Maximizing Affiliate Revenue with Deep Linking

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team coming at you with something special this week. We are really excited to be planning an upcoming episode featuring questions from our listeners. We always love hearing from Food Blogger Pro members and podcast listeners with any questions they have, problems they’re solving or anything else that’s come up in their blog and business lately. So we are asking you to call in with your questions. You can head to speakpipe.com/foodbloggerpro, or we’ll have the link in our show notes and you can send us a recording. You can ask a blogging business, social media, or branding question for Bjork. If you have questions about Pinch of Yum’s current strategy or questions about working with an ad network, really the sky is the limit for any questions you might have. Just leave us a message, and Bjork will answer your questions in an upcoming podcast episode. Again, head to speakpipe.com/foodbloggerpro to send us a recording. All you need is your phone or a laptop. It’s super easy, but head to the show notes and you’ll see the link to send us a recording. We can’t wait to hear from you.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there, and from the Food Blogger Pro team here, welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Today we’re sitting down to chat with Scott Allen from URLgenius. Whether you’re a seasoned affiliate marketer or just getting started, today’s episode is packed with valuable insights you won’t want to miss. URLgenius is a powerful tool that’s helping marketers everywhere unlock the full potential of their affiliate links. If you’ve ever wondered how to maximize your affiliate revenue through the links you’re sharing, Scott’s here to share how deep linking can revolutionize your affiliate strategy, especially on mobile and social platforms like TikTok. We’ll talk about how deep linking can prevent commission losses, boost conversions, and help you avoid missed opportunities. Plus, Scott will break down the importance of understanding your audience’s app behavior so you can find tune your approach from maximum impact. So if you’re ready to take your affiliate marketing to the next level, be sure to stick around. This episode is full of actionable tips that could change the game for you. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Scott, welcome to the podcast.

Scott Allan: Hey, thanks for having me, Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re going to be geeking out and we’re going to be geeking out on a thing that I probably should have known about, I don’t know, years ago, and I kind of knew about it, but just within the last few months I’ve been spending more time educating myself on it. And the great thing about this strategy that we’re talking about is it’s really, we talk a lot about this idea of tactics and oftentimes tactics aren’t the things that you want to spend most of your time on. You want to spend most of your time on understanding how to create content, what content with your users, how do you show up every single day. This would be an example of a tactic that actually is really important to understand, number one, and can pretty quickly have almost like overnight as you start using, it can have an increase in your revenue and you share a lot of stories about how it can two x three x. There’s nine x examples of people who have started using this strategy and have increased their revenue, and it’s all about this idea of deep linking. So what is deep linking? And then we’re going to talk about specifically how we can go about using it as creators.

Scott Allan: Sure, yeah. So deep linking or app deep linking is really about linking from one app to another, or it could be linking from any marketing channel into an app to a specific screen in the app, like a product screen in Amazon, for example, if you think about the web and HTML links, that’s kind of a linking system from website to website. Apps don’t really have that. You’re in kind of your silo for your app and you have your phone and you jump to the other app and jump to the other app. So for marketers who are going from say, social media to an app like Amazon for an affiliate commission or Walmart or Target, typically a regular link and a regular affiliate link, what it will do, and we’ve all experienced this as a consumer, I follow this influencer, I click on the link that they share in their Instagram stories or on the link in their bio, it sends me to the Amazon web login. Now, why is that a problem? Well, one, as a consumer, I prefer the app. I have the app on my phone, I’m signed in. Why are you sending me to the login? Right? It’s kind of frustrating. Two, it’s not good for the affiliate because what happens is as consumers, we don’t log in that way. What do we do? We jump over to the app ourselves, we look for the product, maybe get distracted and maybe we buy it. But in that case, the influencer, the blogger doesn’t get credit because that connection’s lost. So an app link, what an app link will do is it creates a smooth connection from app to app. So let’s say you share that Amazon link in the Instagram story, the user can click on it. It says, oh, you have the Amazon app, so I’m going to open the app to the right screen as a shopper, I can go in, click around, boom, you get your commission.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting.

Scott Allan: Yeah, so it’s kind of like, well, that is, we’re really in the weeds here. Technically, as you said, it’s a tactic, but it’s so important because what we’re finding is that influencers and affiliates that share links on social media affiliate links that lead into e-commerce apps, if they don’t use app links, their commissions could be suppressed by 75, 80, even 90%. So when they use app links, the results, as you said, are really immediate dramatic.

