Affiliate marketing on Instagram: Is it any good?
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Abdul Wadood
Have you ever heard of affiliate marketing on Instagram? If you are an affiliate marketer, you would have, probably.
If you’re a beginner wanting to promote affiliate products through Instagram or if you’re planning to expand your affiliate marketing business channel through Instagram, here’s all you need to know.
Basics of affiliate marketing
Before getting into the topic of affiliate marketing on Instagram, I’ll quickly explain the basics of affiliate marketing.
If you’re familiar with affiliate marketing, feel free to skip to the next section of this blog.
Definition of affiliate marketing:
Affiliate marketing is a business model where you sell products for a commission.
Many companies offer an affiliate program, and signing up for the program is pretty simple.
However, before joining the affiliate program, you have to choose a niche.
There are several niches out there, and there’s a potential to make money from all of them.
Once you choose a niche, search for companies in that niche and sign up for their affiliate program. Make sure that the company is legit and their products are of high quality.
Once you join the affiliate program, you will receive your affiliate links. If someone purchases a product through your link, you’ll receive a commission from the company.
Affiliate marketing on Instagram
As you all know, Instagram is a popular social media platform for marketing because of the large number of users and high user engagement. Affiliate marketers can make use of this opportunity to promote their affiliate products and increase brand awareness.
Tip: If you want people to see you as a legit and professional brand, you must have a website.
If you’re already doing the affiliate marketing business, you will probably have a website. But, if you are just starting, I urge you to create one as it’s highly essential for the business.
You can create a pretty good-looking website within 30 minutes or so. Thus, creating a website isn’t that big of a task. Now, some may wonder how someone can code a website in 30 minutes?
Good question!
Nowadays, you don’t have to code your website thanks to Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress. All you have to do is purchase the hosting for your website from good hosting companies like HostGator. Once you purchase, you can install WordPress from HostGator itself.
Depending on your subscription plan, you can get hosting for as low as $2.75/month.
Websites created using WordPress look and perform better than many manually created websites.
Once you finish building your website, start publishing blogs and increase the resources.
Ways to promote the affiliate products on Instagram
There are various ways through which you can promote affiliate products on Instagram. I have explained them below.
1. Instagram pages
The most obvious way of promoting affiliate products on Instagram is through your Instagram page.
Sure, building engagement and followers can take time and effort, but it’s worth it.
Here’s my suggestion to beginners.
Besides improving your Instagram presence, focus on developing your presence on other marketing channels like YouTube, website, email marketing, etc.
Keep in mind that the higher the number of marketing channels, the better will be the sales.
Pro Tip: If your videos and photos are high quality, you can reuse and publish them on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
2. Instagram influencers
As you already know, many individuals and companies pay a lot of money to Instagram influencers for shoutouts. They do so because influencers can increase their brand awareness and sales.
Similarly, as an affiliate marketer, you can utilize influencers to promote your affiliate product. But, make sure to choose the right influencer.
Here are some tips to choose a good influencer.
- The niche of the influencer should be relevant to the affiliate products you promote.
- The posts published by the influencer should have good engagement. For instance, if the influencer has 300,000 followers, each post should have an average of 6,000-10,000 likes. Various tools can help to calculate the engagement rate.
- The influencer should have a good number of followers. This takes us to the last important tip.
- The followers should be legit. As you may know, some people pay money to get followers. Those followers are of no use. To check if the followers are legit, you can go to the “Followers” list and look at the profile picture. If many accounts have profile photos, there’s a high chance that the influencer is legit.
3. Instagram theme pages
Instagram theme pages are pretty similar to Instagram influencers.
In the Instagram influencer page, the owner themselves will be the marketers (for example, Cristiano Ronaldo).
On the other hand, Instagram theme pages are niche-based pages with multiple posts related to that niche. Either method will yield pretty much the same results.
Strategies to promote the affiliate products on Instagram
1. Live video session
Conducting live video sessions on Instagram is a fantastic opportunity to interact with your audience and make affiliate sales.
Here’s why.
In live videos, you can interact with your audience directly, making it easier to promote affiliate products.
However, make sure your live videos aren’t too promotional. You can ensure this by sharing a lot of beneficial information with your audience.
2. Use appropriate hashtags
Using appropriate hashtags is essential to make your posts reach more people.
When your posts reach more people, your sales, engagement, and brand awareness will increase.
3. Publish high-quality content
High-quality content gets higher engagement compared to average content. People prefer quality over quantity.
Ok.
If your content is in the form of a video, you should grab the viewer’s attention within the first 5 seconds. To achieve this, you should nail your intro. So, instead of showing off your logo or telling people a story, get straight into the content.
Talking about image content, it should be professional and attractive. If you manage to make your image post stand out from the crowd, trust me, your post can get pretty good engagement.
4. Instagram Stories
Nowadays, many businesses started to utilize the Instagram Stories feature because of the advantages it offers.
People spend a lot of time on Instagram Stories to see what their followers are doing. As an affiliate marketer, you can use this fantastic opportunity to increase brand awareness.
You can also promote affiliate products in Instagram Stories. But, it shouldn’t be too frequent.
5. Instagram Reels
Instagram Reels is a recently launched Instagram feature that lets users create short videos. The Instagram Reels videos are in 9:16 portrait format.
If you want your Reels to stand out from the competition, you should make them attractive.
In your Reels, you can include Call to Action (CTA) to promote an affiliate product.
However, don’t depend too much on the captions to promote a product, as the users may not read lengthy captions when scrolling through Reels.
How to place the affiliate links on Instagram?
In Instagram, there are some limitations in placing the affiliate link. But, you don’t have to worry as there are solutions to this problem.
1. Link in bio
If you’re a beginner, the best way to promote the affiliate products is by placing the affiliate links in the bio.
If you promote a single product, you can place the affiliate link of that product in the bio.
However, if you promote various products, you should change the affiliate link on your bio depending on the product you promote in your posts.
2. Instagram story swipe-up (Only for business accounts with at least 10,000 followers)
If your Instagram business account has more than 10,000 followers or if your account is verified, you can make use of this fantastic feature to promote affiliate links.
Here’s how you can add a swipe-up link to your story.
- Create a story.
- Before publishing the story, click on the “link” symbol in the toolbar.
- Paste your affiliate link and publish the story.
3. Place a non-clickable text link
Though Instagram doesn’t allow clickable links on the caption, you can still place non-clickable links.
Here’s an example of a non-clickable link in the caption of one of my Instagram posts.
As you can see in the image, the link isn’t clickable.
However, if someone is so interested in the product you promote, there’s a high chance for him to check the link manually.
Sure, this method isn’t as effective as the first two methods, but you can give it a try.
Conclusion
Instagram is a social media platform with one of the highest engagement rates. Nowadays, many businesses utilize Instagram to promote their products. As an affiliate marketer, you too should utilize this opportunity before the platform gets saturated with marketing-related stuff.
Ok.
If you want to make a good number of affiliate sales through Instagram, you should build a healthy audience base. To achieve this, publish high-quality posts consistently. The posts you publish should be high-quality and attractive.
I hope that you clearly understood affiliate marketing on Instagram.
Before concluding the blog, I would like to ask a question.
Do you like the concept of affiliate marketing on Instagram? Please share your opinion in the comment section below.
