Have you ever wondered how you can leverage social media to make more money online through affiliate marketing?
You’re not alone.
Since its inception, affiliate marketing as a business has grown from strength to strength, and today it is worth $12 billion.
As this is a lucrative business, there is a lot of competition in almost every niche, and with social media penetration increasing consistently, almost every affiliate marketer is trying to use it to connect with more consumers.
That said, stiff competition is not the only thing you need to worry about when you use social media to promote your affiliate products.
For starters, you’d benefit greatly from a website to publish relevant content. There’s no need to go overboard and hire a developer. WordPress and fast, light, and affordable hosting will suffice. All you need is hosting. If you are wondering what website hosting is good for your affiliate marketing blog, Nick, web hosting expert at Hosting Tribunal considers HostGator as one of the best value-for-money choices based on its speed, uptime, price, compatibility with WordPress and customer services.
Coincidentally, early on, HostGator was one of the strongest promoters of affiliate marketing, allowing many of its subscribers to generate passive income with minimum effort. Since, many web hosting companies and christian hosting companies are happy to include as many users as they can in their affiliate marketing schemes.
Once you have your website up and running, it is time to look toward social networks.
Social media is a tricky thing. On one hand, it can help you grow your audience base and increase sales faster than any other online marketing medium, but on the other hand, a single false move and consumers will start avoiding you like the plague.
Therefore, it is imperative that you use social media intelligently—and this is where this post can help you. We have listed 5 top strategies that allow you to make your social media campaign count.
Promote affiliate products to niche-specific groups
Did you know that Facebook has about 2.7 billion users and LinkedIn has more than 560 million users?
Their potential as marketing tools is beyond doubt. However, not all of these users will be interested in your affiliate products. So before you start marketing your affiliate products on social media channels, you must identify the people who’re more likely to show interest in what you have to offer offer.
For instance, let’s say you are affiliated with a web-based business such as cloud hosting. You can use keywords like web hosting, web development, and web designing to find groups related to your business.
In case you are affiliated with a local business, you should use local search keywords to find groups relevant to your business niche. For instance, if you are affiliated with a car renting service in California, consider using keywords like California car renting or car renting in California.
Publish Excellent Content
You have identified relevant groups on social media but what’s next? Should you start publishing promotional content pieces one after another?
That would be suicidal. Shoving promotional content down the throat of viewers is the fastest way to shoo them away and irreparably damage your image.
No one, we repeat no one, likes seeing promotional content. Instead of spamming readers, create content that provides value to them.
You can get impressive results by publishing informative, engaging and entertaining content pieces with just one affiliate link at the bottom.
Blogging is as effective a way as any to offer customers content that they will like to read. However, if you decide to blog, make sure you post regularly. In case you are hard-pressed for time, you can outsource this part of your business or delay setting up a blog until you have more time on your hands.
If you’re using the popular blogging platform WordPress to manage your blog, you might consider Cloudways as a choice of hosting provider. One of the fastest WordPress hosting solutions, Cloudways will focus on performance, speed and security while you focus on creating share-worthy content.
Include Product Images in Your Content
Did you know that content with product images enjoys a wider reach and better engaging rates on social media platforms?
Linking images of your affiliate products in your content is an effective marketing strategy to build brand recognition and improve customer engagement.
Images stimulate interest, especially if they are visually appealing or really compelling, and attract clicks.
Besides using product images in the content, you should try to include infographics because they can help you make a meaningful impact on viewers immediately.
With the average person having an attention span of no more than 8 seconds, catching consumers’ attention the moment they see your content can prove to be the difference between impactful and not-so-effective content.
Apart from grabbing viewers’ attention instantly, infographics help you to demonstrate subject-matter expertise as you can present complex information in a more understandable form and convey large amounts of information in a small space.
In addition, infographics have better viral capabilities than ordinary text-based content. Because they are visually appealing and contain lots of information about a single subject, viewers are more likely to share them via social media channels.
Redirect Your Links with Friendly-Looking Links
A raw affiliate link looks something like this:
https://kirticontent.com/?ref=123 click?abcjxxzzyFzPg/F3&offerid=22142.10121&type=2&subid=0
This link is too long and complex. It’s also very easy to spot.
Most importantly, such an obvious affiliate link may send the wrong signal to consumers—that all you’re interested in is selling the product to them.
If your affiliate link creates a bad impression, your click-through rate will take a hit and no amount of compelling and visually appealing content will be able to get it up.
That’s why you should use cleaner and friendly-looking links. Instead of inserting your affiliate link in a page, put a link to another page on your website that will automatically redirect viewers to the affiliate link.
Continuing with the above example, you can create a redirect link like this one:
https:kirticontent/MIL
As you can see, this links looks much nicer and clickable than the raw affiliate link.
One of the easiest way to create redirect links in WordPress sites is to use the Redirection plugin. It’s free and works like a charm.
Use Social Media Channels to Build Your Email List
Most affiliate marketers use social media to only induce more sales. They want their sales process to be just 2-step long: consumers read their content and click on the affiliate link to make a purchase.
While this line of thinking is quite natural because a shorter sales funnel means less work and might lead to more sales, it doesn’t always work.
As said before, consumers don’t like overly promotional content. The same holds true for social media sites which usually have high quality standards.
Therefore, instead of promoting your affiliate link left and right on social media channels, use them to build and grow your email list.
A large email list is invaluable for online marketers, especially for affiliate marketers. Research shows that email marketing is one of the top traffic sources for affiliate marketers.
When you think of this, it makes a lot sense. A bigger email list means you can market your affiliate product to more people, which in turn can help you experience more sales.
Besides email marketing, what are other top traffic sources in affiliate marketing?
Check this fact-packed infographic here to learn about other global top traffic sources and gain better insight into the world of affiliate marketing.
About the Author
There are so many different ways to utilize LinkedIn as a business owner and entrepreneur. You definitely broke it down into sizable action steps and chunks!
Thank you, happy to hear you enjoyed it!
Hi, this is very informative. Thanks for sharing
Really enjoyed. Social media is a great power nowadays.