Affiliate marketing is multifaceted — it includes influencer marketing, classic marketing and many other types. At the same time, all of them are a great way to make a good income — at the moment of 2024 the affiliate marketing industry is estimated at $17 billion.
But how to establish really affiliate marketing profitable relationships so that you don’t join the ranks of losers? We decided to look into this and explain to newbies how to build profitable affiliate partnerships in influencer marketing and explain the power of influencers.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing in which an advertiser assigns the promotion of his products to webmasters for a fee. This is a very simple and effective method of promotion, as both parties benefit — the advertiser increases sales, and the webmaster gets good money for his efforts.
Influencer marketing is a little different — the advertiser turns to some blogger and establishes a partnership with him. The blogger will receive affiliate marketing profitable remuneration for advertising, and the advertiser will increase sales of his goods and services. Webmaster can also use influencer marketing to promote the advertiser’s products more effectively.
Why should influencers consider affiliate marketing?
As mentioned above, influencers are often used to promote products and services. But why? It’s simple — influencers have an engaged audience that believes in the authority of the influencer and listens to his opinion.
An influencer can be a blogger, a website administrator or any other person who has gathered an engaged audience around him/her. influencers can also vary in the number of subscribers — the more subscribers there are, the larger the influencer is considered to be. That’s the power of influencers.
Thanks to influencer marketing bloggers can have a good income, but it is the webmaster or advertiser who gets the bulk of the money. But nothing prevents influencer to become a partner of one of the many influencer affiliate programs and promote products and services to their audience, receiving many times more than for regular advertising.
Thus influencer himself becomes an affiliate of influencer affiliate programs, and he does not need to spend money to advertise the advertiser’s product on third-party resources — it is enough for him to create his own content, integrating into it advertising of goods and services.
In addition, the audience of the influencer is more engaged than on other traffic sources, so users attracted in this way are more likely to buy the advertiser’s product and influencer will get more money by using the power of social media influencers.
Getting started with affiliate marketing
If you type «how to do affiliate marketing» into the Google search box, you will find 88 million results. It is very difficult to find really useful information among such a lot of information. That’s why we have prepared a step-by-step guide on how to get started in affiliate marketing to gain the power of influencers.
Choosing a niche
If you are a beginner Influencer and have not yet decided on the choice of your niche, then you need to start there. Depending on which affiliate partnerships niche you want to work with, your content should be in the same or similar niche.
Otherwise, the audience may react negatively to advertising integrations that don’t fit the topic — if you shoot fitness content, the audience won’t understand you if you advertise women’s cosmetics. It’s also important to clearly define your niche — you shouldn’t make content with different topics, as this will negatively affect audience engagement. Choose the niche in which you know best — so the content will not only be of higher quality, but you yourself will be interested in doing it.
Selecting a traffic source
Once you have chosen your niche, you need to choose at least one platform or channel that you are going to use for affiliate marketing. Here are a few popular traffic sources where it is effective to do Influencer marketing:
YouTube is a great platform for affiliate marketing. You can also start a YouTube channel for free, upload videos, and target affiliate marketing on YouTube. The downside is that there are tons of other videos and authors on YouTube, so it can be difficult to get attention for your products.
Also, creating and uploading a great video will probably take much longer than just writing a blog post. YouTube is definitely worth considering if you want to be in front of the camera and talking to people. And if you already have subscribers on YouTube, be sure to utilize them for successful affiliate marketing by using the power of social media influencers. Read about how much you can earn on YouTube in this article.
Instagram is another place where you’ll find you can use the power of social media influencers. It’s a very active platform, and like YouTube, if you already have subscribers on the platform, it’s a great option. You can create visually appealing images and videos to promote your affiliate products and, like other platforms, you can even pay for advertising if you want. By the way, if you’ve always wondered whether Instagram notifies users about screenshots, RateMeUp just recently published an article dedicated to this topic.
