Affiliate marketing has always been an excellent way to monetize online traffic and earn a decent commission. Only the way people conduct affiliate marketing kept changing. If you have searched for ways to make passive income online, you must have come across affiliate marketing as a common suggestion.
It is a performance-based marketing tactic wherein affiliate marketers are given a commission(s) for every successful sale they make. The sale can be conducted through any medium, i.e., email marketing, ads, blogging, social media, etc.
Of all the mediums, social media opened massive avenues for affiliate marketing enthusiasts to begin their journey. Since social media platforms are free to join and easy to use, more people can try their hands at affiliate marketing. But is selling through social media channels this easy? Well, not really. You cannot expect to publish an affiliate link and expect people to buy from it.
You will have to create a social media plan, get the necessary tools, and be consistent with your effort to see any results. If you’re starting, you can follow some tried-and-tested methods discussed in this article. When executed correctly and consistently, the results can be impressive.
What Is Affiliate Marketing & Who Is It For?
7 Ways to Use Social Media to Generate Affiliate Sales
Social Media Has Opened Floodgates of Opportunities for Affiliate Marketers
What Is Affiliate Marketing & Who Is It For?
Affiliate marketing can be best defined as a Cost-Per-Action (CPA) affiliate model wherein affiliates (content creators) are given a commission for every successful sale by brands. Whether you’re an online content creator or a brand offering products/services, affiliate marketing creates a win-win situation for both.
As per the data shared by similarweb.com, affiliate marketing generates approximately 5% to 25% of the total online sales for some of the world’s biggest brands, so you know how powerful it is. You can earn a hefty commission(s) as a creator by successfully selling a brand’s products to your dedicated audience. On the other hand, brands can generate more sales by simply paying a percentage of sales to the approved affiliates.
So whether you’re looking forward to earning some extra passive income as a creator or want someone skilled to sell your products as a brand, affiliate marketing is the way in the future.
7 Ways to Use Social Media to Generate Affiliate Sales
The best part about affiliate marketing is that it can be done via any medium. Earlier, affiliates relied heavily on blogs and email marketing to promote affiliate products. But the advent of social media offered a newer and better avenue to attract and build a target audience.
If you combine the total number of social media users on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., the figure surpasses an astounding 4.5 billion mark as per the data shared by wearesocial.com. With so many people online, you cannot risk not leveraging social media platforms to your advantage. If you’re an affiliate marketer trying to get sales from social media platforms, the following tried-and-tested methods can help you get visible results.
Leverage Niche-Specific Groups
Social media platforms like Facebook have countless groups created around particular interests. So if you’re promoting affiliate products in the yoga niche, look for groups built around yoga, health, wellness, and similar topics.
Joining such groups will give you instant access to people who would be interested in buying the products you’re promoting. If you’re in for a long-term game, ensure you don’t spam niche-specific groups.
It will only increase your likelihood of getting banned from the group. Instead, focus on delivering value to the people inside the group, and making sales will become much easier. You can check the next point to learn how to sell in social media groups without spamming and getting banned.
Emerge as the Community’s Influencer
When it comes to online communities, you can either create one from scratch or join an existing community. The former option would easily require a lot of time, so you might consider joining an already well-established online community. Once you get approved in such communities, your focus should be on providing value around the topics related to your affiliate products.
Direct publishing of affiliate links will mostly lead you to a permanent ban from the group, so you should focus on establishing yourself as a trusted influencer. You can achieve this feat by consistently sharing helpful posts, assisting people through comments, etc.
Once people know you, start incorporating affiliate products in your posts and describe how they helped you. The more problems you solve for your target audience, the more sales you’ll make.
Be Consistent with the Delivery of Attention-Grabbing Content
It can be an extension of the previous point as both will touch lines with sharing highly relevant and helpful content. Whether you’ve decided to join niche-specific communities on Facebook or have planned to build an audience on your personal Twitter or Instagram profile, one thing will remain unchanged, i.e., the need to share helpful and attention-grabbing content.
A golden rule of affiliate marketing is one should never try to force sales. The affiliate should focus on solving the problems using an affiliate product, and sales will follow. You can do this by being consistent and creating niche-relevant content that is engaging, crisp, and attention-grabbing.
You can get better results if you can incorporate storytelling in your content pieces. Those starting can follow established affiliate marketers and replicate their content format. It can be altered as you advance.
