Facebook boasts of having the largest social media audience and getting sales from Facebook is certainly amongst the cheapest in today’s competitive market and certainly good for a start of your affiliate marketing business..
Yes! You can market your affiliate business on Facebook. Not only that, you run affiliate marketing on other platforms apart from Facebook. But, before giving you my reasons why you should run affiliate marketing on Facebook or any other social platform, let’s discuss the pros and cons of affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is an advertising model in which a company( or product owner) compensates third-party publishers to generate traffic or leads to the company’s products and services. Simply put, an affiliate helps to generate sales and gets paid a commission for every sale he or she generates. Oftentimes, the commission is a percentage of the sales price.
Affiliate Marketing Requirements
Two things you basically need as an affiliate marketer are the online space and the affiliate product you have to sell.
Online space
This refers to the platforms and media you will use to get to your potential clients. This platforms could be Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, blogs, hotsuite, twitter etc.
The product
What product are you selling? It could be digital or physical. Digital products are easier to sell . What digital product do you have to sell?
You have to take note that starting small is good although in the affiliate marketing world, you get a percentage of the amount you sell. This means the bigger the product, the higher your commission. So choose wisely. Irrespective of whatever affiliate platform you choose, you’ll be presented with a wide range of products ( even wider when it’s digital products) to choose from. Often times these products span diverse niches. Choose the products your customers want more. Know your clients and learn their demands and ensure to supply that demand.
4 Platforms that Support Affiliate Marketing
In as much as you can run affiliate marketing on a variety of social platforms, I will be outlining to you three top platforms where you as an affiliate marketer will get more leads and prospectives for the least amount of money
Facebook ranks as one of the top most visited and populated social media site used by different people about and around the globe. With its advancement through the ages, Facebook has become a platform where people, companies and businesses connect. Facebook has evolved to occupy not only the social hub of the society but to also provide tools that support different businesses.
As an affiliate marketer, Facebook is a good marketing platform for you. Apart from creating a page for you to communicate with your various potential clients, Facebook provides you the following services.
- Pages. You can create a page for your business and communicate with your leads as a business entity.
- Groups. You can connect to a community of people who need your products through Facebook.
- Ads. When I mean ads, I mean promotion in the very sense of it. Facebook allows you to run sponsored ads that reaches a wide range of prople especially those whom you have designed the the message for.
- Facebook/Instagram influencers: Apart from this, you can also send your affiliate links to Facebook influencers to help you reach out to more people, potential clients, and those who intend to learn from you.
Tailor Your Ad to Your Audience
You are allowed to design an ad to suit your audience. With the different varieties of ads types made available to you, such as image ad, collection ad, video ads etc, you are allowed to choose, create and build your own ad for your various goals. You can learn how to create high converting Facebook ads here
Send Interested People to Your landing pages.
A re-direct to your landing page. Through Facebook ads, you get people to see the message you designed for them and also redirect them to the landing page for your products. Here you can collect their contact details and follow them up using email or WhatsApp marketing.
LinkedIn offers you professional tools and a platform to broadcast and sell yourself and products. Being the largest online social business-oriented networking site specifically designed for professionals.
It has over 500 million members, in over 200 countries. It provides you an easy platform to find, connect and link up with leads and prospective clients.
LinkedIn gives you the ability to showcase your profile, expertise, recommendations and connections, to the million others who seek your experience.
LinkedIn can also be used for affiliate marketing by showing your expertise in the topic or niche you’re attempting to market in. For example, if you’re promoting a product in the travel niche, showcasing your expertise in solving travel related issues will be advantageous.
The simple way to use LinkedIn to sell affiliate products is to optimise your profile to reflect your knowledge in that niche. Once done, simply using relevant content will generate organic leads. Alternatively, you can run LinkedIn ads and get leads to your sales funnel or landing page.
While this method is costlier, it’ll however give you results faster than promoting using organic methods. However it’s a highly untapped platform as people tend to stay away from it because it’s more professional than social.
The gains of using LinkedIn cannot be overstated though, this is because if you promote high ticket affiliate products, which you should, LinkedIn provides you the best platform to get to professionals with the financial capacity to purchase that product.
YouTube
YouTube is a video based platform owned by Google. It offers its users the ability to upload videos, watch others videos as well as attend live video events.
YouTube when combined with affiliate marketing is a very powerful way to promote products both digital and physical. YouTube for affiliate marketing involves creating videos that explains or shows the benefits of the product you’re promoting and attaching links to learn more or purchase that product in the video description.
As the old saying goes, “show don’t tell”, showing people how the product will benefit them instead of just telling them serves two purposes. One it creates trust because it gives an opportunity for consistency and secondly, it provides an opportunity for you to give proof of action or proof of benefits.
With YouTube, you can run google display ads to get more viewers to see your videos, go ahead to your landing page and then purchase your product.
Twitter boasts of one of the best platforms for affiliate marketing. One big advantage twitter has over others is it’s favorable algorithm. With twitter, almost anyone can go viral, this happens less with other platforms such as Facebook or LinkedIn.
Using Twitter for affiliate marketing is simply about dishing out relateable value consistently and letting the algorithm grow your account. As your account grows, so would your sales if done properly.
To promote your affiliate products, you should regularly create high value posts that have the propensity to go viral and attach your affiliate links. Similar to LinkedIn, this creates an air of authority which people admire and follow. The advantage here is that people who will follow you are going to be highly interested in your offer.
With consistency, people will follow you more and buy your affiliate products easily.
Others
The lists of platforms are growing as many people are getting to know the power of the internet and social media marketing.
You can try out Pinterest, Google ads, WhatsApp groups, blogs, hotsuite, the list is ever increasing.
Now that you know 4 of the best Platforms to carry out affiliate marketing, you should check out our “7 steps to making 7 figures with affiliate marketing” article.