The importance of social media in affiliate marketing

Unless you’re made of money, you can only do so much with PPC advertising. Ultimately, affiliate marketing comes down to being able to promote your website and brand and reach a wider audience. This means taking advantage of the mailing list, blog, and social media accounts you have set up and using them to attract more new visitors and build trust and authority. What you must recognize here is that you are the ‘middle man’ in any business, the ‘middle man’ is effectively unnecessary. The buyer doesn’t really need you and the seller doesn’t really need you, so you must make yourself indispensable to each one. In this case, that means helping the product creator sell a much larger number of products than they could otherwise. And for the buyer, it means providing high-quality content and information and helping them find the best deals and products out there. Ultimately, every business is built on providing value of one kind or another. This is how the internet marketer provides its value. At the same time, it is also the way to be successful as an internet marketer and the way to build momentum and followers.
In this chapter, we will see this link very clearly as we look at the three main types of marketing available to promote your brand.

How to be successful on social media
One of your number one tools as an affiliate marketer is social media. This gives you a direct line of communication while allowing you to harness the power of real-world social media. Compared to email marketing, social media has the drawback that you have to go through a third party, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google. But while this can be a problem, the silver lining is that people can share your content with their friends and this gives it the potential to go viral. At the same time, social media is generally more multimedia and makes it easier for you to share different types of content. But unfortunately, 90% of companies and marketers do their social media marketing in a completely wrong way. The problem here is that they will spend their time posting on social media, but all they will post is about how good your business is and it will sound a lot like a “corporate pitch.” If this is the type of status you are posting to your Twitter or Facebook account, then sadly, you are completely missing the ultimate goal of social media marketing. This type of content would be fine, of course, if you already had an audience and your goal was to simply market them. However, what is really happening here is that you are not posting content for anyone and you are not giving anyone who might stumble upon it any reason why they should consider signing up. The question you should always ask yourself when creating content for the web is: would you follow it? If you saw a social media account like this, would you subscribe? If the answer is no, then you really need to rethink how you might be providing your value.

How to do social media well
The key is in the way you look at your social media and the way you see it within the broader context of your marketing. Specifically, it’s important that you start thinking of your social media profiles not just as an opportunity to promote yourself, but as a product in its own right. What does that mean? It means that social media accounts should provide value to the point where people want to subscribe to them and would be disappointed if they left. Of course, you have to do this without losing sight of your marketing and that means you should focus on whatever niche or industry you have chosen. If that’s fitness, then it’s not good that your Facebook account is all about business. But it is also not good that your account has to do with how good the product you are selling is. Instead, you’d like to fill it with inspiring images of people working out and getting in great shape, with exciting industry news on really exciting new products, and helpful tips and advice. If you sell life insurance, you may find it a little more difficult to see how you can keep a social media account interesting and entertaining. However, in that case, you simply need to think a bit more outside the box. In particular, this could mean sharing photos of families enjoying life together or tips for family activities. Maybe you could open a social media account on ‘tips for modern fathers’, or maybe you could give it a humorous ‘dispatches from the front lines of parenthood’ angle. Either way, you have now created almost a new brand, a new mission statement, and a new form of value for that social media account and have given people good reason to follow you.

This is how you build your following and you will find that if you consistently offer good quality in this regard, it will eventually provide you with a large audience to market to. Note here that what is really important is the value you are providing.