When it comes to affiliate marketing, there are a lot of pathways you can take online. Do you go with social media? If so, which platforms? Are we talking about paid promotions or original content? What content format will you go with? Photos? Long-form or short form video? Blogging? Podcasts?
There are a lot of options out there for your marketing campaign to pursue, but if you’re looking to focus on the options that get you the best result, you’ll need to whittle some of these approaches down.
So, we’ll start with blogging versus podcasts. What are the benefits and downfalls of each format? And which one should you move forward with in your marketing campaign? We explore here.
Blogging pros and cons
Affiliate marketing in blogging sites looks, to the user, like any other article, with a link in usually one phrase throughout the information conveyed.
It can be a subtle way of generating clicks to your site. The user isn’t likely to check where the link is going before they click on it, and since links also act as a means of citing sources, the reader might not even be aware they are being marketed to.
However, this approach might be too subtle. A reader might scan over your link without having any interest in it, and sometimes not even register that there is a link. You will have nothing to entice them with but a purposefully generic and to the point phrase, and no way of making them pay attention. It is an approach that requires action from the user to even pitch your brand, before you then convey a call to action to buy, subscribe, etc.
What helps the blogging argument is the fact that users seek out blogs for specific purposes. A podcast is generally played and passively consumed while doing other tasks, where a blog is usually sought out to answer a question or give advice, like how to guides. This means that links are likely to be clicked on to inform the article if the user thinks it might help them, where advertising in podcasts is likely to be purely product placement not relevant to the subject of the podcast.
Podcasting pros and cons
Podcasts biggest benefit is its sheer numbers. Podcasts are growing rapidly, becoming a staple in everyday entertainment alongside music and television. To pass up an audience like that would be leaving money on the table.
Podcasting also forces the listener to pay attention. In a lot of cases, there is no skipping podcast advertisements, and even if the listener wanted to skip over the paid promotion, it would take a physical action from the listener. As pointed out, podcasts generally are used as background entertainment to another task, which can either mean that the listener can’t use their hands to skip the paid promotion, or decide they are better off listening because it will soon be over.
However, the main perk with blogging affiliate marketing over podcast is the click through rate. Where podcasting isn’t likely to even generate a click, blogging is exclusive to a webpage and therefore there is nothing stopping a user from tapping through wherever they wish. Podcasting doesn’t really allow for this. There are links in the description, sure, but listeners are more likely to simply put it on and get on with whatever else they are doing, like driving or travelling. It’s something to listen to while your hands are busy and if your hands are busy, you’re not browsing and clicking anything.
Which is better?
Ultimately, deciding which marketing strategy comes down to your taste in subtlety. A reader of a blog post can entirely skip over your affiliate link seeing only a word that is underlined where a podcast advertisement takes a physical response to skip over, and if it’s not part of the podcast itself, sometimes it’s impossible to skip over.
So, the question is, just how bold do you want to be with your affiliate marketing? There are pros and cons to being subtle to consider within this question. Being subtle with your affiliate marketing might mean that a user doesn’t even know they are being advertised to and therefore have more trust in the brand and product. However, of course, being more bold with your marketing means no one misses the point and takes in the information conveyed about your brand.
There are more differences between the two approaches, and ultimately, they come down to weighing up the results and going with your preferences on what you are trying to convey and how aggressive you want to be with it.
Plus, no one is saying you can’t do both.
For more information on affiliate marketing, take a look at our blog or check out the latest episode of the Affiliate Marketing Podcast to gain some insight into how both these types of content work and grab some tips from us!
