To be successful at social media affiliate marketing, you just need to do TEN simple things in regards to your posts and social media channels.
In this article, I will explore, step by step, how to set up a successful social media affiliate marketing business.
For affiliate marketing, social media is one of the most widely used tools. When done right, you can create a successful stream of income for yourself.
For an in-depth outline of marketing affiliate products through social media, read this article. For detailed understanding of all kinds of affiliate marketing tools, feel free to sign up for Powerhouse Affiliate’s free affiliate marketing course.
Quickly Jump to any Section:
- Sign up for an affiliate program and choose products to sell
- Identify your audience for social media affiliate marketing
- Choose a social channel for affiliate marketing
- Create quality content
- Engage audience through two-way interactions
- Use photos and videos to engage audience
- Post actively
- Promote quality products through social media affiliate marketing
- Use short and clean redirect links
- Promote you social posts
Here’s how to use social affiliate marketing:
1. Sign up for an affiliate program and choose products to sell
Choose one of the many affiliate programs out there. Choose an affiliate program that is reliable, offers good commissions, has a good brand value, and has a good affiliate cookie duration. You do not have to tick for all the criteria while choosing an affiliate program. Decide what’s important to you. One feature of the program might make up for another. So, evaluate various programs like Amazon Associates, PowerHouse Affiliate, and CJ Affiliate, and choose one or more for yourself.
Ensure that you do not fall in any scams. We have written an article on identifying and avoiding affiliate marketing scams.
2. Identify your audience for social media affiliate marketing
Identify the audience that you will target through social media affiliate marketing. Learn about their age group, their interests, geographical location, etc. After that, learn about the kind of social media channels your audience is using and engaging with. For example, your audience might be Women aged 25-45, who use Instagram and Facebook and have interest in startups, cooking, and home decor. Learn such details about your audience before you go for social affiliate marketing.
3. Choose a social channel for affiliate marketing
The next thing you do in social media affiliate marketing is to choose a channel to promote through. Once you know which channels your audience prefers, choose social media channels you think will be the most effective and profitable to work with.
You can choose all or a few relevant channels to work with, depending upon your execution capacity. It is best to stick to one or a few channels and work on them properly. Here are a few popular social media channels to work with for affiliate marketing:
3.a. Facebook affiliate marketing
Facebook affiliate marketing is straightforward. This platform offers a lot of opportunities and features to sell affiliate products. Facebook has 2.37 billion active monthly users.
Affiliate marketing on Facebook is used to create a user base that is influenced by your recommendations on the channel. It is a good way to reach a wide audience that can be engaged well through various features of Facebook. Facebook analytics also help you narrow down your audience and help you create informed Paid Ads on the channel.
To learn how to affiliate marketing on Facebook, you can explore our Affiliate Marketing Course or read Point 10 below.
3.b. Instagram affiliate marketing
Instagram is a fast-growing platform. It had 1 billion monthly active users in June 2018, as per Statista. These users have varied interests and demographics. You can easily target your prefered set of audience on Instagram through features like sponsored Ads, organic hashtags, insta stories, verified Instagram accounts, collaboration with other influencers and high user engagement.
To learn tips and tricks on how to affiliate market on Instagram, Jump to Point 10 below.
3.c. Twitter affiliate marketing
Twitter affiliate marketing is also very popular. In this era, where opinions and news can be shared and people can be influenced in as little as 280 characters, Twitter is gaining popularity among affiliate marketers.
Affiliate marketing on Twitter can be very effective with little effort, as the platform had about 330 million daily active users in Q1 of 2019, as per Statista. Like other social media platforms, it also offers various paid and organic modes to reach a wide audience.
3.d. Pinterest affiliate marketing
Pinterest works like a charm, when it comes to affiliate marketing. It’s where you can use powerful imagery to attract users to your affiliate products. The platform feeds users with posts as per their interests, which helps marketers reach their audience automatically.
Affiliate marketing on Pinterest can be very lucrative, considering the platform reportedly had about 322 monthly million users in the 3rd quarter of the year 2019. You can add meaningful content and links to your posts to ensure that they reach the right audience.