Make Your Content More Visual & Engaging
Good-quality images always catch people’s attention. Affiliate marketers who incorporate high-definition images in their content always receive better conversions.
You can include pictures of the product you’re promoting or add any other image related to the topic you’re talking about. Relevant images paired with attention-grabbing content always give the best results, so try it out.
If you’re a beginner and don’t know how to integrate images with ad copies or other text content, follow some Amazon or eBay affiliate marketers to study and understand how they do it. You can begin by replicating their process, but it should be customized as you advance.
Create Short URLs for Affiliate Products
Affiliate marketers should always use link-shortening services to make their work easier. Original links to affiliate offers are long and may look like spam to most. Always post shortened URLs online if you don’t want the URL structure and length to hinder your affiliate sales.
Whether you use Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or any other social platform, attach links with your content that look short, neat, and professional. Bitly, Rebrandly, TinyURL, and Shor.io are some link-shortening services you can consider.
Promote Quality Offers
If you’re serious about earning from affiliate marketing, you should focus on finding and promoting offers or products that are highly relevant to your target audience. Selling junk products can get you sales in the short run, but it won’t be sustainable.
To become a good affiliate marketer, you should always search for quality affiliate offers that can sell like hotcakes on social media. You should never accept any random affiliate offer coming your way as a beginner, as it can affect your long-term goals.
Use Social Media Tools
Affiliate marketing can be arduous if you don’t have the right tools for the trade. For example, you may fail to come up with interesting content ideas for your social media profiles if you don’t have access to tools like Buzzsumo.
Capturing emails of people interested in your promoted offers can be challenging if you don’t have a good email capturer like OptinMonster. The market offers different tools to solve your affiliate market problems. This method can help you improve affiliate sales indirectly.
You just need to identify what you need and invest in those tools. For starters, you may consider getting click funnels or Unbounce landing page builders to hosting your offers. A chatbot like Mobilemonkey to actively engage with the audience and generate leads, bitly to shorten affiliate links, and email marketing software like convertkit to build your email list and promote your offers.
Social media provides ample opportunities for affiliate marketers to build a loyal audience and earn from it. But only a few manage to leverage it correctly. Whether you’ve just started your affiliate journey or are finding it challenging to make affiliate sales, following the methods discussed above will bring noticeable results.
Social Media Has Opened Floodgates of Opportunities for Affiliate Marketers
Promoting and selling products to a target audience online is not as simple as it seems. You will have to put in consistent efforts, give time, and invest in the right resources to start making serious income from affiliate marketing.
However, if you have little investment but can dedicate time to shaping your career as an affiliate marketer, social media platforms can help you greatly. These social media platforms have billions of people, so finding the right audience for your affiliate programs is no longer a challenge.
But how you will attract your target audience, initiate a conversation, and make sales is what matters the most. There can be endless ways to use social media to your advantage, but you will have to start with a few proven methods.
To help make your journey easier, we’ve covered some practical and timeless ways to help you get started. Follow all the techniques for at least a few months to know what works best for you. With time, you will gain clarity, and you can also start experimenting with newer ways to close sales on social media.
Tanusha Verma
Conclusion
Social media is not restricted to one use, instead, it has many potential ways to help in different tasks like lead generation, affiliate marketing, etc. Use social media for affiliate marketing, there are multiple ways one can prefer to take help form.
A complete guide on how to use social media platforms for affiliate marketing is given above with the addition of tool names where required. The guide also contains few examples of the methods and some basic tips over them.
FAQs
Which social media platform is best for affiliate marketing?
The universal social media platform that is almost used by everyone is Facebook. Hence, Facebook is considered the best option to choose for affiliate marketing.
Does Instagram allow affiliate marketing?
Yes, Instagram does allow affiliate marketing for the users with the only condition of being compatible with their terms and conditions.
What should a beginner do in affiliate marketing?
Being a beginner in the field of affiliate marketing one needs to start by considering the platform for the affiliate marketing followed by selecting a particular niche you might be interested in. The next step involves searching for better affiliate marketing options in your niche that you can, later on, add with quality content on your selected platforms.
How do I promote my affiliate link on social media platforms?
One can promote their affiliate link on social media platforms in multiple ways. Some of them are selecting the most popular social media platform in order to join the niche-related community, taking help from social media influencers or becoming one by self, keeping up with the available resources and quality-based offers, etc.