Bjork Ostrom: So I’m building this analogy on the fly. Let me know if this makes sense. So one of the things that is important is the separation between the open web and the app ecosystem. And so with the open web, you almost view it as I think of it when I’m on my computer clicking around, there’s a link on Pinch of Yum, which is our food and recipe website, and it links to Food Blogger Pro. You click and it just goes right over there. And A lot of times, especially on your desktop computer, you’re going to be logged into those. I’m logged in on Amazon. So if I have affiliate link on Pinch of Yum and I click on that, it goes over to Amazon. That person’s logged in on your desktop computer. You can look around and click. It’s kind of like you’re in a house, you’re in a big house and it’s the worldwide web house or traditional kind of open web house and you’re using a browser and all the doors are open. You can just kind of go in, you can navigate around. But what’s happening when you switch over to a mobile device is suddenly you introduce the app ecosystem and People aren’t downloading an Amazon app on their desktop computer, but they are downloading an Amazon app on their mobile device. To use the house analogy, you can be operating within the browser and you can be clicking and you can be going to one place or another, but it’s almost like once you and all the doors are open in that house still, but once you click on something that would be an app on your phone, you come up and the door is closed. That’s right. You’re not able to get into that space because the person hasn’t signed in. In the case of Amazon, I haven’t signed in on amazon.com on Safari. And so what do you do? Well, you close out a Safari and you open the Amazon app, and

Bjork Ostrom: Then maybe you type in the product that somebody was recommending,

Scott Allan: Try to find it,

Bjork Ostrom: Try and find it, or you just abandon it and press back.

Scott Allan: Yeah, abandon it or find another product

Bjork Ostrom: And you buy that one. So what is happening here with deep linking, what you’re saying is it’s almost a way to through code, open that door to the app. And so what happens then is you are navigating around, you click on it, you leave the house, that is the internet browser, you go to the app, but that door then is open. You go in there and you also get credit as an affiliate for that referral to the app itself. And then it’s tracking within that. So let’s talk about the specific use case of Amazon and Amazon affiliate links. Talk about what happens when somebody starts to use deep linking in a tool like URLgenius to facilitate that process. What change happens that allows them to earn more revenue?

Scott Allan: That’s great question. So the process is at the outset is the same. You’re an affiliate. You go to the Amazon tools to get your affiliate link. That process is the same. So what’s happening when you get your affiliate link, your tags are added so that the transaction can be recorded. What’s different is that when you take the regular affiliate link and you update that with a platform like URLgenius, it’s going to give that link the capability to detect the app and open the app to the right screen. It’s not changing your affiliate tags, it’s not changing anything. But what it can do is say, okay, you update the link, you promote the deep link instead of the regular affiliate link, it’s got some extra capability to detect the app and what’s happening. This is an all-in-the-cloud, cloud-based solution. It’s opening the app, transferring your tags into the app as well as the website. So it’s able to take those tags and give those tags to the app. Amazon can then reconcile the transaction, whether it’s made in the app or on the web. So therefore you’re able to earn more commissions. You’re able to get credit for all the traffic you’re driving, not just the website.

Bjork Ostrom: And in the example of the first case, what’s happening is you’re going to Amazon.com. You’re not signed on your mobile device. In the scenario where somebody clicks on it, they’d go to Amazon.com in Safari or in Chrome, wherever they are, they’re not signed in. And so that’s not where they’re transacting. And they might open the app later that day and they might even purchase something related to what you were recommending. But if you did have that tracking enabled and they had clicked on one of your affiliate links, you’ll get credited with that earnings. Those earnings, right? Because Amazon, the cookie is based in a way where it’s anything within the cart that’s purchased 24 hours after a

Scott Allan: Click. Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Bjork Ostrom: Is that still true?

Scott Allan: That is still true. So essentially, what the deep link is doing is it’s enabling the cookie policy to be set. Because if you click a link as a shopper, and if your shopper clicks the link and they hit that web login and they don’t log in, well, the cookie can’t be set and you jump over to the app and buy the product, well, that connection is lost. If you use an app link, you’re opening the app to the right screen, the cookies being passed, your tags are being passed, so you can get credit for the sale and the cookie policy is being put in place. Back to your point about that house, when you’re on your desktop browser, you’re in that house. When you’re on your mobile device, you’ve got to have a link that can securely take you from one app to another so you can hop around on those silos of the apps.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And it’s a completely different mindset when it’s app to app as opposed to just a web browser, because when we’re on our desktop, we operate primarily within the web browser in terms of how we interact. We’re not as app based unless it’s maybe like an email. But even then when you’re clicking on it, it’s not you have an email on your desktop, you click on the link in there. It’s not opening the Amazon app, it’s not opening the YouTube app, it’s just opening the browser and you’re probably signed in across all the different platforms there. So it makes sense. It’s really mobile specific. Would you say that’s true?

Scott Allan: We’re getting into the mindset of somebody using a mobile device?

