3 Ways to Build Backlinks to Your Affiliate Site

While your affiliate site’s credibility and traffic are crucial for business growth, your search engine rankings are just as important. The process of improving your site’s rankings may seem daunting, but adding backlinks provides a perfect solution.

In short, backlinks can boost credibility, improve site traffic, and increase your rankings on search engines. These consequences are beneficial for your business, leading to more conversions and a greater following.

In this post, we’ll first explain exactly what backlinks are, and why you should use them as part of your linking strategy. We’ll then explore three ways to effectively build backlinks to your site. Finally, we’ll show you how to create shortened, branded backlinks with the help of Pretty Links. Let’s get started!

What Backlinks Are (And Why You Should Use Them in Your Linking Strategy)

In simplest terms, backlinks are links from one website to another. In the case of your affiliate site, they’re a link from an outside website (such as a forum, blog, or social media platform) to your own. There are two main kinds of backlinks – dofollow links and nofollow links.

Whether dofollow or nofollow, using backlinks in your linking strategy offers amazing benefits. For example, you may experience:

• Organic growth of your website's traffic. Through improved search engine rankings (in the case of dofollow links) and natural offsite incorporations of those links, you can drive organic traffic to your website with little effort.
• Improvement of your brand's authority and credibility. With more links pointing to your website, you can see an increase in rankings (dofollow), and grow as an industry authority.
• The building of meaningful and beneficial relationships. As you interact with your audience more widely, you'll have the opportunity to make deeper connections.

Overall, backlinks are a strategy that all marketers – affiliate or otherwise – can use to build up their website's authority and even improve conversions (after all, more targeted traffic should mean more sales).

3 Ways to Build Backlinks to Your Affiliate Site

With a better understanding of the benefits of backlinks, let’s look at three ways you can direct them to your affiliate website.

1. Guest Post on Relevant Blogs

Guest posting on relevant blogs is an effective way to create dofollow backlinks for your site. They're also effective for reaching a larger audience and building authority.

On most blogs, you can add backlinks to the content and within the bio (if used). However, there’s more to effective guest posting than knowing where to add your links. For increased effectiveness, you should also:

• Find the right blogs. Using website visitor demographics, you can find the blogs your target audience is most likely to read.
• Link to landing pages. This can improve conversions and also boost search engine rankings.
• Mention industry leaders. By linking out to industry leaders, you may be able to leverage their audience if they share the post on their social media accounts or blog.

The main goal of your guest posts should be to engage your audience. The fact that guest posts also offer an excellent platform for building backlinks is a happy side effect.

2. Interact on Industry Blogs and Forums

Interactions on industry blogs and forums – that is, offering insight and adding to conversations – are an easy way to build credibility and authority within your industry.

Industry blogs and forums are more likely to only allow nofollow links. However, your website can still benefit from the genuine interaction and networking these platforms provide. To get the most from your interactions, we recommend you:

• Choose the right blogs and forums. This means understanding who you’re targeting, and finding where they hang out/read.
• Link to landing pages. Just as with guest posts, landing pages can be beneficial when interacting within comments and on forums.

Another effective way to get the most from these interactions is to be genuine and forthcoming with your advice. As an authoritative voice during forum and blog interactions, make sure to be thorough and approachable.

3. Get Active on Social Media

Just as it sounds, getting active on social media involves creating profiles and interacting regularly with your target audience. A few popular social media platforms allow dofollow links (including Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google+). If you’re more active on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, you can still benefit from the promotion and interaction these platforms enable.

Here are some tips to get you started:

• Pick the right platform for your industry. With many social media platforms to choose from, it’s important you choose those most likely to engage your target audience.
• Create (and follow) a consistent posting schedule. The more active you are on your social media profiles, the more benefits you’ll experience.
• Track results and tweak accordingly. To improve your efforts, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on your social engagement and tweak your approach when necessary.

Overall, your goal should be to interact with your audience in a direct and meaningful way. A beneficial side effect just so happens to be increased backlinks to your site.

How to Create Shortened, Branded Backlinks Using Pretty Links

Pretty Links is a link shortening plugin with many useful features, including the ability to effortlessly manage and automate the entire linking process. Of course, it also enables you to shorten your links.

When it comes to building backlinks, pretty links are the best way to share your links on blogs, forums, and social media platforms. They enable you to brand your links (meaning people will know where they’re leading) and even track results. Fortunately, you can create shortened links very easily with Pretty Links.

Conclusion

Backlinks to your affiliate site can improve your business in a number of ways. They can help you rank higher on search engine results pages, increase your site’s organic traffic, and enhance your credibility.

In this post, we’ve discussed the importance of backlinks. We’ve also provided three techniques for effectively building backlinks to your affiliate site. To recap:

1. Guest post on relevant blogs.
2. Interact on industry blogs and forums.
3. Get active on social media.

Do you have any questions about building backlinks, or how Pretty Links can help? Let us know in the comments section below!

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