Several good ways to use social media for your affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is all about signing up to promote products on behalf of a retail company. For the retailer, this is an excellent way to get around what had might have previously been expensive and often ineffective advertising campaigns. By offering affiliate programs, the onus on marketing is transferred to their affiliates, meaning zero cost for promotion. The marketers devote their energies to encouraging sales, without being concerned about stock control or customer contact.

The amount of turnover is wholly dependent on the effort any marketer puts into promoting the items through their web platform. In this respect, one of the key aspects of any affiliate marketing strategy is using social media. Here are the best ways of harnessing this.

High-quality products

An obvious tip is to ensure you choose a worthwhile product to promote from the outset. You should be considering something with a strong track record for sales, but it still ‘niche’ enough that you won’t be swamped by competition in the marketplace. But even more importantly, this should be something that sits well with whatever you normally blog about.

For instance, say your social media activity focuses on sporting activities. You could sign up to an affiliate program devoted to, say, nutritional supplements or exercise equipment. Once you can discuss a topic with verve and enthusiasm, slotting in the promotional aspect behind your monetized web presence should occur seamlessly.

Content

Whether you are blogging or using posts on Instagram/Facebook/Twitter to engage with your readership, you need to strike a balance between publishing product-related content and promoting the product. This should be around 80/20. Your content is what is crucial, not the hyperlinks leading site visitors to the retailer purchase pages.

Links

You can certainly insert appropriate links into your web pages – that’s the cornerstone of affiliate marketing – but you need to do this subtly. Simply placing these prominently, in garish text accompanied by slogans saying “please buy my product,” will discourage people from buying.

Photos

Site visitors will welcome well-written articles, but they’ll also appreciate visual images. Photos are an excellent way to get your message across to your social media circle / potential customer base. Ensure these are top quality, preferably HD renditions. The beauty of using social media to get the product out there is the share facility allows your friends to begin doing your promotion for you.

YouTube reviews

Another recommended method of getting your product out there would be to purchase an item yourself, then use a good camera or smartphone to film a positive review. Publish these on your social media, in order to give your customers a sense of the benefits to them from investing in the product. Invite them to submit their own reviews to your social platforms, and if there are 5-star rated, post them prominently.

Mailing lists

Once you have established a social media presence relating to your topic of choice, reach out to your customer base by inviting subscribers to add their details to an email list. Now you can circulate links to your products at the click of a button.

Stay active

Never sit back and expect your business to continue ticking over with little need for your input. Site visitors will quickly grow restless about returning to the same tired-looking web pages. Ensure your web content is fluid and continually revised, regularly rejuvenated with bulletins and updates. Dating affiliate network is an excellent example of how marketers can keep their content refreshed by collaborating with others on a similar wavelength, and this principle applies regardless of the products you are promoting.