Scott Allan: Absolutely. Absolutely mobile specific. So it is good to know your audience, how much traffic of course you’re getting from mobile, especially when it comes to your affiliate business. A lot of folks shop on mobile. We see the reports every year that mobile’s taking over desktop in terms of shopping and percentage of buying behavior. So it’s really important to have app links because if you’re not using links with your affiliate links, you’re definitely losing money that you should get credit for because you’re driving traffic, but you’re not getting credit for it because of that login friction between

Bjork Ostrom: Us to use something that’s not technology related. Let’s say that somebody would click on a link and before buying anything, they had to do a cartwheel and you’d say like, okay, how many people are going to actually purchase if they have to do a cartwheel before they buy the thing? There’s a lot of friction. Not many people are going to be like,

Scott Allan: There’s a lot of friction. Even if they really want it, they’re going to be like, I’m not going to do it. I would say signing into a browser for some people on their mobile device, signing into a platform is the equivalent of doing a cartwheel. People don’t want to do it.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not worth it. For whatever reason, the mental burden of clicking on link,

Scott Allan: They may not even know their password. I’ve been to the Amazon app for how many years. I don’t know what my password is. A lot of apps, you’re logged in all the time, so you may not know your password, then you’d have to reset it or people don’t want to do that. I mean, just to go back to your point about the cookie, I think that’s another really important point because that affiliate link, that shopper, once you get them into the app and they start clicking around to your point and they add other things to the cart, you’re going to get commissioned on that as well. So what happens is not only are you instantly getting commissions on that sale that you just made, your average order value also goes up because you’re getting credit for all these other things. For anything

Bjork Ostrom: For anything or many of the things.

Scott Allan: Exactly right. That’s exactly right. So we see a 70% increase, almost 70% increase in average order value as well.

Bjork Ostrom: So to explain that for people who aren’t familiar, every affiliate program has different rules around number one, how long the cookie lasts. So the idea being some people say, Hey, if somebody clicks on this link anytime that they buy something over the next three months, you get credit for it. Now the probability is going to be higher that it’s within the first few days. There are other programs like Amazon, correct me if I’m wrong on this, where the cookie length is really short, it’s 24 hours. So if somebody buys something two days after they click on your link, you’re not going to get credit for it. The cookie length is really short. But one of the really unique things is that you are credited with any of the purchases that are made or many of the purchases that are made depending on what the things are that they’re buying from Amazon. And so we’ve had a situation, this was years ago where somebody bought a ring on Amazon and we got a commission on that, whatever it was, thousand dollars ring, even though we recommended, I dunno what it actually was, but it could have been ketchup, and then they bought a ring. And so to your point, it’s really important to remember that it’s not just the fact that you are recommending people go check out a thing on Amazon. If you’re trying to be strategic from a revenue perspective, you are thinking about the fact that hey, anytime that somebody clicks on your Amazon link and it properly registers, then you are getting into credit for anything that person buys within the next 24 hours, which could be really powerful if you have a little one day window for a thousand people for 10,000 people, and you can get a commission on what they are purchasing within Amazon. So does this also apply to the browser? Let’s say that you are on, in our case, pinchofyum.com, we have Amazon links there. If somebody clicks on that plain vanilla Amazon link, that’s not a deep link. How does that work, whether it’s in Safari or Chrome?

Scott Allan: Yeah, this is where it can get confusing. So Amazon does have some deep linking technology in their links. And so if you do a search, a Google search on a product, you find a product, you click on it, you’re in the browser that may open the app may or may not open the app. However, that same deep linking technology doesn’t work in social media. That’s why the same link wouldn’t open from social media.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Scott Allan: So when you think about your blog, I would understand how is your audience discovering your blog content? So if they’re discovering it on social media, test your Amazon links just like your customers would find that content. So if they’re going to find it on a Facebook post, go test that link from a Facebook post and make sure it’s opening the app because may open the app outside of Facebook. But once you’re in Facebook, you’re in that Facebook world and you need an app link to get out of the Facebook app into the Amazon app.

Bjork Ostrom: And here’s an important additional kind of note for people when you’re talking about that. People will think, wait, Instagram, you’re in Instagram, and I think many people would think myself included like, oh Stories. That’s where the link is. And so the link is within stories, but what you’re saying is each of these platforms also has a native browser And you are still within that app when you are navigating the browser. And so to draw the arc of what you’re saying is you could be looking at, you could be in Instagram, you could come up against a Pinch of Yum piece of content on Instagram. You could swipe up to look at that. That’s not going to kick you over to Safari or Chrome that’s going to pull up a browser, but the browser is still within the context of the social app that you are using. And so if you click on the link of a webpage within the social platform, it still might not deep link like it would if you were just pulling it up within Safari, is that what you’re saying?

