The importance of social networks in affiliate marketing

Unless you have money, there is not much you can do with PPC advertising alone. Ultimately, affiliate marketing comes down to being able to promote your website and brand and reach a larger audience. This means leveraging the mailing list, blog, and social media accounts you’ve set up and using them to attract more new visitors and build trust and authority. What you need to recognize here is that you are the ‘middle man’ in any business, the ‘middle man’ is effectively unnecessary. The buyer doesn’t really need it and the seller doesn’t really need it, so it must become indispensable to each one. In this case, that means helping the product creator sell a much larger number of products than he otherwise could. And for the shopper, it means providing great content and information and helping them find the best deals and products out there. Every business is ultimately predicted around providing value of one type from another. This is how the internet marketer provides their value. At the same time, it is also how you succeed as an internet marketer and how you build momentum and followers.
In this chapter, we’ll 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 also 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, be it 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 networks are generally more multimedia and make it easier for you to share different types of content. But unfortunately, 90% of businesses and marketers do their social media marketing completely wrong. The problem here is that they will spend their time posting on social media, but the only thing they will post is how good your business is and it will sound like “corporate language”. If this is the kind of status you’re posting on your Twitter or Facebook account, you’re sadly missing the whole point of social media marketing. This type of content would of course be fine if you already had an audience and your goal was simply to market to them. However, what’s really happening here is that you’re not posting content for anyone and you’re not giving anyone who might stumble across it any reason to 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 reconsider how you might be providing your value.

How to do social media right
The key is in how you look at your social media and how you view it within the larger 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 itself. What does that mean? It means that social media accounts should provide value to the point where people want to sign up and would be disappointed if they disappeared. Of course, you need to do this while staying on top of your marketing and that means focusing on whatever niche or industry you’ve chosen. If that’s fitness, then it’s no good having your Facebook account focused solely on business. But it’s also not a good thing to have your account focus only on how good the product you’re selling is. Instead, you should try to fill it with inspiring images of people exercising and getting fit, interesting industry news about really exciting new products, and helpful tips and advice. If you’re selling 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 outside the box a bit more. 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 ‘advice for modern parents’, or maybe you could give it a humorous ‘dispatches from the front lines of parenting’ angle. Either way, you’ve now almost created a new brand, a new mission statement, and a new form of value for that social media account and given people a 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 give you a large audience to market to. Keep in mind here that what’s really important is the value you’re providing.