If you prefer to write rather than create videos, it is better to do Influencer marketing on X (Twitter) or Facebook. Both social networks have a very large number of users and thematic communities, so it will be easier to find your audience for social media affiliate marketing. You can link to blog posts, articles or products you promote in your posts.
Also, these platforms for social media affiliate marketing have many useful influencer marketing tools, making it easy to get traffic. You can also effectively do Influencer marketing on TikTok as there are Influencer marketing tools and a huge audience there too. You can learn more about promoting SMM marketing in 2024 in our article.
Choosing an offer
As mentioned above, it’s important to choose products and services for advertising that will fit the theme of your content. In Influencer marketing it is important to keep the audience engaged, otherwise a small number of people will respond to the ads.
To maintain engagement, you should not advertise gray and black offers — if people doubt the quality of products or services, they will not respond to advertising. To be sure of the quality of products, it is better to try them yourself and then advertise them in your content.
In addition, it is important to pay attention to the terms of the offer — if the terms of the offer say that you can only use Google Ads as a source of traffic, then this offer will not work for you.
Choosing an influencer affiliate programs
A lot depends on the choice of influencer affiliate programs, for example, the type of commissions, payment dates, availability of promotional materials and so on. To really get a good income without difficulties, it is important to choose an influencer referral program responsibly.
Pay attention to all the terms and conditions of the influencer referral program and if they suit you, you can choose this particular affiliate program. Otherwise, you will rarely get income, it will be small and you will have to create your own content ads.
Content creation
The power of influencers is in the creation of content. The quality of content will determine the number of your subscribers, and their number will determine your income. Always try to look for interesting approaches to content creation, make it unique and interesting.
Also, do not insert too many integrations affiliate links for influencers into the content, otherwise the quality of content will suffer greatly and the audience will become more negative towards you. This way, you will provide yourself with a regular increase in subscribers, make your audience more engaged and increase your income.
Strategies for successful affiliate marketing
Start with product reviews
Embark on your journey as an influencer by providing insightful reviews of diverse products and services within your niche. This practice not only fosters trust among your audience but also enhances your expertise in the chosen niche.
Share your detailed product reviews with your audience, articulating the specific benefits that make the products you review valuable to them. Once you have a few product reviews under your belt, add product comparisons to them and then you can start promoting affiliate links for influencers.
Diversify your advertising
You shouldn’t advertise the same product or service all the time. While you may have one constant offerer that you advertise most often, sometimes it’s worth it to start directing traffic to other offerers as well, as ads can get boring to viewers too. This also protects your earnings, as you will earn income from the other offer if the other one closes.
Measuring and optimizing your affiliate marketing performance
Influencer marketing platforms are very effective influencer marketing tools. Just as you are not limited to promoting one affiliate product, you are not limited to manually tracking performance or relying on one affiliate program. Such influencer marketing tools offer a variety of conversion tracking features, a wide selection of programs, and automation.
It’s also important to run regular tests and analytics to optimize your Influencer marketing campaigns by using influencer marketing tools. For example, if you’ve come up with an interesting integration of affiliate links for influencers into your video or article, you should first try testing it on a third-party resource, such as your second project.
Or if you’ve come up with an effective marketing bundle to use on your own site, then it should be tested as well. Once you have the information from the tests, you can start analyzing it and based on it decide whether you should use the new strategies or not.
FAQ
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a type of promotion method in which an advertiser pays a webmaster for successfully referred customers.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a type of affiliate marketing in which an employer or webmaster partners with an Influencer to promote a product or service. Influencers also sometimes become webmasters themselves by participating in advertisers’ influencer affiliate programs.
Why should influencers try affiliate marketing?
Influencers will be able to make a lot of money from affiliate marketing because they have an engaged audience that is willing to buy a product or service on the recommendation of their influencer. Because of this, an Influencer can generate high conversion rates with quality traffic while not spending money on advertising.
What sources of traffic can an influencer choose?
Influencers can promote products and services through their content on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), Facebook and other popular platforms for social media affiliate marketing.