Scott Allan: Exactly. Because you’re still, even though it looks like you’re in a browser page, you’re actually still in the Facebook app or the Instagram app. And all apps have this any app that has browser capability, it’s a native browser experience, but you’re still within the walls of that app.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Got it. And so you might have success within Safari or Chrome with plain vanilla, we’re talking Amazon right now, plain vanilla Amazon link to deep link into Amazon. But if you’re using that within a platform’s browser, it might not or probably won’t operate in the same way. Is that right?

Scott Allan: Exactly right. So the key is to understand how your audience is discovering your blog content. Are they going to Google and just doing a Google search and they’re in the browser? Okay, test that use case, make sure it’s opening the app, whether it’s Amazon or some other app or if you can see this, understand what percentage of your users are discovering your blog content within social media. That’s how they’re finding your content because they watch your Facebook posts every day or they, they’re being shared by friends or on Messenger or wherever it is, but understand how much of your blog con is being discovered from social media.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. And the downside and part of me would just be like, well, you just want to use a deep link everywhere. It would just be easier if you have an affiliate link. Your process is do a deep link. The only downside with that would be cost. If you have a scenario where everybody’s actually clicking within a browser and you wouldn’t actually need it, but it feels like the downside of that would be less than the potential upside of the increased revenue. So maybe what you can do is you can talk about how deep linking works within the context of URLgenius, just in terms of pricing. And so people can think about if we’re going to go in and use this tool to do the deep linking for us, what is the cost associated with that and what does that look

Scott Allan: Like? It’s a great question. So we have different pricing models to make it cost effective and to align with different influencer models and bloggers. First, it’s free to test you sign up, there’s no technical implementation, just sign up, update your links and test it. The first, we can put you into a free two-week unlimited trial so you can really see the results before you decide on a pricing plan and what you need. If you sign up for a year at a monthly fixed fee, it’s much more cost-effective. If you just want to pay as you go, then it’s CPC click,

Bjork Ostrom:: CPC, meaning cost per click. So every time somebody clicks, then you pay a little bit,

Scott Allan: Then you pay a little bit, right? But if you don’t use it, if you use it less than, you pay less during that month. A lot of our, I would say the bigger influencers go for a fixed monthly fee just to get the CPC as low as possible. And we’re not a platform that takes part of your commission, so that’s something to be aware of. You’re paying a CPC fee, but we’re not getting a slice of the commission from a regular affiliate link.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s not like you get 10% of every bit of commission that

Scott Allan: Yeah, we do have our own marketplace in the platform where you can get links to offers that are typically higher than a regular affiliate link. Those we take a small commission from, but those are not regular affiliate links. Those are special brand offer links that are deep links, by the way. And yeah, I can earn an extra high commission. So that’s just another link type. But yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Almost like a different marketplace. It’s almost like an affiliate marketplace. If you wanted to promote a certain product, you could do that. Yeah,

Scott Allan: Exactly. And we’re working on features like if you’re promoting an affiliate link, we’ll tell you, Hey, this brand is offering the same product in our marketplace at twice the commission. Do you want to use this instead? Stuff like that.

Bjork Ostrom: We talked about Amazon. Would you say that’s the number one opportunity? If you’re speaking to people that listen to this podcast who are food creators, they have a blog, they have an Instagram following, they might have a TikTok following. We can talk about TikTok in a little bit, maybe YouTube. They’re creating content, syndicating it across platforms,

Scott Allan: Probably

Bjork Ostrom: Occasionally talking about affiliate or including affiliate links. Are you seeing Amazon kind of as the primary platform that people are thinking about and using for affiliate commissions?

Scott Allan: Well, it’s certainly one of the most, I mean is the most popular platform in terms of bloggers and influencers sharing links on Amazon because their biggest retailer, but there’s a lot of other apps that people are using links for, certainly Walmart and Target, the big retailers. But the concept that we’re talking about that app linking can apply to a lot of different use cases. So for example, if you’re linking, you might want to link from one social app to another. Maybe you want to get your Instagram users over to your YouTube channel, so you have a new YouTube video, you post that YouTube link on an Instagram story. Well, if that’s not a deep link, that’s going to send them to the YouTube login, same concept. So you’ve got to use a deep link to open the YouTube app to that content. So that’s another use case. But we’re seeing people, certainly Amazon is one of the most popular, but certainly Walmart, target, big retailers, any retailer that you’re working with or company that you’re working with that has an app, if their app install rate is quite high, meaning a lot of their customers use the app, you want to make sure you’re using an app link.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think that in our conversation, the thing that I’d never thought about was social to social, like, oh yeah, if you are on Twitter and you link to your Instagram, then you want to make sure that that’s a deep link because somebody’s going to click on it and you want to make sure it goes into the app appropriately.

Scott Allan: It’s not

Bjork Ostrom: An e-commerce transaction, it’s just like an ease of use, increasing followers, things like that.

