold:

first - like any other business or your social channel or blog, it takes time and consistency to develop results and earn money;

and second - the platform that you use to get your affiliate links might be taking a significant portion of your earnings and also may not be utilizing the right strategies to make you the most money possible.

First, time and consistency: affiliate linking is largely a numbers game so, the more you post and link, the more you earn. Let’s go through some realistic example numbers for an influencer that gets 200,000 views on their social content per month (this can a combination of Instagram photos, YouTube videos, your blog, Snapchat stories, etc). I’ll talk about conversion rates, purchase rates, and average order values in calculations below - if you want to know what these numbers mean, check out this post that gives an overview on affiliate marketing and the numbers impacting your earnings.

Ok, now on to the math:

  1. 200,000 views*10% click through rate = 20,000 clicks
  2. 20,000 clicks*1% purchase rate = 200 purchases
  3. 200 purchases*$50 average order size = $10,000 in sales
  4. $10,000 sales * 10% commission = $1,000 earnings
  5. $1,000 monthly earnings*12 = $12,000 annual earnings

As you can see in the example above, if the complaint is around money, there probably just hasn’t been the time or consistency devoted to making affiliate links work to get the desired results. I’ve also seen bloggers and influencers with much less than 200,000 monthly views that make twice as much as the earnings stated above. When it comes down to it, there’s only a few factors to focus on to really increase earnings.

Now on to the second point, the platform your using: our initial mission at Weave was to simplify the way brands and creators connect online and always work to provide value to our creators. Therefore, while other platforms all take a 20–35% cut of your affiliate earnings, Weave takes 0%, so you get to keep everything that you make. Additionally, we utilize flexible and advanced software to improve your earnings performance. The service that you use may be doing some of the things listed below but, speaking from experience, most don’t. Here’s what Weave does to optimize the amount of money that you make:

  1. Weave redirects viewers to the appropriate affiliate program based on their location. Many affiliate linking companies don’t pay attention to this, meaning that you won’t earn money for any international sales.
  2. Weave chooses the highest earning product link automatically for you. Say, for example, the product that you want to link to is available at 30 retailers, we calculate which link will be the highest paying and automatically select that link for you.

Click here to get started earning on Weave! As always, if you have any questions feel free to email us at talent@weavesocial.com

Weave Social

The easiest way for creators to earn money from content.

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George Jacobs

Written by

Co-Founder @ Weave (weavesocial.com)

Weave Social

The easiest way for creators to earn money from content.

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