Do You Need Social Media for Affiliate Marketing?
About 3.6 billion people are using social media sites today. As an affiliate marketer, what wouldn’t you do to reach a little less than half the world’s population? But do you really need social media for affiliate marketing?
Yes, you will need social media for affiliate marketing. It’s not just the staggering number of users on these platforms that you should pay attention to but also the way social media makes it easier to reach your target audience, get more people to read your blog posts, and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
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How do you effectively use social media for your affiliate marketing? What exactly can you expect from social media? Read on and learn how to make your affiliate marketing more effective without needing to work harder.
Social Media Is Where Your Audience Is
Social media sites are easy and free to use. For instance, you can create an account on Facebook with just an e-mail address and have your own profile in minutes. Figuring out what to do when you’re already on social media takes a few clicks of your mouse button.
Creating an account and learning how to use it is very easy. People find it easy to sign up, so that means that your target audience is probably on social media.
That’s good news for you for two reasons:
a. You can easily reach people who are most likely to be interested to buy your products.
b. Social media sites have the tools to make it easier for you to promote your content.
Reach People Who Like Your Posts and Products
When people follow you on your social media accounts, they can get notified if you post something new. Let’s say you have 100 friends on Facebook, and you put up a link to your latest blog post, your connections will get notified about it. That’s an instant 100 eyeballs for your affiliate links just by updating your status.
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Tools That Makes Affiliate Marketing Easier
Social media also helps you engage your readers as social media allows them to comment on your posts. If they have a question, you can readily answer them. As such, it’s easy to start and maintain a conversation.
If you don’t have a blog or website yet, social media can also help you. You can put up your content on Facebook or LinkedIn and include the affiliate links as well. You can add images to make things more interesting.
It’s also easier to see how effective your content is by looking at the number of views, likes, and the number of shares that your posts get.
Breezy Niche Marketing
In the past, if you want to find people who are interested in your niche, you will have to scour the Internet for discussion groups, user communities, and other enthusiast sites. The bad news is that it’s not always easy to find these groups, and if you do find them, you might have a difficult time trying to keep track of things.
For instance, if you have identified five discussion groups and forums with your target audience in them, you will need to create five different accounts to access these groups. Plus, some groups might have different rules, such as prohibiting links in your comments or requiring you to reach a certain number of posts before you can add a link.
Not so with social media. Facebook and other social media platforms have groups that will allow you to push affiliate links to people who are interested in the niche where your products belong.
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For instance, if you have content on the best camping gear for outlanders, you can join an outlander group or three on Facebook and share your content. Or perhaps, join a group of corporate bankruptcy lawyers if you have affiliate links to the best chapter 13 bankruptcy books.
Joining groups will help you meet people who are interested in a particular niche. Online communities are very knowledgeable and passionate that you are more than likely to have experts as members of the group. If you can wow them over, and they share your content with others, it will be like having an influencer do your affiliate marketing for free.
As such, niche groups help your affiliate marketing by making it easier for you to put your content in front of people that you know are already interested in what you have to sell. It will also help you discover what types of content will be more effective and what they are looking for in that particular niche.
Influencer Marketing
Online communities also help you with your branding. If you’re an expert in gardening, for one, you can help other members with their problems. This is an excellent way for you to establish yourself as an authority to other people and engage more potential customers.
What you should be doing is to build up a good profile. Present yourself as someone who is helpful, trustworthy, and an active participant in that particular community. If people see you as a mere seller who only pops up when you have something to sell, they are not as likely to trust your content and click on your links.
More importantly, you should push products that are credible and have a good reputation. You can be that person who can influence people’s opinions and buying habits.
Influencers
Taken together, influencers formed an $8-billion industry in 2019. There are all sorts of influencers in every social media platform, and brands are noticing. The percentage of brands who tap influencers on different social media platforms are as follows:
Influencers have sway over your target audience. A survey found that seven out of 10 millennials trust bloggers more than celebrities. If you target young parents, then at least 40 percent of millennials are part of the demographics you’re talking to. If you have products that are related to smartphones, then you should know that 92 percent of millennials own one.
Admittedly, however, influencers are expensive. So you should consider becoming one. Once you have identified your niche and social media platform, put up some great content, you can go about engaging your audience by interacting with them and responding to their questions.
Getting Your Content Right
Content strategy is probably one of the most challenging steps in affiliate marketing and perhaps in other types of marketing. But it doesn’t have to be. Being on social media doesn’t only allow you to promote your affiliate links and blog posts; it will also help you know what topics to write about next.
Interacting with your target audience on social media gives you a way to know more about them, their needs, their wants. As such, you will have a more concrete idea of which topics they are more interested in and which ones they are more likely to click on.
Getting New Visitors to Your Posts
Imagine being able to describe your target audience to someone and that someone finds people who match everything that you want them to be. That’s exactly how social media ads work.
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms keep tabs on their users using the information they provide, including the information they write on their profiles, their latest statuses, the things they liked, and other stuff.
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Using all of these allow social media networks to serve highly targeted ads to them. Using social media to advertise your posts and content is a great way to get the right people to the door.
Social Media Can Help You Do Other Types of Marketing
If you still think that Instagram is nothing but people posting pictures of their plants, food, and pets and Facebook is filled with people who talk about their boring day, then you are certainly missing out on a lot of opportunities for your affiliate marketing efforts.
Social media can help you from getting new visitors to engaging your current readers to get them to click your affiliate links – plus everything in between. Social media makes it easier for you to serve up your affiliate links to the people who matter and even provide tools that can help you do other types of marketing, such as cornering a niche market or increasing your influence in a community of interested users.
So if you’re an affiliate marketer and you’re still not on social media, get a move on it and see more clicks and more revenues coming in.