Scott Allan: Exactly. And I see a lot of folks put, for example, a link to their YouTube channel in their Instagram profile, and it’s a regular YouTube link

Bjork Ostrom: Which will open Safari or Chrome,

Scott Allan: Which will open Safari. Yeah, it will just send them to the YouTube login so they’re losing unless that user jumps over to the app and does a search on your channel and finds it. And again, we’re going back to the cartwheel.

Bjork Ostrom: It does a cartwheel

Scott Allan:: Doing the cartwheels to find it, so you’re losing followers. So you just want to make sure, be conscious of whenever the consumer journey really going from app to app and testing that experience yourself and using an app link whenever you can. Even YouTube videos. YouTube was popular for Amazon long before. Now Instagram people put Amazon links in their video descriptions. If you’re using regular Amazon links in your YouTube video descriptions, you’re losing money. You’ve got to use an app link to open that up.

Bjork Ostrom: And I’ve seen people do this with YouTube where they’ll even just have essentially my favorite kitchen tools, and it’s like in the description, you just have a list of YouTube, your favorite kitchen tools. That could be something you could just copy and paste, and essentially what you’re doing is you’re giving people the opportunity to look at the description and be like, oh, interesting. I’m going to click on one of these, check it out. It could either go to the Amazon login on Safari or Chrome, or it could go into the app where you’d get the cookie place for 24 hours. And so you can start to see how part of it is just like a process mindset around where are we putting these? Where are we trying to capture some of the attention and where are we trying to remove the friction when people get into the app in order to interact with it?

Scott Allan: The other thing that you do get credit beyond the 24 hour window is if the shopper adds it to their cart, but they don’t check out yet, you’ll still get credit as long as that shopping cart doesn’t expire. So that’s something else to keep in mind.

Bjork Ostrom: Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Clariti. Here’s the thing. We know that food blogging is a competitive industry, so anything you can do to level up your content can really give you an edge. By fixing content issues and filling content gaps, you can make your good content even better. And wouldn’t it be awesome if you could figure out how to optimize your existing blog posts without needing to comb through each and every post one by one, or I know some of you have done this, create a mega Excel sheet with manually added details for each post that’s soon to be outdated anyway, that’s why we created Clariti to save you time, simplify the process and make it easy. So with a subscription to Clariti, you can clearly see where your content needs to be optimized, like which of your posts have broken links or missing alt text, maybe there’s no internal links or what needs to be updated seasonally. Plus you can easily see the impact of your edits in the keyword dashboard for each post. Here’s a quick little testimonial from Laura and Sarah from Wander Cooks. They said, with GA4 becoming increasingly difficult to use, clarity has been a game changer for streamlining our data analytics and blog post performance process. That’s awesome. That’s why we built it, and it’s so fun to hear from users like Laura and Sarah. So, as a listener of the Food Blogger Pro podcast, you can sign up and get 50% off your first month of Clariti to set up your account. Simply go to Clariti, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. That’s clariti.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode. So let’s say somebody’s interested in doing this. Can you talk through how you actually do it? Number one, let’s assume that somebody has, and we’re going to use Amazon again as an example. You have an Amazon Associates account, which is the name for Amazon’s affiliate program, So you’ve signed up for that. If you have that, you can go in and you can get a link for that, which you would share in your blog. You share on social media if you want to start to do deep linking. Are you then now introducing a platform like URLgenius as the in-between, where you take that link, go to URLgenius and then populate it? Or are you able to do that all within the platform?

Scott Allan: That’s exactly right. So we are kind of in the middle between the associates program and the social media platforms. So you would create your affiliate link first. You would update that with Urlgenius, and URLgenius is going to give you a link console and you would just promote the URLgenius link yourself. Now, that’s how you could do that right now. After this call, you could sign up, try it. What if you have your own domain and you want to brand your links? You can do that with URLgenius, so you can brand your links, so you’re going from your domain to Amazon and right into the right product. And then so your product link would look something like your domain slash Amazon slash whatever you name at the end of the link.

