Are you currently working as an affiliate marketer? Then you must be looking forward to taking your affiliate marketing efforts to the next level. Why not take a look at the opportunity available to engage with affiliate marketing with the help of eBooks? From this article, you can get a better understanding of how to proceed with affiliate marketing in eBooks and figure out the steps to place the affiliate links within eBooks.
Why Would You Add Affiliate Links in an eBook?
Before we begin, you should take the time to understand the reasons why people place affiliate links in eBooks. Then you will be tempted to go through the next section of the article and understand how to move forward. Here are some of the most prominent reasons people write eBooks to place the affiliate links within them.
– It will help you grow your audience
As an affiliate marketer, you are trying to broadening your audience as much as possible. This is where eBooks can become very useful. You can now discover affiliate programs in every product category and every market. No matter whether you are trying to break into a specific niche or the mass retail industry, you need to make sure that you get a large targeted audience to see your affiliate links. Then you can increase the total number of views that you are getting for the products that you offer.
If you are making plans to reach out to a new audience, you can think about going forward with eBooks as well. They can help you to grow your audience in a convenient manner.
– You can boost your reputation
Affiliate marketers who use eBooks will be able to grow their reputation for what they write as well as what they promote. Along with that reputation, you can get more people to trust you and purchase what you offer. This is where you can think about getting the maximum advantage out of the reputation your can gain from writing an eBook.
You may need to partner up with a reputed author. That will help you to get the reputation for your eBook as well.
– It is a cost-effective method to promote your affiliate links
If you take a look at the cost that you have to bear in order to promote affiliate links with eBooks compared with the other mainstream marketing methods, you will figure out how cost-effective it is. This is applicable whether you write your own eBook or get your affiliate links published in the eBook published by another person. It is the objective of all the affiliate marketers to reduce their expenses and boost profits as much as possible. eBooks can deliver all the support and assistance needed for it.
– You can scale your traffic
Promoting affiliate links with eBooks will be a great method available to scale your traffic. However, you should make sure that you are not just using an eBook to promote the affiliate links. eBooks alone cannot deliver any positive results. You need to use them along with the other marketing methods so that you can receive maximum returns. You will appreciate the helping hand that eBooks can provide to you by taking your affiliate marketing campaigns to the next level. The Content of your eBooks should be more than what the reader expected.
Reasons Not to Add Affiliate Links to Your eBook
At this point I think it is a good idea to discuss some of the reasons you might not want to add affiliate links to your Ebook. As platforms and companies grow and change their terms of use often change as well. This can become very had to keep up with if you are dealing with multiple entities. This point brings me to my first reason not to add affiliate links to your eBook.
Policy Changes
Placing direct links to affiliate offers in your eBook may or may not already be against an existing policy of an affiliate program or an eBooks platform. Trying to find out and stay up to date on this kind of restriction can be difficult and even get you punished.
For example, if you publish and eBook on a platform that currently allows you to do so but at a later date they change their policy so that it is no longer allowed your eBook could be removed form the platform.
Affiliate Changes
If you are able to get away with adding direct affiliate links to your eBooks, which I do not recommend trying, you could run in to some problems. Once problem being if your affiliate link is changed by your affiliate program, the links that are in your eBook will become useless unless edited.
There could also be changed in the affiliate program or the product itself that once changed or updated would make what you wrote about them in your eBook no longer accurate. The affiliate program could also just get shut down or closed then your links become basically dead.
For these reasons, I suggest not using direct or cloaked affiliate links within eBooks. Instead, you should add and use different kinds of links in your eBooks. I will talk more in-depth about these types of links later in this blog post.
How to place your affiliate links in eBooks?
Now you have a clear understanding of the benefits that you can get by placing affiliate links in eBooks. While keeping this in mind, you should know the steps that are available to proceed and get the job done.
When you want to place the affiliate links inside an eBook, you have two different options to consider. Either you can write your own eBook and place the affiliate links, or else, you can place the affiliate links into an eBook written by another person.
If you are a person how is good at writing, you can go ahead with the very first option. This step is more recommended for seasoned authors. You are aware of how to compile the eBook, and you just need to place the affiliate links inside them. Hence, you can go ahead and make the decision without keeping any doubts in mind.
People who aren’t good at writing eBooks should think about getting the assistance of an author. That’s because you need to make sure that the eBook is well-written and super helpful. Then more people will purchase the eBook and you can get lots of people to see your affiliate links. Moreover, people tend to trust on the affiliate links and click on them, based on the helpfulness of the content and affiliate links.
Expert authors know how to make their eBooks helpful. Moreover, they write eBooks in an engaging tone as well. Hence, they go ahead and invite the readers to click on the affiliate links and move forward with them. This can eventually provide you with the chance to boost the total number of affiliate sales that you are generating. You can sign up with an agreement with an author and share a profit from your affiliate campaign or you can give a fixed payment to place your affiliate links. It is entirely up to you and the book author to decide.
