Turn Recommendations Into Income, Affiliate Links and Promo Codes Done Right
A code buried in a caption gets lost. Here's how affiliate cards, promo codes, and showcase pieces work on a Keepp page, and what Keepp does and doesn't do in the transaction.
By Keepp Team
You recommend a product. You add your code to the caption or the description. Someone has to read the whole thing, remember the code, remember it again three days later when they actually go to buy, and most of them don’t. Half forget the code exists, half of the rest use it wrong or too late. The commission you earned by making someone want the thing evaporates because of where you put the information, not because they didn’t want it.
Text is a bad place to put something someone needs to act on later. Here’s a better shape for it, and what’s actually happening under the hood when someone taps through.
What someone actually does after they see it
They don’t reread your caption. They don’t screenshot the post to remember a code. If they liked what you showed them, they look for a shortcut, usually your bio link. If that link is a generic list with nothing specific to the thing they just saw, they either hunt for it or give up. The code, meanwhile, is still sitting in a caption they’ve already scrolled past. By the time they’re at checkout on the retailer’s site, the code is gone from their head and the recommendation might as well not have carried one.
Affiliate cards: what happens when someone taps through
On a Keepp page, an affiliate-link card is a card whose button is your referral URL, whatever network issued it. LTK, Amazon Associates, Impact, ShopMy, a direct brand affiliate link, it doesn’t matter which. The card shows a photo, a title, and an optional price for context, and tapping it (or its button) sends the visitor straight to the retailer’s own site.
Be clear-eyed about what that means. Keepp is not a party to the sale. Nothing about the purchase happens on Keepp, no cart, no checkout, no payment. The card is a well-labeled doorway to the retailer, and the retailer’s own affiliate tracking (a cookie, a URL parameter, a code entered at their checkout) is what actually attributes the sale back to you. Keepp doesn’t process the transaction, doesn’t see whether it converted, and doesn’t take a cut of an affiliate commission, because there’s no commission running through Keepp to take a cut of. If you want payment to run through Keepp itself, that’s a different kind of block entirely: a product, where checkout happens on your page through your own connected Stripe account. Selling a product covers that path, and it’s worth understanding the difference, because a card is not a product even when it carries a price.
That distinction matters for what to expect from the card. It won’t raise your affiliate conversion rate by changing how the retailer’s program works: cookie windows, attribution rules, and commission rates are set by whoever runs the program, not by Keepp. What the card changes is everything upstream: whether the person who wanted to buy still has the link and the code in front of them by the time they get there.
Promo-code cards: a code someone can actually carry to checkout
A promo-code card is built for programs that run on a code instead of, or alongside, a tracked link. The code sits on the card front as a chip; tap it and it copies to the clipboard, ready to paste at checkout. An optional button underneath can still carry a link if the program has one. Tapping anywhere else on the card opens a detail view where the code is there to copy again, along with any photos and a longer description.
That “copy on tap” mechanic is the whole fix for the problem this post opened with. A code in a caption has to be memorized or re-found. A code on a card gets copied at the moment someone’s already decided to buy, and it’s sitting in their clipboard the whole time they’re filling out a retailer’s checkout form. If your program uses both a code and a tracked link, put both on the card (the link in the button, the code as the chip) so either mechanism the retailer uses to attribute the sale is covered.
Showcase cards: recommend without selling anything
Not every recommendation needs a code or a commission attached. A showcase card is the plainest kind: photos and a description, no price, no button required, not even a title required. Use it for things you like and want to mention but aren’t monetizing: a brand you’re not in an affiliate program with yet, a gift you got, a tool you use that doesn’t have a referral link. The same page that holds your paid affiliate placements can hold cards like this without every recommendation reading as a pitch. Mixing the two is often better for trust than an all-affiliate page: a run of showcase cards between the monetized ones signals that you’re actually recommending things, not just running ads. If you’d rather keep something as a plain outbound link instead of a full card, links and buttons is the lighter-weight option for that.
Building the card from what you already posted
Give a card the same photo and framing you used in whatever post made someone want the thing: the same angle, the same lighting, the product in the same context. Someone who taps through from your bio right after watching a video or scrolling a post should land on something that visibly matches what they just saw, not a stock product photo pulled from the brand’s site. That continuity, more than anything else on the card, is what makes the tap-through feel trustworthy instead of like an ad unit. A card holds up to five photos and can use a portrait shape sized for Instagram-native images, specifically so a photo you already shot doesn’t get awkwardly cropped when it lands on the card.
