Affiliate marketing has proven to be a suitable primary and excellent secondary source of income for millions. Although it has just recently gained popularity, the concept—patented by William J. Tobin in 1989—has been around for decades.
It's so easy to learn affiliate marketing today—just search for it on YouTube, and you'll find tons of tutorials. It has become so popular that even TikTok, one of the biggest social media apps today, has its own affiliate marketing program.
With consumerism on the rise, affiliate marketing could be your next lucrative job or side hustle. However, the competition will be tough, so you need every edge you can get. This is where Geo-targeting comes in.
What Is Geo-targeting?
Geo-targeting helps you provide content, services, or ads to online users based on their location. It’s a clever way to adapt your ad campaign to location relevance.
Geo-targeting is commonly used by advertisers to prioritize and target their audience based on their physical location.
Why Is Geo-targeting Important to the Affiliate Marketer?
So how exactly is Geo-targeting relevant to affiliate marketers, and how will it give them an edge? Well, there are several ways Geo-targeting can boost the online traffic involving your affiliate links, but here are a few key moves affiliate marketers can make because of Geo-targeting.
1. Target a Specific Audience
Any type of marketing requires you to pick a target audience. No matter how general or specific, having a target audience helps you base what types of ads to use or how you should approach presenting your affiliate links.
Although it mostly depends on what service your affiliate links lead to, ads generally do better with specific audiences rather than general ones. Advertising to anyone that cares to listen is tedious and ineffective. You want your links to land in the eyes of people who are likely to respond to them.
Plus, being able to target a specific audience helps with holiday sales too. For example, if you were to write an article about Saint Patrick’s Day and provide an affiliate link to Saint Patrick’s Day merchandise, you’d have to be very specific with the countries you’d want your ads to reach.
Advertising blindly is like firing a thousand arrows in hopes of getting a single bull’s eye. Not only will it take a while, but it will cost you too.
2. Create Separate Campaigns
Personalized content always sells better. Humans love the feeling of being included, of being in the loop. So when you create content that leads to your affiliates, creating separate and personalized campaigns can be an advantage.
With this in mind, you can create different content leading to your affiliate links that cater to different countries. You can use headlines and titles with local slang. You can even create content in their language, using their location as context for how products or services could be used.
The more personalized your content is, the more likely the chance they will click on your affiliate to check it out. This strategy becomes possible through Geo-targeting. With Geo-targeting, you can create separate campaigns to bring in the best results.
3. It Lets You Set a Limit
Have you ever tried clicking an affiliate link to a product you desperately wanted, only to find out that the company doesn’t ship to your area? Perhaps you were watching a YouTuber rave about something, and you were convinced to get it, but they don’t deliver to your country.
Oftentimes, the service or product an affiliate link offers is only available in certain countries. Some may even be unavailable in some regions and states, leaving several viewers saddened or dissatisfied.
This limitation makes Geo-targeting all the more relevant. With Geo-targeting, you could make ads to your affiliate links show up only in places your services are bound to reach. You not only avoid disappointing viewers, but you also prioritize those who can actually buy the product your links lead to.
4. It Also Allows You to Break Limits
Online shopping has changed the world. What once was only accessible to thousands has been made accessible to billions. The magic of overseas shipping and international shops has paved the way for merchants, customers, and now, affiliate marketers. Some limits that have been set can be broken.
While Geo-targeting is a good way to set limits on who should be exposed to your affiliate links, it is an even better way to break the limits and make your links visible to numerous other places. Geo-targeting plays an essential role in online advertising.
If you advertise Amazon affiliate links to the world, the possibility of hundreds of thousands of people clicking your affiliate link becomes very real. Not only will you rely on a few consumers in your country to click the link, but a dozen more countries!
5. Conquer Market Saturation
Geo-targeting is also a clever way to overcome market saturation. Often, a service or product becomes too available in one area and scarce in another. By using Geo-targeting, you can conquer market saturation by targeting areas that do not readily have your link’s product or services available.
For example, the product of your affiliate link could be a specific Asian broom. It wouldn’t make much sense to use Geo-targeting to place ads in Asian countries that commonly use those brooms and have them easily available.
Instead, you opt to target European countries or the US. You will have successfully avoided market saturation and have found an audience that is actually looking for the product of your affiliate link. Thus, your affiliate link gets you the traffic you want.
Power-Up Your Marketing Beyond Geo-targeting
If you think Geo-targeting is impressive, then you’re going to want to check out Short.io. Short.io is a link shortener that makes custom links (and all the features they have) available to you.
Beyond geo-targeting, Short.io lets you create geo-templates. This feature lets you group together different areas and countries, allowing you to reuse them anytime. This will save you time, allowing you to create different areas and name them as you see fit.
Geo-targeting is merely one of the dozens of features Short.io has to offer. Features like link retargeting, deep links, detailed statistics, etc., are powerful features that can help affiliate marketers succeed in gaining the traffic their links need.
Check out Short.io today and see how they can help you in affiliate marketing.
