As an influencer, your income is not bound by how many brand deals you get. In fact, use your social platforms and influence to drive your own revenue. This is possible with affiliate marketing. If you’re unsure what affiliate marketing is, check out our guide to affiliate marketing walking you through the process step-by-step.

In this post, you’ll learn how to use popular social media networks to drive affiliate earnings and earn uncapped revenue!

Let’s go!

Work with brands on ZINE

If you’re not registered with ZINE, sign up today to get a free Media Kit and start working with some of the best brands who want to collaborate with you. The ZINE Media Kit is the easiest way to authenticate and share your social channel stats with brands. Pitch yourself to brands or have brands pick you to work on their campaign.

As an influencer on the ZINE platform, work with brands on an affiliate basis. To accept affiliate campaigns:

• Head to your profile
• Click edit
• Under the ‘work’ tab select ‘affiliate’ as a campaign type, you’d be interested in

To start affiliate marketing today, check out the upcoming campaigns on ZINE.

Instagram

Once you’ve built a following on Instagram, it’s time to start earning money from affiliate marketing. If you have over 10,000 followers, include a swipe-up link in your Instagram Stories. This means followers go straight from your story to the affiliate link. It’s a simple way to promote affiliate products to your fans and followers without them needing to copy and paste a link to their browser.

If you don’t have 10,000+ followers, add a link in the caption section of your on-feed post. Keep in mind, Instagram does not currently allow users to click links from captions. Users have to type the link into their browser. This creates a slight barrier to entry. However, if the content resonates with your audience, there is no reason why they wouldn’t take the extra step to follow the link.

Add affiliate links to your Instagram bio. This works for people with 10,000+ followers and those without. Pick the product you will promote and add the link to  your bio. Let your followers know what you’re promoting and where they can find the link.

 

Youtube

For affiliates, YouTube is a goldmine. Although it’s one of the more difficult platforms to grow on, when you do, the opportunities are incredible.

When making purchase decisions, consumers use YouTube as their persona; review and recommendation tool. Adding your links to the video descriptions and mentioning the products within your video ensures when people seek advice about specific products, yours show up.

Youtube works well for affiliate programmes as the visual aspect of the platform allows users to see you using the product. They get a better idea of what it looks like and how it works. Seeing the product via video provides an extra layer of trust followers use to help make purchase decisions.

On Youtube, try creating videos of you trying on clothes, or using the latest makeup brush, or even creating a recipe. The possibilities are endless and it all boils down to your own creativity, your audience  and how you want to present it on your channel.

 

Blog

Your blog is an incredible resource to use if you want to generate affiliate income. This is because not only do you have your core readers, who perhaps follow each post, or subscribe to your newsletter, but you have external readers too.

If your blog performs well on search engines, people will find your content via Google, Bing or other search platforms.  The better your content is, the more people who will click the affiliate links.

Within your blog content, affiliate links work well for product review posts as well as comparison posts.

If someone is looking for [best makeup brush for sensitive skin] and land on your blog post where you’ve reviewed & ranked the best ones you’ve used, there’s a strong likelihood someone will use your content to make a purchase decision.

Because of this, it’s important to work with brands you advocate. If you promote products for the sake of it, without using it, you’re going to encourage people to buy products you can’t support. If someone uses your recommendations to buy a rubbish product, they’ll be unlikely to return to your blog as a source of information.

If you already have an audience, perhaps through your blog, why not try to monetise your email list? By collecting your reader’s email details, you have a direct line of contact to promote your affiliate links. Provide you use your links within the context of the email, you will always have a source of traffic to your links.

Facebook

On Facebook, there are a number of options when it comes to sharing affiliate links. Try including them in Facebook status to share with friends and family.

Alternatively, if you have a Facebook page, use that to promote your links and chose products.

If you have an active membership in relevant groups, you may be able to post your links there. Be careful though, joining a new group just to provide links will get you banned. Instead, try to join the community and contribute as much as you can. That way, people won’t be annoyed when you do post your affiliate link.

 

Pinterest

Pinterest often doesn’t get enough attention as it should – for content creators, especially those using affiliate links, the platform is an essential way to drive traffic to your links and generate revenue.

You might be surprised to know, after Google, Pinterest is the next biggest search console. So while creators constantly fight for attention, Pinterest allows creators and influencers to post their content and drive views directly to a link of their choice.

Pinterest allows users to organise their boards by category to enable users to find what they need with ease.

 

TikTok

TikTok has recently allowed creators to add a clickable link to their bio. While most creators link to their Instagram or other social networks, use it to link to an affiliate product. TikTok generates millions of views for users, the chance of people checking out your affiliate link increases significantly.

If you’re not on TikTok, it could be a great way to get started. One of the best things about the platform is you don’t have to have thousands of followers to get views. By creating top quality content, your videos are organically shared and potentially featured on the “For You Page” which shows users interesting content they might like.

Final thoughts

Now you have a clearer idea of how to use affiliate links within social channels, start implementing them. Be mindful not to make every post an affiliate post, or you’ll alienate your followers.

It’s important to note if you plan to use affiliate links on your blog, social channels or anywhere online, you need to let people know not only are you using affiliate links but you’ll earn a percentage of revenue if they choose to buy. This transparency is important and failing to do so could land you in trouble.

Start affiliate marketing today and sign up to ZINE