Stay22’s Spark Tool Helps Fill the Gaps in Affiliate Linking

What is Stay22's Spark Tool?

Spark is an inventive tool created by Stay22 to help bloggers naturally insert affiliate links into existing posts automatically.

The tool, which is turned on automatically within the Let Me Allez suite of products, uses Stay22's AI technology to analyze your existing content to determine what posts on your site are underrepresented with affiliate links. Once identified, the tool automatically adds Stay22 affiliate links to appropriate keywords to better serve your users. (Your Partner Success Associate can always deactivate Spark, if needed, as well.)

To illustrate this one just a bit more clearly, we should give an example.

Let's say you published a guide to a city you recently traveled to. But let's say you were in a hurry and decided to forgo adding affiliate links to get the article out in a timely manner (something that happens to me regularly). Historically, you'd likely lose out on some potential revenue by not having affiliate opportunities present for your readers in-content. But with Spark, Stay22's technology will identify appropriate keywords and add the best-suited links for you!

So instead of leaving that “where to stay in Pittsburgh” text unlinked and unmonetized (amongst others), Spark will add the relevant links in for you without making a single click!

How Does the Automation Work?

For those who have been around as long as we have been, you may have likely tried a few tools that advertised automatically inserted links on your site, likely with mixed results. So what makes Spark different, and how does the automation work?

As with all things Stay22, their proprietary technology takes a look at your site and analyzes each post for the best fit not only for affiliate companies/links in general but also for the right text to link.

Both of these analyses are important because if the program identifies that your page is already optimized with affiliate links, it is unlikely to add any links to the page. If your page could be optimized just a bit more, it may add a few links. Or, like in the example mentioned above, if you have none, it may add several links to the page to bring it up to what is considered an optimized experience.

So, while the program may add several links if you have a robust guide with appropriate text and zero initial links, during the initial rollout, Stay22 has determined that the average insertion is just 2.7 links per post. My own experience looks similar to this as well, albeit a bit lower as I am told I was actually fairly well optimized for links at the start. Still, within the initial tests of Spark, I saw an increase of outbound clicks by 10% thanks to the newly added links (and Stay22 is reporting an industry average increase of 18%)!

Beyond identifying links, the software looks for context clues in the text to determine what phrases to link. Think of terms like city names, phrases like “book a hotel”, or others like “where to stay” as illustrated above. The goal is to identify contextual phrases that, when linked, would likely encourage an outbound click, and the software does the rest to add the best links for each with your affiliate details already included.

But, as with everything, there are a few more details of note that those who want to give Spark a try should be aware of.

First, you should be aware that the program takes a bit of a rollout approach on your site as it analyzes your articles, reader engagement, and more. During the startup of my own integration of Spark, for example, I was told that only 50% of my page views were showing the added links as an A/B test behind the scenes. This optimizes and improves things more before full application on your site at a later date.

Second, Spark is designed to run in the background after all other content is loaded so as to not harm page speed. It collects data upon the initial load, inserts links for the next user that loads the page, and the inserted links are subsequently cached in future loads to ensure that the AI does not have to run the analysis on every single page load. But, as with most Stay22 products, if you remove Spark, these added links will also be removed as they are not permanent insertions.

Finally, while we love Stay22's Analytics features in the dashboard, we should note that Spark is not identified in the booking system just yet. So to receive data on Spark performance for the time being, you'll want to reach out to your Partner Success Associate for an export of the Spark-specific data. We're told these details are being added into the dashboard in the future, however.

Overall, we absolutely love how Stay22 is looking out for the needs of bloggers, and creating novel solutions to help increase our affiliate earnings all with just a few clicks of the mouse (if that). Spark is one of those features that we think will really help increase earnings for many bloggers, even those who are quite strong in affiliate linking overall, and is something you should consider for your own blog today!

Tho join Stay22, click here. For new subscribers, mention This Week in Blogging during your onboarding call to receive an additional 5% commission on us. Terms and conditions apply. Valid for new subscribers only. This article was sponsored by Stay22; however, all opinions are our own.