Bjork Ostrom: Would You have to have a different subdomain in that case? In our case, pinchofyum.com. So it would be like go pinch of yum.com/

Scott Allan: That’s exactly right. Yep. You just create a subdomain for your app links and something short top or go link. Now what if you have a blog? What if you do your testing on your blog? You discover that, wow, maybe I am losing a lot of money because these links aren’t opening the app on my blog, and I’ve got 10,000 links on my blog. How am I going to update all those links? We have a solution for that where we can update those very, very quickly. So yeah, so the concept is it is a separate platform. We’re a verified Amazon partner. Sometimes people will ask, is this Amazon approve this? We don’t want to do anything wrong. Like the Associates program,

Bjork Ostrom: Is it like going around some rule or something or

Scott Allan: It’s all, yeah, it’s all legit. It’s all, we work with thousands of influencers all over the world, and we’re a verified Amazon partner technology partner. And so yeah, the console that you see for URLgenius lets you organize and tag all your app links so you can go back and use them again, promote them again. You’ll see little images of the product, so you can scan them fast. You’ll see various features. Actually, there’s a couple new features. One is called, let’s say that you’re, for the whole month of January, you’re promoting your favorite kitchen gadgets and you promoted, I don’t know, a thousand links. You’re like, which ones were the most popular? How can you view that information really, really quickly? So we let you create a page just with a few clicks that will list your 10 most popular products in terms of how many people are engaging with them. And you can then instantly just promote the link to that page and say, Hey, these are my most popular products. You don’t have to code anything or do anything. Or maybe I just want to put a collection of products together about my favorite appliances. You can do things like that too. And they’re all app links, so you’re sending someone to a nicely designed page of a collection of products, but when they click on that product, it’s an app link.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Scott Allan: So there’s different features like that as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. That’s great. What about doing a link directly to a product on a specific platform versus a link to a page that lets people pick the platform that they want to buy on? I’ve seen different examples of that where let’s say you have an air fryer. Instead of sending people just to Amazon, you’d send them to a page that shows Amazon, target, Walmart, all the same air fryer that then they could click on and that would be the deep link.

Scott Allan: Yeah, exactly. Let’s say, and maybe you just want to do that. People have their favorite retailers for whatever reason, they want to shop it as certain retailer. You can do that with UL Genius too. You create a collection, we call that a collection, and you could create different app links from Walmart, Amazon, target, and put them all on the same page and let the user pick.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have any insight into which is best? Because my initial thought would be it’s best just to go to Amazon, but then I’m like, wait, there are probably some people who’d rather do pick up from Target and get that on the way home versus Amazon.

Scott Allan: Yeah, there’s different opinions on that, and I think it’s just trying different things and knowing your audience and engaging with your audience and asking them like, Hey, what do you think about this page? Is this helpful in getting some feedback? But I’ve had influencers tell me that they like to send people to a page with options on it, various options, because the idea, the key goal to earn more income is to get your shoppers into the app and get them clicking. So if you present them with five different choices for that appliance, they’re going to keep clicking, look at the product details, add to the cart, spend more time. So some folks say, well, I want to do that a lot because I want them shopping and spending more time as a result of clicking on my link. Now, if it’s a special product with a special deal, special price, a lot to talk about, maybe you do an individual product link, but I think you got to mix it up and do both.

Bjork Ostrom: Makes sense. How about platforms that work best for this? We are Instagram forward in that. That’s our biggest platform for our food site. Pinch of Yum or food following. So we think a lot about Instagram. Is that kind of what you’re seeing with people that you work with, or is YouTube actually at the top, or what are you seeing with platforms that work well with affiliate?

Scott Allan: We’re seeing that the newer influencers that are Instagram focused are catching on to this technique quicker than the YouTube folks. A lot of the YouTube bloggers, influencers, video bloggers, they’re the first ones to be influencers, and they’ve got their processes down and app linking may not be part of that. So I think there’s a huge opportunity for YouTubers who have e-commerce links in their video description to update those to app links, and especially those with lots of followers if they’re getting a lot of traffic on those links. Every time I see it, I’m like, oh, they’re just sending traffic to the login. You’re sending thousands of people to the login and you’re not getting credit for the money for the traffic you’re sending

Bjork Ostrom: On Instagram. Are you primarily seeing people do that with stories where they’re including links? I also know now, I was looking within the meta business suite and there’s this premium offering where you can pay to start to get links within reels so that you can have a link in Reels. And I don’t know a lot about it. I haven’t really looked into it, but I do know that’s an option. Where are you seeing it? Within Instagram,

Scott Allan: We’re saying Stories, Reels, link in bio. So if you have, for example, a popular use case is to put an Amazon, a link to the influencer’s Amazon shop on file.

Bjork Ostrom Oh, interesting.

Scott Allan: So Linktree. So here’s another use case, Linktree, of course, great platform, popular. You put the Linktree link on your Instagram bio. The Linktree has your 10 favorite kitchen gadgets. They’re regular affiliate links. You’re going from Instagram to Linktree in the browser, and then from Linktree, you’re still in the browser, unless that’s a deep link to get you from Linktree out of the browser into the app. So that’s another use case. Advertising is another popular use case. So we’re seeing influencers participate in programs where they’re boosting their content with ad dollars, and let’s say it’s a video, they’re doing a product reveal, and they’ve got a Walmart link in there, and it’s not a deep link. They’re going to be sending traffic to the login from that ad. So you want to make sure that the links behind your ads have app links as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. How about TikTok? So we are recording this before the weekend before we don’t. TikTok will be banned or not when this comes out. It may or may not be banned. It kind of feels like one of those things where this happened in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, St. Paul, where they were going to ban Uber and Lyft. There’s all this commotion, and then at the 11th hour they figured it out and it never happened. There’s part of me that thinks that might be how it plays out, but I also know there are situations where that’s not what happens and it actually is banned. So anyways, all that to say, we don’t really know. We’d be curious if you have thoughts on it, and then also if you have thoughts on how you can use TikTok well, as an influencer and publisher as a creator, knowing TikTok Shop plays into that. A lot of considerations there.

