How to Run A Content Audit As An Affiliate Marketer

If you’ve been running your affiliate marketing website for any amount of time, chances are it needs a tune-up. Why? Because links break, affiliate products are out-of-stock, affiliate programs slash commissions, or your affiliate offers could use a refresh.

Whether you’re blogging about living a plant-based lifestyle or running a review site like The Wirecutter, scheduling a content audit will keep you aligned with your business goals so you can see what’s working (and what’s not).

This post details 8 things you can do to ensure you keep making money online.

Let’s go.

Check Your Link Status

Links are the lifeblood of any successful affiliate marketing business. It’s how merchants track the referrals you send and the sales they (the merchant) make, and how you’re paid.

If they’re broken or continuously listing out-of-stock products, you’re not making money.

Not only does this reduce your affiliate commissions, but it’s also not a user-friendly experience for your visitors (because nobody likes getting sent to a busted page).

Let’s fix that.

1. Replace Broken Affiliate Links

You can do this two ways. If you use a marketing tool like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Screaming Frog, you can run a site audit or plug your domain into its website analyzer. 

For example, using Ahrefs, you can head to Site Explorer > Your Domain > Outgoing links > Broken links.

However, the optimal way is to use a WordPress affiliate marketing plugin like Lasso. With Lasso, you’ll see broken link alerts in your dashboard automatically.

Click the broken link icon, and you’ll see every broken affiliate link appearing on your site:

Clicking the “Locations” column for a specific affiliate link lets you see every place on your site with context for that link.

For example, when clicking on the affiliate listed at the top of the page in the above screenshot (Arcadia Power), we see 11 locations on this site with broken Arcadia Power affiliate links.

Lasso scans your site, finding every broken Arcadia Power affiliate link. This page shows us three things:

1. Content with URL (e.g., a blog post)
2. Link with context (i.e., its anchor text and how it appears in your post)
3. Link-type (e.g., text links, image links, etc.)

Action Step

If the link is broken, check your affiliate ID to ensure it’s still listed on your site correctly. If it is, contact your affiliate manager to send you a new link.

Affiliate programs update links often, so checking to make sure your link’s valid is a good habit to build. When you get your new affiliate link, update it in your dashboard by pasting it into your affiliate product’s Link Details page here:

Lasso updates it across your site, so you don’t need to dive into individual posts and pages.

Further Reading:

• How to Add Text and Display Links to Posts and Pages

2. Remove “Out of Stock” Product Links

Lasso detects affiliate links with out-of-stock products. If you notice a link that hasn’t carried a product for a while, it’s best to replace it.

You can see out-of-stock product links in your dashboard:

Many retailers frequently run out of products or stop supplying them entirely. When you spot this, follow the same steps as you did with broken links:

• Click the out-of-stock icon
• Locate the links on your site
• Replace or remove

You can contact your affiliate manager or the company directly to check the status of your affiliate products. You have a stake in their success, so don’t feel like you’re bothering them.

It might not make sense to list a product if it’s never available. An out-of-stock link could be a signal that the company no longer makes it. This is prevalent with eCommerce sites (e.g., Amazon Associates)

Fix Your Underperforming Posts

Monetizing a post isn’t enough — it needs to drive clicks. Find out which posts and links need attention to increase your monthly affiliate income.

Fix My Underperforming Posts

Analytics & Tracking

A successful content strategy lets you see which links perform best. It also involves other metrics that search engines use to rank your site (e.g., bounce rate and dwell time.) These are helpful when auditing your site to improve the overall user experience.

3. Connect Lasso to Google Analytics

You can connect Lasso to Google Analytics and see your top-performing affiliates by Event.

In your Lasso Dashboard, head to Settings > General and then paste your Analytics Tracking ID into the field. Next, click “Enable Click Tracking.”

Now, you can track clicks (aka Events) and improve your affiliate site’s monetization strategy (more on that in a minute).

Further Reading:

• How to Connect Lasso to Google Analytics for Click Tracking

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Learn How To Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Business

Our Team Of Affiliate Marketing Experts Will Teach You How To:

• Outrank Bigger Sites
• Monetize Your Content
• Engage Your Audience

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Leverage Alternative Affiliate Programs

Diversification is not putting all of your eggs in one basket and is the first risk management rule. It also has its place in affiliate marketing. Why?

The fact is diversification won’t leave you exposed to reduced commission rates by a single affiliate partner.

One way to do it is to find alternative programs to join.

