Digital Profit Success

Affiliate Marketing on Facebook

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If you are an affiliate marketer, you have probably heard that social networking sites are great for boosting affiliate earnings. But do you really understand how to use them to their benefit? Sometimes, if an affiliate marketer is too pushy they may appear to be spammy – you know the type that ends up posting their links on other peoples’ fan pages or worse – spamming their own friends and family.

There are several ways you can pursue your affiliate marketing on Facebook and it can be quite lucrative, especially considering that Facebook traffic is continually on the rise! You just need to work out how to best cater to your target audience and their needs on Facebook.

Here are just 3 ways to market on FB:

Fan pages
These are one popular way to pursue affiliate marketing on FB. Anyone can create a fan page, and yours can be for a specific brand or niche topic, like parenting. You’ll want to grow a list of followers on your fan page by providing lots of interaction, tips and yes, links to products they might like.

FB Groups
While your FB pages are usually meant for fans to follow a leader in a niche (YOU), a group is for like-minded people to be able to interact.

So you could have a parenting Facebook group for Moms of autistic children, for example. You could provide tips for working with autistic kids, and sometimes provide a link to toys that are good for autistic children or a link to an info product about nutrition and autism.

Your group(s) can be either public or private. Private groups require you to invite and approve members. You may wish to consider this option if you’re collecting names on an email autoresponder list and want to give them access as a perk. You cna even make your group secret meaning that it cannot be found by any search on FB so the ONLY way to know of its existence is to be invited.

FB Ads
Advertising on Facebook is very popular among affiliate marketers but you do need to know how to use it before you plunk down a substantial amount of money – or even invest a little and lose it all because you didn’t know what you were doing.

The thing that many advertisers like about FB ads is that you can really target your audience well and drill down into a niche, and the ads themselves are pretty inexpensive. Because of the highly focused targeting, your conversion rate can be very high.

With a Facebook ad, you’ll want to use a mix of images and text to produce a click-through although you need to bear in mind that any text has to follow strict FB guidelines and not cover more than 20% of the ad (FB does provide a tool for advertisers to check whether their ad is compliant to the 20% rule and is well worth checking to ensure your ad is approved quickly. Your mixutre of iamage and text is something you can easily split test and you can see what works best for your particular audience.

The demographic targeting options you have are very extensive; you can choose the country, age group, interests and even relationship status – so if you wanted to target single men and promote a course on how to pick up women, you could! Or if you wanted to promote your gardening site to people who garden, your ad could just go out to those individuals.

So if you are an affiliate marketer, you really should add FB to your arsenal and by using these 3 options you can really make the most of FB to drive highly targeted traffic to your affiliate offers.

Content Marketing Strategy To Establish Authority In Your Niche

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Once you’ve created a brand for yourself, the next job is to start making that brand recognisable by creating a reputation around it that will encourage people to seek you out and to (hopefully) order more of your products and services. The idea here is to establish your brand to the point where people consider your logo and/or your name to be a ‘guarantee of quality’ so that they know they can trust you. People will then seek you out to get your opinion and at that point, selling will become a LOT easier. This is essentially how you become an authority and a thought leader for your chosen subject matter.

One of the best ways to reach this point is through content marketing. This means publishing content on your site and on other channels that will demonstrate your knowledge and gradually help you to build a name for yourself.

The mistake that a lot of bloggers and business owners make here is in thinking that they can build that name for them with just one or two posts. But in reality the ‘process’ of content marketing and of building trust is a long term strategy.

These are the steps that any blog must go through to become an authority in the eyes of any one customer…

  1. A visitor finds a blog post by accident and reads it, finds it valuable and entertaining. They then leave your site and give you no further thought.
  2. They then come across another blog post and finds it this one entertaining too. Now they might make a note of your website name/brand.
  3. They then find your blog a few more times and eventually come to think of you as someone they can trust on a particular subject. They may actively start to look around the rest of your site at this point and may even subscribe to your mailing list.
  4. In future, when they are looking for information about a given topic, they will specifically search for your website or business name along with their question because they believe they can trust your answer.
  5. At this point they now consider you an industry leader and if you suggest something for them to buy they will be more likely to trust your judgement and make a purchase.

As you can see, a content marketing strategy is a long process and is predicated on you delivering consistently high quality content for a long time! But it will be worth it in the long run.