4. Create quality content
It’s cliched, but the content is the Key! Post regular educative and entertaining content on your chosen social media channels. Your generic and affiliate posts should in 80-20 ratio. Do not post too much promotional and affiliate content. Create videos, images and articles that educate and entertain users in your niche. Once you have gained the trust of your audience, you’ll easily be able to influence them to purchase your affiliate products.
5. Engage audience through two-way interactions
Aim for high engagement rates to keep audience interested in your content. Your posts shouldn’t be a one-way communication. Use features like polls, comments, and reactions to get your audience’s opinion. This helps in people being able to relate to you and trust you as a content creator. Actively reply to comments and reviews to show that you are listening. Modify your content to suit your audience’s preferences.
6. Use photos and videos to engage audience
Photos and videos tend to get better response on social media than text-based content. Link relevant images to affiliate products to get a better click-through rate. Videos are great to hook users and, hence, are great to motivate users to purchase your affiliate products.
7. Post actively
Persistence is important. Make a schedule and stick to it. Your audience needs to understand that you are actively serving good content. Give them a reason to stay connected to your channels. If you go missing in action for long or if your posts are sporadic, then your users might lose interest in your channel over time.
8. Promote quality products through social media affiliate marketing
One important thing to keep in mind is to put your name to products that are of good quality. Refrain from marketing low-quality affiliate products. People will trust you in the long run only if they have a good product experience after making a purchase. Good quality products will earn you a good word of mouth, adding to your follower base.
9. Use short and clean redirect links
Affiliate links are generally untidy and long. Try to use clean redirect links from your website to ensure that people are comfortable clicking on them from your social media pages and posts. You can also use link shorteners to make the links look clean.
10. Promote you social posts
Once you have created good content, you need to promote your posts for three reasons—get more followers, higher content engagement, and more affiliate sales.
Here are a few ways you can promote posts on different social media platforms.
10.a. How to do affiliate marketing on Facebook
Create quality content (pictures, text and videos), add affiliate links, join relevant groups on Facebook, share posts on relevant groups, and create paid ads and optimize them.
Affiliate marketing with Facebook can also be done through Facebook stories. Create a product catalog on Facebook and promote it. Write and promote entertaining and educative content for your niche to build audience and to gain your audience’s trust. Invite people to like your Page. If you are learning how to start affiliate marketing on Facebook, then you can try our Free affiliate marketing course.
10.b. How to affiliate market on Instagram
Instagram affiliate marketing can be done by adding sponsored affiliate links to your Instagram posts, reach a ‘verified’ status to add links in Insta Stories, or add a link in your Bio to get traffic to your affiliate links.
Use the right hashtags to organically reach your audience. Reply to comments to improve the engagement rate of your posts. Overall, affiliate marketing on Instagram will work only if you are regularly posting interesting and engaging content for your users and not just selling.
10.c. Affiliate marketing on Twitter
Twitter affiliate marketing can be done by promoting your posts using the right hashtags, choosing a theme of posts, creating a story with your posts, and promoting through Ads. Add links to affiliate product images, so that users can reach your products to purchase them.
10.d. Affiliate marketing on Pinterest
To promote your posts on Pinterest, you can add the right keywords to the titles and descriptions of your posts. Understand the interests of your audience and create content around it. Relevant keywords will help Pinterest show your posts to the audience with an interest in the content and products that you are promoting.
Add links to your posts to direct users to your affiliate products. You can also use Paid Ads on Pinterest to promote your posts among users who search, browse and discover content.
Conclusion
Social media affiliate marketing can be very effective when done right. It gets you a higher ROI as you are able to engage users easily and frequently.
Affiliate marketing through social media can be done through channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. Choose the channels your audience prefers, create quality content, and promote that content organically and through paid Ads.
Choose quality products to promote through social media affiliate marketing. Create educative and entertaining content to engage your audience. Publish affiliate product posts only 20% of the time.
Build audience, brand, engagement and trust to be successfully able to sell affiliate products.
Besides social media marketing, you can also sell affiliate products by creating a website for affiliate marketing or making an affiliate marketing ebook.