You can find several affiliate networks worth joining, including: 

• ShareASale 
• Clickbank
• CJ Affiliate (formerly known as Commission Junction)

To find them, run a Google search for products in your niche. Try this formula:

• “Product + affiliate program”

For example, if you’re in the keto diet niche and wanted to sign up with Bulletproof Coffee’s affiliate program, Google “Bulletproof coffee affiliate program.”

The quicker way to do this is with Lasso.👇

4. Use Lasso’s Affiliate Program Detector

We have a database of nearly 1,900 affiliate programs you can sign up for on our site.

So, if you link to a domain (e.g., you’ve linked to Bulletproof several times but don’t belong to their affiliate program yet), Lasso displays every one with its affiliate program you can join.

The above screenshot shows you five things:

1. The affiliate program
2. Number of programs Lasso found on your site you can sign up for
3. The payout (i.e., the commission rate)
4. Potential opportunities across your site where you could add an affiliate link
5. A link to the affiliate’s sign-up page

You can also click the affiliate program to see additional details or use the search field above the “Potential Links” column to find a specific affiliate.

Here’s what you see when clicking WP Rocket’s details page:

And when you scroll down, you’ll get a list of related programs:

Further Reading:

• Explore Lasso’s Database of 1,900 Affiliate Programs
• Best Affiliate Programs for Beginners (7 Worth Joining Now)

Helpful Tips for Determining the Right Affiliate Marketing Programs

Earning money via affiliate marketing is an excellent passive income source. Many successful bloggers use it to monetize their WordPress websites.

Here are two tips to keep in mind when you start exploring affiliate platforms:

• Cookie duration
• Payout

For example, Amazon is huge, trusted by millions, and easy to join (which is why it’s beginner-friendly).

But they notoriously slashed their commission rates mid-pandemic, and their cookie only lasts 24 hours.

With Amazon, you only have 24-hours from the time a website visitor clicks your affiliate link to make a purchase.

The payout is the other factor to consider. How much will the merchant pay you, which payment method will they use, and how often?

For example, Lasso’s Preferred Partner program features include:

• $49 per lead
• Payments made via PayPal
• 30-day cookie
• Net-60 payment (meaning you get paid for all leads that remain a customer until their second payment)

Direct deposit or PayPal are the best (and fastest) ways to get paid.

5. Calculate Your Earnings Per Click and Resources Pages Revenue

Your earnings per click is the total number of clicks divided by the total commissions earned. The formula looks like this:

• Total commissions / total clicks = EPC

This metric can give you an overall idea of what a merchant pays you.

For example, if an affiliate link gets 2,000 clicks and earns $20 in commissions, that’s an EPC of ten cents per click.

If you decide your number is too low, you can always negotiate for a higher commission rate. But, some do have low payouts and may not be worth your time to do their marketing for them.

Also, take note of income produced from your resources pages.

For example, the Toolbox page on our personal finance site generates 10% of our total income — all from a single page! So, we monitor its performance.

Performing an audit of these high-level pages on your site lets you keep track of your earnings. When you notice a decrease in income, you can investigate why (more on that later).

Further Reading:

• How to Create A Resources Page with Lasso (In Under 10 Minutes)
• Affiliate Marketing: An EPIC Guide for Beginners This Year

Assess Your Marketing Materials

Reach out to your affiliate network manager for their best marketing materials. This is a tough business, and you want to make sure you have high-quality affiliate offers.

It’s in their best interest to help you succeed.

6. Optimize Your Product Displays

If you’re using Lasso, make sure your product displays are optimized to attract clicks. That means using informative product descriptions with excellent copywriting, high-quality product images, titles, and enticing call-to-action (CTA) buttons.

Ask yourself, “Would I click this?”

Lasso lets you customize your product displays with enhanced attributes, including:

• Badges
• Secondary CTA buttons
• Custom fields

Here’s a step-by-step walkthrough of how you can highlight your product’s best attributes with quality content and draw more clicks.

Badges

Badges add personalization. They boost its visual appeal while giving you another chance to explain what’s great about your affiliate product.

Try terms like “Our Pick,” “Budget Pick,” and “Upgrade Pick.” Or, depending on your niche, “Money-Back Guarantee,” “Best for Beginners,” or “Amazon Best Seller.”

You can add badges to displays inside your affiliate’s Link Details page. Type your term in the field marked “Badge Text,” and Lasso displays a real-time preview (see example below): 

Further Reading:

• How to Add Badges to Your Displays Using Lasso

Secondary Call-to-Action (CTA) Buttons

Give your readers a second option with this button type. You can add it to your Link Details page. For example, offering your readers two locations to buy an affiliate product (e.g., Walmart and Target).

