How to Use Social Media to Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Business
Affiliate marketing has come a long way since its inception, developing from conventional methods and currently ruling in the form of content marketing, email marketing and social media platforms.
It has been a subtle transition yet quite productive in terms of sales. Thus, attracting a lot more people to begin product-based affiliate marketing as their side or in some cases, as their main business.
And who can question them? Because affiliate marketing is one of the most profitable ways to promote and earn money. It has been appreciated by businesses in various industries all over the world.
81% of brands have affiliate programs. Since it requires little to no investment, affiliate marketing is incredibly popular among publishers and brands alike.
However, being a successful affiliate is not as easy as signing up for an affiliate program. It’s a tiring process and requires a well-thought-out strategy.
Fortunately, you have an effective way of marketing your affiliate business right at your fingertips: social media.
Social media is an excellent way to boost visibility, and begin to build an audience. You can even use it to deal with any customer queries or concerns you encounter.
Being both free and user-friendly, social media has emerged to be one of the go-to channels for affiliate marketing.
Affiliates are no longer required to have a well-known blog. Social media platforms provide affiliates with the tools they need to create content and seamlessly share referral links to their built-in audience of followers.
In this post, I’ll explain why social media is such a vital part of affiliate business success. I’ll then highlight some of the ways you can use social media to promote your business.
Let’s dive right in!
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a form of marketing in which products or services are promoted by other people or companies. The latter receives a percentage of the sales; this is their interest.
Affiliate marketing is basically made up of three parts:
- Advertiser: The advertiser is the actual manufacturer or seller of the product. It is its product that forms the offer. The advertiser forms the promotion budget. It determines what percentage the partner will receive for the targeted user action.
- Partner: The partner is the party that attracts traffic. This could be influencers, individuals or other companies that drive user interest. The partner’s job is to get people to take action.
- Client: The client is the person who performs the targeted action, for example, buying a product.
Why Social Media Is Important For Your Affiliate Marketing Business?
At this stage, social media probably doesn’t need much of an introduction. It has become a huge part of most people’s day-to-day lives — both personally, and on a more professional level.
The latest figures indicate that well over 9 in 10 internet users now use social media each month. That equates to an annualised growth of 10.1%, or an average of more than 13 new users every single second.
Despite its popularity, you’d think social media marketing wasn’t necessary when running an affiliate business. This is because affiliate marketers promote products put out by a specific brand, rather than their own wares.
However, carrying out this process means you essentially become a part of the brand. As a result, people need to become familiar with you as an individual. Social media is the perfect way to build credibility.
Plus, without social media, your reach is pretty limited. Remember, generating an income with affiliate marketing relies on getting people to convert. Social media gives you access to a potentially huge audience.
How to Choose The Right Social Media Platform For Your Affiliate Marketing Business?
Choosing which social media platform really depends on your social media objectives. Are you aiming to build your brand or looking for lead generation?
In any case. you need to consider which channels are used by your target audience, the channels that your competitors are using, and the type of content that is most likely to engage with your audience.
With this in mind, we are going to consider a number of social media platforms that I believe are easy to set up at no cost and that can create the audience for your affiliate marketing campaigns.
Let’s start with Facebook, the largest of them all.
As an affiliate marketer, you need to ensure that you are set up with the largest social media platform from day one. Facebook not only has the largest network, but it also offers many targeting options.
Furthermore, it offers all types of audiences to both merchant and affiliate websites to promote any type of service or product. The first thing that an affiliate should do is to create their own Facebook page by just entering some basic information and updating the profile.
Once you have created your own Facebook page, you should select a theme to focus on based on your personal interest or knowledge and promote related affiliate products on this page.
You should also treat it as a regular and long-term marketing activity making sure that it delivers good quality and highly relevant content to your followers.
Instagram is a great platform for affiliate marketing because it gives you the chance to monetize your audience easily. Instagrammers can promote affiliate merchants’ products by placing a discrete affiliate link in published content.
In exchange, the Instagram affiliate gets paid the commission percentage once a service has been purchased by a member of their audience.
One of the main obstacles when promoting affiliate products and services via Instagram is the limited opportunity to post links as only one link is permitted per biography, so affiliates need to be creative and promote the offers in alternative ways to be able to track performance.
One way is to use the affiliate link in your Instagram biography to promote your top-performing service or product and change it as when required with new top-performing products.
