As you all know, social media is now more than just a platform to stay in touch with friends, family, and co-workers. It has also opened possibilities for people to make some extra cash – or even a lot of cash.
Affiliate marketing is a partnership between a company and an external website, where the external website helps to promote the company business, and the external website owner gets paid for each click that transforms into a sale.
Using social media for affiliate marketing is one of the most popular and simplest ways to generate revenue online. It is so simple that you can get started right away, and there are many businesses willing to pay a commission in return for promoting their product online.
Choosing your Channel
The key to your social media success can be knowing which social channel to use. You’ve got to understand which social platform your target audience is most active and reactive on.
Here, we will learn about the three major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram)
With more than 1.5 billion daily users and nearly 2.5 billion unique monthly users worldwide, Facebook is the broadest reaching social media network. It is seen as your company’s second website. The way the pages are organized allow you to put pretty much all information a potential customer needs to know about your business on the page.
If you are not using your affiliate marketing brand with Facebook, you are not getting the exposure you need. For your brand to reach a wide audience, you need to maintain an account. However, we'd recommend that you keep your professional and personal accounts separate, and start a business page for your affiliate marketing.
If you’re sharing affiliate links on your Facebook Business Page, make sure they’re few and far between.
With 126 million daily active users and 321 million unique monthly users, Twitter is a powerful tool and a great way to share news quickly to a wide audience. It is an International platform which supports 40 languages.
But that being said, Twitter is one of the fastest moving social media networks. A trending hashtag often changes within an hour, on average, around 6000 tweets are tweeted every second which corresponds to over 350,000 tweets a minute. Thus, the challenge here is to keep yourself visible on people’s timelines as often as possible throughout an entire day. Thus, to keep your posts relevant, it’s recommended to tweet no less than five or ten times every day.
You also want to make sure to include the right hashtags in your tweets. That way, you can reach people that are searching for that subject. Include a link and an attractive description and your engagement will go up.
Instagram has 1 billion monthly users, of which more than 500 million use the platform daily. Of all the social media platforms, only Facebook and YouTube have more active users than Instagram.
There is no limit on the amount of text you can write beneath a photo, so you can spend as much time as you want explaining an affiliate program. However, affiliate marketing is a little more difficult on Instagram compared to other social media platforms due to the lack of link sharing opportunities.
Only when you reach 1000 followers, you will be allowed to add links to your posts. Until then, your profile will be the only place where you will be able to add a clickable link. Thus, every time you want to promote a service or product on your account, you have to go to your Instagram profile and change the link in your bio.
Best Practices for Affiliate Marketing on Social Media
Now that you know about the most popular social media platforms, let's look at some ways to carry out affiliate marketing on social media. Follow these ideas to drive a good amount of sales, and profit as much as you want.
Creating Affiliate Redirect Links
Affiliate links look spammy and have become easy to spot. Since they can look a bit sketchy, it may turn off potential traffic within your audience. That’s why one of the most powerful affiliate marketing tips is to create a redirect link that looks a bit simpler and cleaner rather than a raw affiliate link.
Creating affiliate redirect links is the best practice to use for affiliate marketing, email marketing, or on any medium you use to share your affiliate links.
Focus On Quality Content
When promoting affiliate marketing through social media, you should always focus on the quality of your content first. To get a loyal fan following on any of the social media channels, you need to establish yourself as someone who provides something of value to your audience.
An engaging blog that addresses news and updates about the industry where your product fits, is another way to reach the right audience. Customers looking for news are more likely to visit your website and might even look at your product as well.
You can easily get results by delivering good quality content, and then promoting your affiliate link at the end of your post.
Link Product Images
Images say a thousand words, and it attracts more clicks as well. Including product images in your content is one of the best ways to draw attention to social media posts.
People are more attracted to a product after getting to see it. Using product images to go along with your social media for affiliate marketing posts will naturally draw people's attention.
Take a screenshot of the page you are promoting and then link that image to the page with your affiliate link.
Shorten Your Links for Affiliate Redirect
Lengthy affiliate links are less appealing to users. This is why shortening affiliate links is a popular practice among affiliate marketers. Shortened URLs have a higher chance of getting shared.
All you need is a URL shortening tool that will make your affiliate links look shorter and more attractive. Bit.ly, Goo.gl, Owl.ly, are some of the most popular URL shortening tools used by affiliate marketers.
Promote Only High-Quality Affiliate Products
If you are promoting lower quality products, regardless of your content quality, the look of your link, or your image use, you are going to be less profitable from social media for affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing through social media is much better all around when you promote a quality product.
If you can impress your audiences with a quality product, they’re more like to engage in word of mouth marketing for you in return, sending other interested people to you to experience the product for themselves.
Promoting a high-quality offer is one of the best affiliate marketing strategies because everyone's a winner there. The customer wins because they are getting an amazing deal on an awesome product. The affiliate marketer wins because they get a good amount of commission for referring the sales.
Conclusion
Social media for affiliate marketing can be an indispensable tool to your affiliate marketing success, as well as your connection with other fellow affiliate marketers.
Using these tried and tested strategies, you can ensure that you are using social media for affiliate marketing to the best of its capabilities.
Lastly, keep in mind to make sure your social media posts not only spread your affiliate link but have actual value as well.
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Oh really nice, I recently came across your blog post and must say that you have provided excellent material.
Your instructions are awesome. I think we should follow this instruction and can gain excellent results quickly. The topic has been completely covered. It answered all of my questions. Thanks for sharing the information with your community.
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Affiliate Marketing is the next big thing. The area of scope atleast in 2020 is beyond horizon. Thanks for this blog. This was informative.