Facebook affiliate marketing: Is it effective?
Facebook is the largest social media network with a whopping 2.740 billion active users (approx.) in January 2021.
Moreover, an average user spends about 60 minutes a day on Facebook.
This massive user engagement on Facebook has attracted many businesses, including affiliate marketers. Many professional affiliate marketers utilize Facebook to build their business and promote the products as they know it’s effective.
If you’re a new or even an existing affiliate marketer, you would probably be interested in learning about Facebook affiliate marketing as it offers many benefits. If you’re interested, this blog is for you.
Let’s get started!
Table of content:
Why Facebook?
Before getting started with Facebook affiliate marketing, we’ll see why Facebook is one of the best platforms to promote affiliate products.
Many people scroll through their Facebook feed every day to see what’s happening with their family and friends. However, besides seeing the photos and videos of the people they know, the users also go through several advertisements and other organic promotional posts.
In fact, many users willingly follow business pages as they find their posts and products to be beneficial and fascinating. This fantastic opportunity, along with massive engagement, made many businesses utilize Facebook as a promotional channel.
Similarly, as an affiliate marketer, it’s possible to make several affiliate sales through Facebook. However, to reach this level, you should first attract people to your posts.
Fortunately, growing a Facebook page isn’t as difficult as you imagine. Nowadays, thanks to the massive increase in Facebook users, you can easily target an audience for your business and attract them.
Wondering how? Here are my expert tips!
Tip #1: Post quality content
About 350 million photos are published on Facebook every day, which is a massive number. If you want to get noticed in this extensive crowd, you should first start publishing high-quality posts.
As an affiliate marketer, even once your business page has grown, you should promote affiliate products only once in a while. It shouldn’t be frequent as it can reduce the quality of your Page.
Initially, your primary goal should be to build an audience and gain their trust. To achieve this goal, you should upload posts that people find to be interesting and valuable.
Once you get this right, people will trust the products you promote, which will increase your affiliate sales.
The following techniques can give a slight boost to the growth of your Facebook business page.
- Invite your family and friends to like your Page.
- Engage with the posts of pages that are related to your business. Similarly, engage with users.
- If you have a blog, you can link or embed your posts in it. You can do the same if you utilize other forms of content marketing like YouTube.
Tip #2: Be consistent in posting
Consistency is the key to success.
If you want to grow your Facebook business page, you must be consistent. Even if you upload one post per day, it should be regular and high-quality.
If you publish several low-quality posts intending to make affiliate sales through them, trust me, you’re wasting your time. Instead, a single high-quality post does a better job.
Nowadays, users are expecting a lot from businesses. Thus, as an affiliate marketer, you have to fulfill the user’s expectations.
Ok!
Everyone wants their post to get high engagement on Facebook, and affiliate marketers are no different! Here’s a simple technique to boost the engagement rate.
Go through the insights of your Facebook page to figure out when your audience is online the most and schedule your posts accordingly. By doing so, you can increase the engagement rate.
Tip #3: Be transparent with people
Let’s face the facts. As affiliate marketers, our primary intention behind growing a Facebook page is to make money.
It’s pretty easy to get your posts some likes and comments. However, making people buy a product isn’t easy. Purchasing is a process that requires trust.
Many affiliate marketers fall into the trap of promoting a product just because the merchant provides a higher commission. This method is totally wrong!
As affiliate marketers, we should always think from the customer’s perspective. As a customer, would you like to be cheated by someone promoting a second-grade product when there’s a better alternative? Of course, no. Am I correct?
So, when promoting a product, we should ensure that it’s of the best quality. If we can’t find such a product, we should expose its defects to our audience.
Some might consider this to be silly. However, trust me, the transparency you build with your audience will help you make several sales.
Facebook affiliate marketing
There are several ways to promote affiliate products on Facebook, such as Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, and Facebook Ads.
Moreover, unlike Instagram, Facebook lets you place clickable links in the caption of your posts, which is beneficial for all business owners.
As for affiliate links, though Facebook lets you directly place them in the caption of a post, you should promote them indirectly. Here’s why.
Most of the users don’t log in to their Facebook to purchase a product. Instead, many people use Facebook to entertain and pass their time.
However, if this is the case, how do affiliate marketers make money through Facebook? They send their traffic from Facebook to other channels like blogs, YouTube, etc., where they convince people to make a purchase.
