The H&M Affiliate Program | Fast Fashion Profits?

In this post, I am going to explore the H&M affiliate program. I’m going to show you how to join, figure out earning potential, and perform some H&M keyword research to help you create a traffic-focused content strategy.

About H&M

According to Wikipedia, “Hennes & Mauritz AB is a Swedish multinational clothing-retail company known for its fast-fashion clothing for men, women, teenagers and children. H&M and its associated companies operate in 62 countries with over 4,500 stores and as of 2015 employed around 132,000 people. It is the second-largest global clothing retailer, just behind Spain-based Inditex (parent company of Zara). The company has a significant online presence, with online shopping available in 33 countries.”

How To Join

*2021 Update: The DCM Network has H&M inside of its affiliate network.

At the time of this writing, your best bet for monetizing with H&M is to join either Viglinks (5.95% commission) or Skimlinks (N/A%). The way these services work, they will convert any H&M link on your site into an affiliate link for you.

They are essentially middlemen that have access to the H&M affiliate program. I would outreach to them to figure out if the program is active and how it is performing before investing a lot of effort promoting H&M.

Calculate H&M Earnings Potential

Keyword Research

I used some SEO software to conduct keyword research on the H&M website.

Below, I extracted 1,000 of their top-performing organic keywords with H&M branded search queries filtered out. This will help you figure out some content ideas and themes if you want to drive traffic to H&M products.

Promotion

SEO Ideas

The term “chunky knit cardigan” has a somewhat small search volume of 1,700, but a keyword difficulty of zero. If you are trying to do SEO, and you have a new website, or just want to compete for low difficulty keywords, this could be a good keyword to start with.

I would recommend doing a long listicle post- perhaps you scour social media and find examples of chunky knit Cardigans on Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest and write up 50 or 100-word blurbs beneath each image.

You could then throw in a couple of H&M chunky knit cardigans and include affiliate links. On top of that, it would make sense to create a Pin for Pinterest to drive traffic to your page. This is a smart, low effort strategy to siphon traffic from two different platforms.

“Nursing dress” is another low competition term with 27,00 searches a month and it keyword difficulty of 4. It’s worth noting that when someone searches for this term, most of the results are going to be eCommerce stores.

If you have a content site with affiliate links, from my experience, your affiliate site content sometimes ranks for this primary keyword, but oftentimes ranks for longer tail variations of it like “best nursing dress” or “what is a nursing dress”.

This is because Google makes its own determinations about what people are looking for. And if they feel that the searcher’s intention is the purchase of a product rather than an informational query, it is going to rank an e-commerce store over and above your informational content.

Even if your content is incredibly long and the e-commerce product page, for example, has 150 words of duplicate content.

A particularly big keyword that H&M ranks for is “sweater”.

It gets 75,000 searches a month, has a keyword difficulty in the 20s, and is currently sitting at position 3. If I were approaching this as an SEO, I wouldn’t necessarily target the primary keyword. I would dive into some long-tail variations of this keyword to see what I could find.

I used the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool to dive into the keyword and found some interesting results:

Personally, I would target some of these longer tail keywords, which do have significant search volume, over and above trying to target such a generic term like “sweater”:

• ugly christmas sweater
• virgin killer sweater
• sweater
• sweater dress
• ugly sweater
• sweater weather
• sweater weather lyrics
• cashmere sweater
• christmas sweater
• sweater vest
• virgin killing sweater
• patagonia better sweater
• cable knit sweater
• turtleneck sweater
• cardigan sweater
• ugly sweater ideas
• coogi sweater
• ugly christmas sweater ideas
• gucci sweater
• fair isle sweater
• off the shoulder sweater
• sweater dresses
• argyle sweater
• sweater weather chords

Again, if I was running a fashion blog, I would consider publishing long form, image-based listicles and creating some digital Pinterest assets to drive traffic to my website.

One thing I like to do is to use content from social media- this means you don’t have to pay for image licenses if you are embedding image content from platforms like Instagram and Twitter.

For example, there is a lot of fun social media content about ugly Christmas sweaters:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Br2x6pfFrmx/

Here is a website that is doing the listicle style format really well:

It’s an easy way to create a lot of content around a particular term. For example, say you want to hit 3,000 words, you can have 30 list items with 100 words each to hit that word count and naturally incorporate an almost infinite number of long-tail keyword variations.

Social Media

As I have already touched on, Pinterest could be a great place to promote your H&M affiliate content. Since H&M is a fashion retailer, there’s lots of image-based content for Pinterest Boards and Pins. A common content strategy is to use a service like ViralTag To automate Pinterest scheduling.

You can also formulate your Pinterest strategy around some of the keyword research I provided- that way you know you’re targeting highly searched fashion terms.

Email

If you have a decent-sized email list, you could experiment with sending traffic directly to H&M. Say you do some research and figure out when they are going to have a sale, you can create some email scripts in advance and send them out to your list when the H&M sale is live.

Summing Up

It looks like H&M recently launched a dedicated affiliate program. Viglinks and Skimlinks are also good options. Doubtless, if you’re big enough, you might be able to reach out to H&M and coordinate sponsored content or a custom affiliate relationship, as well. Don’t be afraid to reach out to their marketing team to coordinate this- I’d find some H&M people on LinkedIn and ping them there to start a conversation. You can also check out Nike, Zara,  Nordstrom or Macy’s affiliate programs for more clothing retail affiliate options.

Last Updated on March 13, 2021 by Ryan Nelson