It’s no secret that the next era of internet marketing centers around mobile.

Mobile applications and mobile accessibility form a cornerstone of the great developments across Silicon Valley. Increasingly, consumers are drawn to the internet via mobile devices, from their smartphones to iPads, and the rules of the game are changing. In this new world, it is essential for the internet marketer to understand how to do mobile affiliate marketing.

The good news is, from an affiliate standpoint, mobile is not that much different from the browser-based techniques we’ve been using for the last few years. The most important takeaway is that authentic value is easier and easier for the user to come-by, so the focus of any mobile affiliate marketing effort needs to be on providing value to a user niche through a mobile site.

The best thing to do is to ensure that your niche website is optimized for mobile access. If you can afford to build a mobile app for native iOS or Android devices, great, but for the overwhelming majority of webmasters native apps are not the solution. HTML5 provides excellent solutions for optimizing a site for mobile devices, and many sites have easily accessible tools for doing so.

For example, if your site is built on WordPress, be sure to make sure that your WordPress theme is designed for HTML5 and mobile devices. If you look on the list of features (attributes) of your theme, it should list mobile access as one of the key selling points.

If, on the other hand, you’ve built your site using a web platform like Ruby on Rails, make sure that you use a gemfile, standard library, or other plugin that enables mobile conversion.

Finally, you should make sure that your affiliate links direct the user to pages that are also optimized for mobile devices. Many of the big affiliate programs, like Amazon or Clickbank, are optimized for these devices, but many of the smaller programs are not.

To check how well your site performs, simply follow the user process via your own smartphone or tablet. That is, visit your site and click on an affiliate link. If the process feels natural, there is a good chance your readers will find the process natural as well. If not, you should look into how to convert an existing site into a mobile-friendly site.

In the end, it comes down to the individual webpage your user is redirected to. If your site and your affiliate program site both make the purchase process easy to follow on a mobile device, your affiliate links will work just fine as is.