How Affiliate Marketers Can Utilize social media to Promote Their Affiliate Product
No one to dispute the role of social media in helping people reconnect with friends and families or even build long-term business partnerships.
Businesses of all fields and sizes have been using social websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, as media to promote goods and services to their friends and followers. Advertising campaigns through Facebook posts and Twitter feeds are effective because of their share-ability nature.
Most (if not all) users have the urge to share valuable information with their inner circle, allowing continuous marketing without requiring a lot of effort on your parts.
Some companies are even willing to pay a fee to get their advertisements displayed on as many pages as possible on social media.
For affiliate marketers, the idea of using social media as a place for a marketing campaign is no longer new.
They use Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, Instagram, and many others as marketing areas to attract more visitors to their websites by providing links. An affiliate marketer earns a commission for every sale, not from every click.
The amount of commission varies depending on affiliation programs and products category. Randomly posting many different links to every social website channel you have will most likely result in big failures, but there is an effective way of doing this as briefly outlined in the following passages.
Build a relationship first, monetize later
One of the most common mistakes is direct advertising on social media. The basic idea of a social website is to help people connect with others via an online platform with photos, images, status updates, etc.
People with the same interest can also communicate easily with each other through groups or online communities. As an affiliate marketer, you do not want to put random advertisements with links to your websites; this is not a likable social media activity. Instead of getting additional traffic, chances are your account gets banned or blocked from most people’s lists.
Rather than being berserk with posting advertisements, try to be genuinely helpful and interesting to others. Keep your posts simple but containing real valuable information about the products you want to sell.
Be honest and help others figure out why your products are good and worth the expense. It is fine to post advertisements from time to time, but your posts should focus more on getting involved in the conversation between your friends and followers.
Overly posting ads can be considered spamming, but a helpful marketer is well appreciated everywhere.
Now that you are an affiliate marketer, your social media account is not only for fooling around, but it is a tool for the more serious purpose of making money. To achieve that purpose, you must remain active in conversations by addressing all comments and updating the contents on daily basis.
However, remember that you are trying to be a good seller here, so use appropriate content (including texts and images).
An affiliate marketer does not actually own the products being offered, but you still want to make good impressions among potential buyers.
If you stay active, say thank you, and reply to all comments, you are on the right track of building good relationships with new people.
When you know them better, you have a better chance of selling something to them.
At the same time, you learn about their perspectives, products preferences, and things they like, based on which you can plan the next marketing post better.
Grow your email list
Every social media account is linked to an email address. If you also have an ongoing email newsletter campaign, you can save the
email addresses to your list too. Social media is getting more interested in keeping their contents informative and valuable, so direct blatant advertising is possibly limited to a certain amount only.
In such a situation, you always have your email address list to send the newsletter to keep the campaign moving on.
As always, the newsletter should contain an unsubscribe link, showing that you respect customers’ choices.
Me on a boat ride in the Malacca River
Compliment others
Thousands of affiliate marketers are using social media for their campaigns. In a longer social media post (wherever possible), you can write original content to complement your competitors and tag their user names.
For example, if you are selling computer peripherals, you can write a useful post containing valuable information
about the products you sell and complement other more authoritative marketers in the same niche.
You can always post the article to your website before posting it to your social media account.
The tagged marketers will notice. If they like your post, there is always the possibility that they share it with their friends and customers too. You instantly have unexpected exposures from hundreds (if not thousands) of potential buyers visiting your website.
Take advantage of visual contents
When it comes to visual content including videos and images, Facebook stands out from the crowd. The social website predates almost everything else for picture sharing and video posting. In fact, you can even post a long video in HD quality without being compressed.
People prefer to see images in every post and enjoy watching short videos on social media, so you can harness the power of visually-engaging content to drive traffic to your website. As a rule of thumb, every image and video should be your own or attach attribution if you use someone else’s materials.
If you have to use an image from the web, try to use content available from public domains. It shows that you are a professional business person who respects others’ works.
The bottom line, social websites are excellent marketing tools, but you must use other tools to complement all the efforts such as blogs and email newsletters. It is worth mentioning that you can put long posts or videos on your website first before you share them on social websites.
This way, you will always have your content no matter what happens.
Grow your email list
