A guide to affiliate marketing on Squarespace (make money with your blog)
Affiliate marketing means you are rewarded with a commission when you recommend products to your audience.
On my travel blog, I use affiliate links for platforms like Booking.com and Discover Cars, and I earn money when my readers book accommodation or rental cars I recommend.
Once you’ve set up your affiliate links and optimised your blog for search traffic, affiliate marketing works all by itself — it’s a favourite of ‘passive income’ fans.
Can Squarespace be used for affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is one strategy for monetising your Squarespace site. It’s entirely possible to make money using affiliate links on your Squarespace blog — it works just as well as it would on any other website platform.
With my travel blog, I make money through affiliate marketing for travel related products, such as Booking.com and Viator. I use the Travel Payouts platform to monetise with affiliates, which means most of the programs I use are kept in one place.
Some of the affiliate programs available through TravelPayouts
Affiliate marketing with Squarespace
One of the big niggles with using Squarespace for a blog is that it’s not easy to mark links as ‘no follow’, which is how you want to designate affiliate links.
Adding affiliate links as normal links means you risk getting penalised from Google, as it can look spammy and overpromotional.
To be honest though, when I first started adding affiliate links to my travel blog, I didn’t know this — and I don’t think it affected my traffic that much. There was only one page that was doing really well, which tanked as soon as I added an affiliate link.
Oops.
Other than that, I didn’t run into problems — but I use affiliate links pretty sparingly compared to other travel bloggers.
To be on the safe side, you should definitely mark any affiliate links as no follow right from the get go.
How to add affiliate links on Squarespace
There are two different methods for adding an affiliate link on Squarespace.
Using a markdown block
The first option is to use a markdown block, which is what you will need to use if you are on a personal plan.
To mark a link as no follow, add a markdown block and paste this code into it (make sure you edit the URL and anchor text):
<a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.addurlhere.com" target="_blank">Add the anchor text here</a>
Markdown blocks are a bit niggly, but you can add code to make them look how you want (the links show up a little differently to other text links, for example).
Install a plugin
A much easier way to mark affiliate links as no follow is to use Exitolic’s free affiliate link plugin — but you will need to be on a business plan or higher.
Add the following code once to your footer with website code injection.
Wherever you add an affiliate link, add &rel=sponsored or &rel=nofollow to the end of your url (it also works with #rel=sponsored or #rel=nofollow)
Opt to have the link open in a new tab for best practice.
<!-- Excito LLC | License: https://excitollc.com/squarespace-plugins/squarespace-affiliate-link-plugin -->
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/Excito-LLC/squarespace-plugins@main/plugins/affiliate-link-plugin/plugin.min.js"></script>Copy
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