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Getting Started With Affiliate Marketing on Social Media
Affiliate marketing is seen as an interesting way to earn passive income online through blogs or other social media. Making money as you write what you love to write about or share with the world couldn’t get any easier or faster than this. However, when one gets down to making money through affiliate marketing on one’s own social media, it is important to remember what product they choose.
A great affiliate product is one with good quality and can be promoted to earn passive income. Such a product can help bypass the various steps involved in producing a product and then creating a sales pitch for it.
In affiliate marketing, all one needs to do is to select a good quality affiliate product, send that link over on your social media or other online methods and get paid when the traffic converts.
However, simply getting an affiliate link and posting it online or on social media may put off your well-built audience. It may also not get you the kind of sales or traffic that you are looking for as an affiliate marketer. Some amount of value addition is necessary.
For example, an affiliate link directly posted on facebook may get removed from news feed as they remove sales links from general preview as per their policy. You link may thus, not get viewed by as much traffic. Results are similar on Twitter as well if the affiliate link is directly posted. Hence, it is important to keep a few things in mind for getting started with affiliate marketing:
Quality is Important
Whether it is your social media platforms or your very own blog, it is important to choose what products you will market. The quality of the product must be great and you should have preferably used it to provide an honest feedback. When linking in your blog, it is always better to provide a detailed overview of the product and thereby increase its chances of conversion.
Disclosure is Important Too
As per federal and other trade commissions it is important to disclose if one is using affiliate links in blog posts or on social media. As per their directives, it is important to disclose that you would generate a commission when anyone buys anything through an affiliate link you share. The trade commissions require to know that you would be generating money and it is not just a goodwill gesture when you share a link.
Follow the 80-20 Rule
The 80-20 rule applies to everything on social media. When posting content on social media or even your own blog, 80% of content must be curated and 20% must be your own. Similarly, when posting links, only 2 against 8 should be of the promotional type. The increase in passive income must not be at the expense of your followers. Do not overload them with affiliate links and make them want to leave you as a follower.
Be Organic in Approach
Integrate the affiliate links as part of regular conversation or a relevant post on your blog. Hard-selling is a total no-no. People believe in you and follow you for a reason, do not let that reason be watered down by incessant hard-selling. The link must be shared in a friendly way, offering advice to your followers or your opinion about the product.
Create a Redirected link
The direct affiliate links tend to look creepy and suspicious and may not get too many clicks, leave alone conversions. It is thus important to create a redirected link which looks clean and non-suspicious. It is possible to do so in self-hosted Wordpress through the Redirection plugin.
Add Images
When promoting a product, it is great advice to add images of the product being promoted. It is well known that posts and tweets with images have higher clickthrough rates. Thus, adding an image would increase the chances of the link getting clicked and thus, increase the possibility of conversion.
Facebook
Even though Facebook is a great channel to earn from through affiliate links, the promotional content on it should be kept to a minimum. This is because Facebook page is almost as official as the website. People look to Facebook for official announcements, blogs, other relevant content. Hence, a minimum of affiliate links must be shared through Facebook. Use Facebook only when there is a huge amount of audience that engages with your Facebook page on a regular basis. Even then, promotional posts must not be aplenty. Do ensure that you add the hashtag #affliate link at the bottom of the post to disclose that it is promotional in nature.
Twitter
Twitter is an extremely fast paced environment where the average lifespan of a tweet may only be about 18 minutes. It is usually recommended to post a minimum of five times a day on Twitter. If posting five times a day, one can add one affiliate link for four regular tweets as per the 80-20 rule. Again, add a hashtag #affiliate link or #afflink to the tweet to disclose that it is promotional.
Similar advice must be followed for other social media channels when looking to make passive income through affiliate marketing. A few online digital marketing courses offer modules for affiliate marketing as well and hence, for those looking to make some serious passive income, it may be advisable to go through such a course.
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