The additional info field is where terms, sizing notes, or shipping caveats go, kept separate from the description so the card front itself stays short and scannable. Use it for the fine print on the code (“one use per customer,” “expires end of month”) rather than cramming that into the description.
Organizing many recommendations without it turning into a wall
Once you’re recommending more than a handful of things, the problem stops being “where do I put this” and becomes “how does anyone find the one thing they came for.” A few structural moves handle that:
- Group loosely by category. Beauty, home, tech, whatever divisions fit your niche: headers break a long page into named sections, and turning on a header’s “show in nav tabs” option surfaces it in a nav bar visitors can jump through instead of scrolling past everything to find, say, the skincare section.
- Lead with what’s current. Put whatever you’re actively promoting this week at the top; older recommendations that are still good but not the focus can sit further down.
- Retire what’s stale, don’t let it pile up. A code expires, a link goes dead, a brand relationship ends, because each recommendation is its own card, retiring one means archiving or deleting that card, not rewriting a page. A visitor who hits one dead link stops trusting the rest of the page.
- Don’t overload the page. A page with forty cards on it is a page nobody finishes. If your list is genuinely long, headers and a nav bar do more for a visitor’s patience than trying to fit everything above the fold.
The affiliate marketer who doesn’t sell anything directly
This setup is built around a specific person: someone whose entire business is curation, not inventory. You don’t hold stock, you don’t ship anything, you don’t handle a return. You tell people what’s good and get paid when they buy it from someone else. Your page has to do two things at once that a plain link list can’t: look like a considered, personal set of recommendations rather than a wall of outbound links, and still get someone from “I saw this” to “I bought this” without the code or the link getting lost in between.
That’s the whole shape of link-in-bio for influencers and affiliates: worth reading if your page is currently an LTK profile, an Amazon storefront, and a notes app of raw links you’re trying to consolidate into one place. A custom icon on any plain links you keep alongside your cards, and a page styled with a font pairing that matches your actual brand, keep the page reading as curated taste instead of a directory. Because each product also gets its own shareable link, you can send a single recommendation directly to someone who asked about it in a DM, without pointing them at your whole page to go find it themselves.
If you’re just getting the page started, claiming your handle, setting up your profile, and adding your first cards is the whole setup: free, and choosing the right block is there if you’re unsure whether something should be a card, a plain link, or a product. How your page works covers the model underneath all of it if you want that first.
A running list, not a one-time post
The things you’re recommending change. You stop repping something, you pick up a new one, a code expires and gets replaced. Because these are cards on your page rather than lines buried in old captions, you update or remove them directly, and the change is live immediately. Your page always reflects what you’re currently recommending, not a snapshot from whenever you last wrote a caption.
What this frees your captions to do
When the code and the link aren’t the job of your caption anymore, your caption stops needing to be a set of instructions. You can write about why you actually like the thing (what it’s for, who it’s for, what you’d pair it with) instead of spelling out “code NAME15 at checkout, link in bio.” People who aren’t ready to buy get something worth reading. People who are ready tap through to your page and find exactly what they need, code already in hand.
FAQ
Does Keepp take a cut of my affiliate commission? No. Affiliate commissions are paid by the retailer or network you’re affiliated with, through whatever payout schedule they run, Keepp isn’t in that transaction at all. Keepp’s commission structure applies to sales made through Keepp’s own checkout (a product block), not to outbound affiliate links. See get paid your way for how the different payment paths on Keepp actually work.
Can one card have both a link and a promo code? A promo-code card can carry a button URL underneath the code chip, so yes: the code copies on tap, and the button underneath can still send someone to the retailer if the program also tracks link clicks.
What if I want to sell my own product instead of an affiliate one? That’s a different block. A card (including the “for sale” kind) always sends the buyer elsewhere; a product block takes payment on your page itself through your own connected Stripe account. Selling a product covers the setup, and connecting Stripe is the one-time step before that. see how selling directly works for the full picture.
Add your recommendations to your keepp.link page, free to start.