Using a secondary CTA button gives them another choice (and you another chance to earn affiliate commissions).

The other reason secondary CTAs are nice is that they maintain engagement.

Let me explain.

Perhaps your visitors encounter your product display, but they aren’t ready to buy yet. Maybe they need more information.

In that case, you could link to your product review, tutorial, or how-to guide in the secondary CTA button like we did with the Fundrise example below.

Just add the secondary URL of where you want to send them (e.g., a link to your product review) along with the CTA button copy:

This has the added benefit of boosting engagement while giving you more time to make your case to buy.

Further Reading:

• How to Use the Primary and Secondary CTA Buttons for Choice

Custom Fields

Custom fields give you more flexibility by adding star ratings and pro/con lists. To do it, scroll to the bottom of your Link Details page and click “Add Custom Field.”

Let’s give this display a star rating and a pro/con list. After you click “Add Custom Field,” you’re prompted to either “Create new” or “Add from library.”

To add a star rating and a pro/con section, you’ll choose “Add from library” since those already come with our plugin.

To give it a star rating, click on “Primary Rating” and give it a score between one and five:

Here’s how your Primary Rating appears inside your display:

If you’re adding a Pro/Con section, the process is the same:

1. Click “Add Custom Field”
2. Select “Add from Library”
3. Click “Pros” to make your pros section (or “Cons” to make a cons section)

After clicking “Pros,” a field appears where you can type in your bulleted list:

Be sure to hit “Save Changes” once you’ve created it.

Then, rinse and repeat this process for your “Cons” section. Here’s how it’ll appear in your display:

Further Reading:

• How to Use Custom Fields with Lasso

Find More Monetization Opportunities with Google Analytics Data

You can also find more monetization opportunities based on the keywords, phrases, and terms you’re already using.

Next, copy it to your clipboard, then paste it into a Google doc/Sheet. Scraping tools are great for extracting metadata into organized groups (e.g., page titles, meta descriptions, etc.) and make the process less time-consuming.

To do it, “Right” click on any H2, and click “Scrape similar”:

Then, copy items to your clipboard:

Next, paste the links into a Google doc or spreadsheet. Finally, analyze which links get the most clicks. You may start noticing patterns between what’s listed on your posts and what people actually click.

If you notice specific items regularly produce low click averages, replace them with different products.

7. Create an Event URL Spreadsheet

An excellent way for you to analyze affiliate clicks is with an Event URL audit spreadsheet. Event URLs are your affiliate links.

Google tracks every click on your site and categorizes it as an “Event” once you connect Lasso to it (hence the title, “Event.”) Here’s a sample of what ours looks like:

Items dipping into the red threshold are potential candidates for removal. Since nobody clicks them, they’re clearly unpopular with our target audience.

These spreadsheets are particularly useful for analyzing “best” list posts (e.g., best gifts for bourbon lovers or best digital cameras). 

Here’s how you can create one for your existing content. Create a Google Sheet with four columns labeled:

• Event URL
• Total Events
• % of Total
• Notes

The event URL will be your Lasso Links as found in Google Analytics. You can either select it by “Top Events” or by “Pages.”

For this example, we’ll use “Pages.” Head to Behavior > Events > Pages in Analytics.

This shows you descending order from highest to lowest, every blog post and page with the highest number of clicks (i.e., an Event).

In other words, you see each blog post and its total number of affiliate clicks. This metric lets you determine which of your blog posts get clicked the most (letting you identify your most profitable articles).

Click on any page to see the number of affiliate link clicks.

For example, when I click on our blog post about ways to make money, you can see the top affiliate clicks for that post are TaskRabbit, Survey Junkie, and Earny.

If you want to dig further, click on the affiliate’s name to see if text links or displays perform better.

Here’s what you see when clicking on Task Rabbit:

Here, you can see there were thirteen display box clicks versus four text link clicks.

If you evaluated this on your own website, you could create more content catered to TaskRabbit, Earny, and Survey Junkie.

Curate Your Content Framework

A good content marketing strategy involves reaching your target audience using strategic keyword research while making it easy for search engines to find you, so you get more organic traffic.

Designing content for your readers using Google Analytics data lets you determine what you might need to create more of.

Consider the content types you could create (using Survey Junkie as an example), including:

• Product reviews (e.g., Survey Junkie Review)
• Product comparisons (e.g., Survey Junkie vs. Swagbucks)
• Product alternatives (e.g., Survey Junkie alternatives)
• Best lists (e.g., best-paying survey sites)
• How-tos (How to Use Survey Junkie, How to Find & Choose Your Survey Sites)

You can use Lasso to help you find more monetization opportunities too.