Scott Allan: Yeah, there’s a lot. And yeah, it’s hard to say what’s going to happen. We hope it works out. They find a resolution. We are a strategic TikTok agency, which means we’re working with TikTok directly to help our influencers earn more on TikTok. TikTok is a little bit different in that it’s its own universe. So the use case is not typically going from Instagram to TikTok because you’re in TikTok, but TikTok has its own platform for e-commerce. So if I’m a brand, I can have a shop on Amazon and I can have a shop on TikTok. So what we do is we work with the folks at TikTok to surface offers that are relevant to our influencers, and they promote offers on a TikTok Shop, on their TikTok Shop. So that use case is a bit different. So I think there’s incredible opportunity with TikTok, so I hope that it works out.

Bjork Ostrom: And that opportunity is TikTok Shop.

Scott Allan: TikTok Shop, and for brands, and for influencers too, because it’s just more distribution for your products influencers, it’s more ways to get product offers out to their audience. And some folks that follow them might prefer TikTok, others might prefer Instagram. So you want to diversify your income and you want to diversify your use cases.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about how TikTok Shop works? For those who aren’t familiar, what is actually happening in that marketplace with a brand? Let’s say it’s a candy bar brand, they sign up, they’re a brand. How is that relationship? How are they navigating that with a creator or influencer?

Scott Allan: Well, how it works at a high level is the brand will just like they set up a shop on Amazon. They’ll set up a shop on TikTok to sell their products, And they can take ads out to advertise. The user is in TikTok, they see an ad, they click, it goes to the brand shop where you can order the product. So it’s all within TikTok. So for influencers, it’s kind of the same in that you’re encouraging influencers to say, Hey, this kitchen gadget is really taking off right now, and people love it, and people are creating videos about it. And it’s really, people are making a lot of commissions on this particular Kitchen gadget. They would create their own shop, their own showcase. They call it a showcase and say, I’m a food blogger. These are all my favorite products in my TikTok showcase. And in that I put links to products that actually are linking to the brand’s shop within TikTok. So it’s kind of the same concept as

Bjork Ostrom: And then get an affiliate commission on the traffic.

Scott Allan: Exactly. Get an affiliate commission. And TikTok is shipping out the product you’re getting credit for the sale.

Bjork Ostrom: Is TikTok actually, I mean TikTok’s not necessarily shipping the product but facilitating the transaction, or they are,

Scott Allan: In some cases they are. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, they are. So it’s almost like Amazon, they have the ability to do warehousing. And it’s all vertically integrated, right?

Scott Allan:: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom:: It’s like a business term where I think that applies in this case. But they started after start to finish, they’re able to complete the transaction,

Scott Allan: Start to finish. So both on the brand side and the influencer side, the affiliate side, it’s really exciting because I’ve talked to influencers that have instantly made thousands of dollars from a clever video, and their thought, they’re really shocked, they’re really good at content, they’re really good at video content. They make a video about a product they really love, and it just takes off. And we help the influencers work with TikTok to get that content in front of the right people so they earn more money. We give them training on the platform, we surface the right offers that are relevant to them. We give them advice on video styles that sell and things like that. So as a strategic TikTok agency, that’s our role, which is, so we’re more than just app linking. We’re also an agency that’s helping influencers and bloggers diversify their income. So the case worked out.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I hope it works out. Yeah, we’ll see. We’ll know when it’s published, but we’ll see in the moment.

Scott Allan: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: So with TikTok, there’s not necessarily the same opportunity as with Facebook, Instagram to do YouTube, some of the linking, I don’t even know. I don’t use TikTok. Is there a linking?

Scott Allan: Yeah, you could link from Instagram to TikTok,

Bjork Ostrom: But I mean from TikTok to Amazon.

Scott Allan: Oh, TikTok to Amazon. Oh, no. People do that. Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: And where are they doing that in a similar fashion to what you would with Instagram, to Amazon? TikTok to Amazon would be where

Scott Allan: TikTok to Amazon would be. I’m not a TikTok expert, but I think it can be in an ad or it can be in, I want to say profile.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, got it. Yeah.

