By B.L. Ochman
Methods To Use For Effective Social Media For Affiliate Marketing
There are several different tips and tricks you can use for more effective affiliate marketing on social media. A community of like-minded and driven individuals can help you to bounce ideas off others, but you’ll need to pull these ideas from somewhere first. A few tried and tested methods for success in social media for affiliate marketing are:
1. 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.
2. Focus on your content
When using social media for affiliate marketing, 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 company audiences, and demand their attention with high quality and interesting content.
3. Use photos
Photos say a thousand words, and they are one of the best ways to draw attention for 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 or related photos 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. Using Instagram for your social media for affiliate marketing platform of choice can really show you what the power of photos hold. You need to have more number of followers on your social media accounts by which your photos will be checked more people. You can buy instagram followers as well which is definitely the best strategy.
4. 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, sending other interested parties to you to experience the product for themselves. While focusing on as many products as you can, regardless of quality, may seem like the way to get more from social media for affiliate marketing, you’re doing yourself a disservice when compared to backing a few products that you really love.
5. Remain active
Remaining active helps to keep your audiences on board, and no matter what platforms you use, communicating and posting regularly is important. For this reason, it’s also important not to oversaturate yourself by using too many social media platforms, as juggling all of these different audiences effectively without inadvertently neglecting your audiences can be difficult. 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 to make sure your audiences are well taken care of. 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.
6. Connect with other affiliate marketers
There is a full community of affiliate marketers out there, and connecting with one another and supporting one another in their success can help you to better use social media for affiliate marketing. The first word in social media is social, and teaming up with other affiliate marketers to share links, share posts, and bring each other up can provide you with just the sort of team mentality you need to improve your followers and get your link out there. Don’t view other affiliate marketers simply as competition, because cooperation can benefit you both in a really powerful and successful way, We’d suggest The Affiliate Institute as all the reviews rave about them.
How To Use Social Media For Affiliate MarketingSocial media is one of the most powerful tools we’ve gained in today’s modern technological age, and this goes for marketing and beyond. With mindful use, social media for affiliate marketing can be an invaluable tool to your affiliate marketing success, as well as your networking with other fellow affiliate marketers. In such a socially driven business, this networking aspect is an important one, and one that isn’t often thought of but is benefitted from greatly.
By following a few simple rules, tips, and tricks, even a social media novice can master the art of social media for affiliate marketing. Social media has been designed to be user friendly and not too complex, and this rings true whether you’re just posting your vacation photos for your friends and family, or if you’re posting the affiliate link for a product you believe in and want to share with your followers. Using these tried and tested methods can ensure that you’re using social media for affiliate marketing to the best of its capabilities, and therefore also gain all the benefits that go along with it.
I like the comment about lurking, especially in the weekends. I think #motrinmoms all happened over a weekend. Imagine being that brand manager on a Monday morning
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23motrinmoms
I love the “no more dipping your toe in” line!
I had to use that line all the time when I was w/in a corporate environment and it drove me nuts! Not one “C” level wanted to listen or see the impact that we could make from ANY SM efforts…the train left last week & they wanted to walk. sigh. (side note: they filed Ch.7 & closed their doors this week).
Thank God I got laid off after pulling teeth for 10 months & landed at a small company where the CEO totally “gets it” and is involved in “it”.
Wahooo!
OK, my eyes are boggling. How do you spend $50,000 on a social media campaign? Sounds like you should remove a zero, so I’m verrrry curious.
Ari – I am talking about a professionally produced campaign, like the online treasure hunt I did for Up Your Budget in 2005, which had a $500K budget for four weeks.
It involved professionally produced videos every day for four weeks, a website, graphic design, animated cartoons by gapingvoid, blog, a newsletter, blog advertising, travel, PR, hosting, a LOT of bandwidth, SEO, legal costs,$16K in prize money, and so on. Plus my fee for creation, production and execution of a campaign that got a million uniques in four weeks and 10 million pageviews.
You can read the case study here https://www.whatsnextblog.com/archives/2006/10/case_study_up_your_budget_i_2005_created_by_bl_ochman.asp
And frankly, that campaign was was under-priced considering the time, effort, and results that went into it and came out of it.
The entire campaign cost them less than one 30-second TV spot, as the COM noted in the NY Times advertising column.
BL
As everyone I am curious about your marketing campaign at 50k or 500k? Do you have some examples??
Guillaume – click on the link in the comments above for a case study of the 2005 Up Your Budget Treasure Hunt that I created and produced for Cendant.
For approx $50K I did a contest for author Karen Quinn’s book, Wife in the Fast Lane. It is no longer online and I do not have a case study available but it contributed to the success of the book, which will become a movie in the not distant future.
Let me say it again – social media campaigns are NOT free, or cheap. At least not if you want them to have significant impact.
The old method of advertising is interactive marketing. The term is misleading. Most people think it means that there is some type of interaction on the part of the person advertised to, and there is. But, it is not conversational. Instead, the advertiser wants you to interact with their campaign in a specific set of steps. Following the call to action and visiting a website for instance. It’s the push to make you do something. Live this image. Buy this now.
Social Media Marketing is just the opposite. It’s the pull of the tribe. The tribe already has your trust so the actions they take are ones you align with. On a larger scale, it’s the allure of belonging in the group as you take action together. “I am doing this so why don’t you do it with me?” On an individual level, the attraction is to behave the same way to get the same results that benefits your fellow tribeswoman or tribesman. “She looks hot! I want to look hot too. I want to go to her hairstylist” and you do. Social Media Marketing uses the power of attraction.
While advertising tries to use the same tactic, with a billboard for instance, of a gorgeous woman telling you the benefits of the salon, it doesn’t have the same impact because it’s pushing you to go. It is not pulling you in as a trusted friend. Your friends have your best interests at heart and advertisers do not. Social Media Marketing is based on building trust and that foundation will make Social Media a dominant player in Marketing.