YouTube
YouTube is the second largest search engine and the second most visited website after Google. The platform has launched in over 100 countries and is available in 80 different languages making it the second-largest social media platform with 1.9 billion logged-in users per month.
The above statistics show the vast potential that the YouTube social media platform can offer for running affiliate marketing campaigns, making online video a great medium to reach and engage with your audience.
As with other social media channels, you can monetize your video content as part of your affiliate marketing campaigns by creating videos and placing affiliate links in the video and the video descriptions.
Twitter has been around since 2006 and has approximately 330 million monthly active users. Although it’s not as large as other social media platforms, it offers affiliates an additional marketing channel.
Using Twitter for affiliate marketing will help you to increase your brand awareness and most importantly, to start building your own audience of loyal followers.
As you communicate regularly and build a closer relationship with your followers, many of them will become partners and deliver valuable leads in due course.
Steps to Consider When Using Social Media for Your Affiliate Business?
There are several different tips and tricks you can use for more effective affiliate marketing on social media. A few tried and tested methods for success in social media for affiliate marketing are:
Try Creating a Redirect Link
Affiliate links have become easy to spot, and this may turn off potential traffic within your audience by way of feeling sketchy or like you’re pulling one over on them.
Rather than using just your affiliate link, create a redirect link that looks a bit simpler and cleaner, and therefore more attractive for those clicks. A clean and simple link is a link that will be more enticing to click.
Focus on Your Content
You should always stop and focus on your content first. Do your posts have the ability to stand on their own regardless of your affiliate link? Do they provide something of value to your audience? Do they grab attention?
Using the right education and finesse, you can learn how to really rope in your social media platform audiences, and demand their attention with high-quality and interesting content.
Use Visuals
Photos say a thousand words, and they are one of the best ways to draw attention to social media posts. Think about scrolling through your newsfeed — what types of posts do your eyes naturally fall upon while carelessly scrolling? Photos!
Using product photos (especially on Instagram) to go along with your social media for affiliate marketing posts will naturally draw the eye of your reader, and therefore naturally draw their attention.
Focus on High-Quality Affiliate Products
If you’re linking to lower-quality products, regardless of your post quality, the look of your link, or your photo use, you’re not going to make what you want to make from social media for affiliate marketing.
You’ll always have more success backing a product you love or really believe in, and if you impress your audiences with a quality product, they’re more like to do word-of-mouth marketing for you.
Remain Consistent
Remaining consistent helps to keep your audiences on board, and no matter what platforms you use, communicating and posting regularly is important.
In order to remain optimally active, first, focus on just one or two social media platforms, and when you become more comfortable posting and communicating actively with both, only then take on another.
A great way to remain active and stay that way is to set aside a couple of hours each day and dedicate this time to your social media affiliate marketing efforts.
Why You Should Use Social Media For Your Affiliate Business?
There are many reasons why you should consider using social media to grow your affiliate business. Let’s take a look at a few of them:
Available Almost at Free of Charges
One of the prime reasons that social media is highly preferred is because it does not demand any cost, at least for the basic features.
Social platforms are free of charge, but you are supposed to invest both time and effort. You need to run your social media campaigns for three months approximately and you are required to devote hours to it.
Freedom to Manage The Account on Your Own
If you take the responsibility to manage your social media account on your own, then you can deduct the cost of outsourcing someone to handle it for you.
The task of updating your social media accounts can be done in free hours. It is true that it takes a lot of time, but it is so enjoyable that you do not feel like you are doing any work at all.
Most People Participate in Social Media
Today, we hardly know anyone, who does not have a Facebook or Twitter account. There isn’t a person you know, who does not watch videos from YouTube.
Keep these factors in mind, you can consider social media a robust medium to promote your business as you can find customers from online conversations and scrolling timelines.
Reaching to Target Audience Gets Simpler With Social Media
Social media works as a link to come together and discuss experiences, common interests and grievances as well. Affiliate marketers can grab this opportunity by making the customers aware of the products.
Conclusion
When done effectively, affiliate marketing is a great way to generate a secondary income. However, you’ll need to make a name for yourself before you can start earning big money.
Social media is truly an awesome way to get a known online presence. Social networks have become an integral part of modern life, which is good for both companies and affiliate marketers.