8. Turn Keywords into Affiliate Links

Lasso has a feature called “Opportunities” in the dashboard

This lets you access its detection engine so you can find more ways to make money with your online business. There are three things Lasso looks for:

• Affiliate Programs (which we covered earlier in this post)
• Keywords
• Content

“Brand” and “Concept” Keyword Opportunities

Let’s say you want to find unmonetized mentions of products across your site. Imagine you run a personal finance site that mentions the cashback app Earny.

You know you’ve mentioned them but can’t recall where.

Here’s how you can find mentions of any word or phrase across your site and turn them into affiliate links. We’ll start with Brand keywording (i.e., when you’re looking for specific product mentions).

1. Head to “Opportunities”:

2. Scroll down and click “Keywords”:

3. Create your keyword (we’ll use Earny for this example) by entering it into the search field and clicking “Add Keyword”:

4. Re-enter it in the search field to pull that keyword up with every unmonetized mention:

Lasso finds every mention of your keyword across your site. Along with which piece of content the word is located.

Our niche site used the automation and displays from Lasso to earn $1.2M in affiliate income in under five years.

Here’s how to generate more revenue from your blog using our ‘Keyword Opportunities’ report.

🧵👇

— Lasso (@LassoWP) June 24, 2022

Here, Lasso found seven unmonetized mentions of the word “Earny.” You can also search for products you’ve linked to by the domain name or URL in your dashboard:

Another thing…

Content Opportunities

You can also check for under-monetized posts on your website using Content Opportunities either by the date it was last updated or the number of outbound links for that post.

Head to “Opportunities” and click “Content.”

To filter by the number of links from highest to lowest, click “Links”:

This lists every link in that piece of content from highest to lowest across your site. You can now click the number of links in the “Links” column to see who you’re linking to and whether to monetize.

For example, when you click on the first piece of content with 105 links, 29 Affiliate Marketing Examples That’ll Inspire You to Get Started This Year,  (by clicking the number “105”), you see this:

This shows you four things:

1. Number of links the post contains
2. The URL the post links to
3. The anchor text you’re using with your external link
4. Type of link (e.g., text link, image, display, etc.)

In the above example, you see immediately some big brands like Nerdwallet and Credit Karma are unmonetized. If you were evaluating your affiliate strategy, you might want to consider monetizing those.

Once you decide which links to monetize, flip the toggle for each one:

Next, choose the affiliate program. In this example, you’d monetize with MediaKix, so type that into the search field:

Finally, click “Monetize.” You just converted that mention of MediaKix into an affiliate link. Rinse and repeat this process for any post on your site.

If you’re searching for a specific content type (e.g., a review or a list of tips), you can enter that word into the search field, and Lasso finds every mention of the word “review” or “tips” displaying in your content’s title.

For example, if you want to analyze how many product reviews you have on your site, you could type the word “review” into the search field and get this:

You could gauge your affiliate income based on how well your reviews perform and decide whether to create more to scale your income.

For example, if you calculated that your reviews with each merchant have a 7-day EPC of $80 per 100 clicks multiplied times 58 reviews, that’s $4,640.

You could then determine based on that calculation how much you could potentially earn based on the number of average clicks you get in a week.

Or if you wanted to determine how well a specific content type is monetized or how many links it’s got (e.g., a “how-to” article), you could type in the word “how-to,” filter the links to display from highest to lowest, and see every “how-to” article you’ve written with the total number of links each article contains:

Then, analyze those posts to determine if there are more monetization opportunities.

How Often Should You Perform This Content Audit? 

It’ll depend on the size of your site. Some affiliate marketers could do it more often than others. Regularly checking in with your affiliate links ensures your earnings are on track.

The best way to do this is to schedule it just like you would a doctor’s visit. And then stick to it. It’s the ideal way to keep your affiliate business running smoothly. The below is a ballpark estimate of how often to run your audit.

Again, these are only estimates. The frequency with which you perform them will vary based on your site’s size. Take the timeline with a grain of salt.

The important thing is that you do them.

Ignoring these metrics ensures you will certainly leave money on the table (and potentially provide a poor user experience the more often you send visitors to broken pages)

Create Product Displays That Attract Clicks: No Coding Required

Building a successful affiliate marketing site starts with knowing what works well. Performing a content audit makes it easier to design sustainable, long-term wins for yourself – and increase commissions in the process.

All you need is the right WordPress plugin to get you there. Ready to see how Lasso can streamline the entire process? Sign up for Lasso today.