Scott Allan: Profile link.

Bjork Ostrom: You have a profile, but it’s not necessarily stories where you are able to swipe up and see a link. No,

Scott Allan: It’s mostly I would say the primary use case is I have a link to my Amazon shop and my TikTok profile.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, that makes sense.

Scott Allan: And I’m making videos about products I like.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. There’s going to be TikTok experts who are listening to this and they’re going to be like, you guys, time to spend more time on TikTok, Which maybe we can’t, by the time this comes out, we won’t be able to do that. So that makes sense. But the opportunity with TikTok, it seems like would be more towards TikTok Shop, figuring that out and how to integrate your content within that workflow as opposed to you still want to pick up and be strategic around having your link and your profile and making sure that maybe within that link, if it’s a Linktree link, you have an Amazon shop link, and that would be a deep link, things like that. Like you said, maybe ads if you’re including ads, but a little bit more broad in that that platform is also a marketplace, which isn’t true for in the same way like a YouTube or Instagram, which makes sense,

Scott Allan: Right? So Walmart has its own marketplace now, and Target has one, Amazon has one, and a brand, if they wanted to, they could be on all those marketplaces. And you as an affiliate, if you have a large following across all social media, why wouldn’t you want to maximize your revenue and go after your audience wherever they prefer to spend their time?

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So I’m a big believer in small first steps in order to make progress. If somebody was interested in doing this, maybe feel a little bit overwhelmed. What is the first small step that they can take today to make some progress towards integrating this as a part of their process?

Scott Allan: What I would recommend is to URLgenius.com, sign up for an account, make an affiliate link, update it with URLgenius and promote that. And once you start promoting that, and you can also contact us, we’ll put you into an extended free trial.

Bjork Ostrom: And is that just through the customer support? Info?

Scott Allan: Yeah, exactly. [email protected] and we’ll hook you up. You can click on the website and just send us a note. But regardless, your first 500 clicks are free. Now, your Amazon sales and reporting, you’re going to see all your reporting as you normally do in your affiliate Amazon Associates dashboard. So that is all going to be the same. But we also give you some quick reporting too. We tell you how many times the app is opening and approximately what city people are clicking from, so some cool insights from there. If you’re using a link across social media, what percentage are the clicks coming from each social media platform? What’s the referring app, for example? But just sign up, update one of your affiliate links, promote that, get a significant amount of traffic enough to be measurable, and then look at the results in your Amazon Associates dashboard. And what we’ve seen, which you had mentioned in the beginning of the podcast, is people typically double or triple their commissions immediately. I am not kidding. We’ve had people tell us, you just helped me pay my kids’ tuition this semester. It really transformed. We’ve had people say to me 10 times more on Prime Day, 10 times. So that was all that traffic. Going to login, not getting credit for that, for the traffic you’re driving. Suddenly that means you have an audience of buyers more so than you realized. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. People aren’t having to do cartwheels anymore.

Scott Allan: Yeah, exactly. And every affiliate’s different, right? It’s about your audience and are they an audience of buyers? If they’re an audience of shoppers and buyers, then you want to be using links, right? If they’re not, so people see different results. So that’s why some people say, oh, it doubled my sales, it tripled. And other people I saw five times more.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great, Scott, this was great. It’s information for me that’s helpful as we are starting to learn about this and figuring out our path forward. And there’s some huge opportunities, and like I said at the beginning, one of the things that’s really fun to learn about is once you have built a following, once you do have those processes, if you can find a tactic that you can insert into the process that has immediate results, those are sometimes the most fun things to learn about. This is definitely one of those. Totally. Thanks much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Scott Allan: You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Bjork.

Emily Walker: Hello, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. I wanted to pop in today and thank you for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We are so grateful for you for listening. Before we sign off, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Food Blogger Pro Forum. In case you didn’t know how it works, if you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you get access to our amazing forum. It’s one of my favorite places on Food Blogger Pro. I spend a lot of time there myself, and on the forum, we have tons of different topics for you to explore. We have a building traffic section, a photography section. We have an essential tool section. We chat about generating income, an essential plugins, all sorts of areas for you to ask questions and chat with your fellow Food Blogger Pro members. It’s a great place to connect with fellow members, troubleshoot any issues you’re having, and brainstorm together. Our industry experts are always popping into the forum to help members with their questions. Casey Markee and Andrew Wilder are always popping in, and so is Danielle Liss our legal expert. It’s a really great place to get access to these experts and have them help you with your concerns. The forum is also just a fantastic place to find a community in this food blogging space as you’re working to grow your site and your business. If you’re ready to join Food Blogger Pro and get access to our wonderful forum, head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about our membership. We really hope you enjoy this episode and can’t wait to see you next week for another great episode. Have an amazing week.