Another great option available for the people who don’t want to create their own eBooks to consider is getting the assistance of an eBook creation service. You can discover numerous eBook creation services out there. You can simply pick a writing service out of them and create an eBook. Along with the instructions on how to write the eBook, you can also think about providing affiliate links.
Make sure that you proofread your eBook before you pay. You must also double-check and ensure that there are no grammar or spelling errors. Then you can get maximum returns from the eBook writing service.
Alternative Strategies to Placing Affiliate Links in eBooks
As I mentioned a few times in this article adding direct affiliate links to your eBook can come with some disadvantages. In this sections of this blog post I will go through seaveral different stategies that affiliate marketers can use to increase their affiliate sales using eBooks. These strategies will be listed in order of most risky to most ideal.
Adding Direct Affiliate Links to an eBook
This is the most risky option. I do not suggest this for the reasons I talked about earlier in this blog.
Adding Cloaked Affiliate Links to an eBook
This is also quick risky for many of the same reasons direct linking is. It is also possible that it is against your affiliate programs policy to cloak links, for example Amazon’s affiliate program forbids this.
Linking to A Landing Page in an eBook
A landing page, in the simplest terms, is a single page on a website designed for a single purpose. Affiliate markets use them to prime and guide their audience. Creating a landing page dedicated to helping your readers learn about a specific affiliate offer and then linking to that page in your eBook is a good option.
Linking to Your Content in an eBook
Adding links to your own blog posts or even YouTube videos is a great option. By picking relevant content to link out to in your eBook your increase the value offered to the reader, increase their understanding of your brand and earn a chance to promote your affiliate offer on your own content where selling is much easier.
The type of content you could link could be things like product reviews, as an example.
Linking to A Reasource Page
This is my favorite option! This strategy combines aspects of some of the others listed above. Much like the landing page, a resource page is a single page on a website. This page, however, is designed to include information and affiliate links for every product or offer you want to talk about in your eBook. If you are only promoting one thing the landing page should work just fine, but if you have more than one I think the resource page is the way to go.
This page should be in divided up into sections, one for each product or offer. Each section should include all the information your reader needs to know about this product or offer and why it will help them. Below this information section is where you should place your affiliate link.
This strategy is so powerful! If you ever need to change anything about anything you are promoting you have outside control over it. You can change your links, change the info, add new products or offers and remove old ones. It will also direct your eBook readers to your content on other platforms there for growing your audience and traffic.
Other Links to Add to Your eBook
I also want to talk about a few other types of links you should add in your eBook. Adding the following types of links will make you look more professional and also help you grow your audience.
Adding an eBook Cover Link
Everyone who reads your eBook will at least see the cover. That is why I think it is a great place to add a link to your number one platform. I would link to my blog website, but if you do not have a blog website you could link to something else like a YouTube channel or podcast. I think linking to a branded website is the best option for your eBook cover link. Adding it at the bottom under the title and author section seems to be a good spot of a link like this.
Adding Links to Relevant Content in an eBook
Linking out to relevant content that you have created in your eBook can add a lot of value to your readers. Blog post, videos, podcasts and PDFs are great options. Make sure what you are linking is content that will help the reader and is targeted to what they need help with. This will grow the number of views your content will get. People are always looking for a way to get traffic and I think this way is pretty smart.
Adding Social Media Links in an eBook
If you have social media account for your brand including links to them in your eBook is a great idea. This will help people learn more about your brand. It will also help you grow your social media followings.
Free eBook vs Paid eBook
As someone who is looking into affiliate marketing, you may have seen people suggest using a free eBook to grow an email list. I personally have not tried this for the following reason. I think it throws off the targeting.
Don’t get me wrong, I am sure others have seen success adding emails to their email list by offering people a free eBook. The problem is you want people who are willing to pay for things. You can not earn any affiliate commissions if no one over buying anything, it does not matter how many people link on your affiliate link.
It comes down to targeting. If you sell your eBook you know, at least, that the people reading it are willing to spend money. If you give your eBook away you will most likely get more people to read it but your audience will not be as targeted or as willing to spend money.
I think even having a very low priced eBook is better in the long run than giving one away. If you still plan on using the free eBook plan to grow your email list I suggest stating clearing on the opt-in page what these people are signing up for. Tell them what kind of emails you will be sending them so they expect it.
If people if you their emails to get your free eBook and then you spam their email they will most likely unsubscribe to your email list. However, if you clearly tell them you run a business online and are trying to make money. Also that by signing up for this email list they will be sent emails that include sales pitches, reviews, affiliate offers, ect.
Just be honest with them.
Including such honest information on your email opt-in page may reduce the number of people that sign up for it, but again, they ones that do are more targeted. These people will be expecting to be sold to, which is what you want.
Conclusion
Well we hit a lot of bases in this blog post. I hope I was able to help you understand the pros and cons of adding affiliate links in eBooks as well as some of the alternatives options. Feel free to share this post with anyone you think it might help.
Have a great day!