I have explained this process below.
1. Blogs
Most of the affiliate marketers will already have a website, as it’s essential for affiliate marketing. But, if you didn’t create it yet, I strongly recommend you to create it immediately and not delay it further.
Creating a website doesn’t involve much time and investment as it did a few years back. If you’ve just $80 to spare, you can get your website a domain name and get it hosted on a server.
There are various top-notch web-hosting service providers like HostGator that offer excellent hosting services for an affordable price. Moreover, they provide easy WordPress installation.
Note: We are transparent with our readers. The link to HostGator is an affiliate link. So, if you purchase a hosting plan through our link, we’ll receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Your small help can help us to keep providing valuable content for free. Thank you!
Once you create the website (which may take about a week), start writing blogs to promote affiliate products.
Great! I hope that you got an overview of creating a website. Now let’s see how to utilize blogs on Facebook to make affiliate sales.
First, select a relevant topic for your Facebook post and blog. Make sure that they both are high-quality and informative to your Facebook audience.
Next, place the link to your blog in the caption of your post. Here’s an example.
Convey a short message to your audience in your caption, and ask them to visit your blog to read further. If your blog is well-structured and valuable, there are chances for people to click on the affiliate links in your blog and purchase the product.
2. YouTube
If you use the internet, I’m pretty sure that you’ll be aware of YouTube. YouTube is one of the most popular social media platforms.
Affiliate marketers can utilize YouTube in various ways to grow their business and make affiliate sales.
For example, you can create a product demonstration video and promote the product in the description. If people find the product beneficial, there’s a high chance for them to purchase it.
The professional affiliate marketers link their YouTube videos in the caption of their Facebook posts. This strategy increases the chances of making a sale. Moreover, by doing so, they are increasing the traffic to both of their marketing channels.
3. Email marketing
Email marketing combined with Facebook is an effective way to promote affiliate products.
As an affiliate marketer, you can offer people a free product (for example, e-books, tutorial lessons, etc.) in return for their email addresses. Moreover, you can utilize the same product to promote your affiliate links.
Once you create the free product, you should design an eye-catchy landing page to promote it. The landing page should contain an opt-in form where people can enter their email addresses. Once they submit their details, the email marketing software will mail them the product.
I hope that you’re clear with the idea behind email marketing. Let’s now see how to utilize Facebook traffic to grow your email list.
Create a high-quality post and place the landing page link in the caption. By doing so, there’s a high chance for people to click on the landing page to check your free offerings.
If your Facebook audience finds the free product worthy, there’s a high chance for them to provide you their email address to get the product.
Sounds interesting! However, when reading through these sentences, I’m pretty sure that you would have wondered what email marketing software is.
Email marketing software is service-based software that helps you with managing your email marketing campaigns.
As you know, email marketing consists of several processes, and manually doing completing them is highly time-consuming. Here’s an example.
Imagine that you have a list of 100 email addresses, and you should email each of them manually. Just imagine the time it’s going to take. It may take a whole working day!
On the other hand, if you use email marketing software, it will automate the process. All you need to do is draft the email and schedule the time frame to send it, which is a one-time job.
Besides automating the emails, email marketing software can also help you build landing pages, create opt-in forms, and many more.
There are many email marketing software out there. Among the software, I found GetResponse to be the best and the most value-for-money. GetResponse offers a 30-day free trial where you can use the software for free and check whether it suits your business.
Note: The links to GetResponse are affiliate links. If you purchase GetResponse through our links, we’ll receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for your support!
Utilize Facebook Stories, Facebook Watch, and Facebook Live
Besides Facebook Pages – Facebook Stories, Facebook Watch, and Facebook Live are some of the Facebook features that affiliate marketers should utilize.
These features can help you attract more audiences and increase the exposure of your business, which will, in turn, help boost your affiliate sales.
Facebook Stories
The launch of Facebook Stories was in 2016. Since then, it’s been rapidly growing.
Facebook Stories lasts for 24 hours and appears at the top of the user’s news feed. In Facebook Stories, people share short video clips (1-120 seconds), photos, and other forms of content.
As an affiliate marketer, if you upload high-quality stories consistently, the engagement of the audience with your brand will increase. Moreover, your brand will get better exposure.
Facebook Watch
Facebook Watch is a free built-in video-on-demand service of Facebook that’s pretty similar to YouTube.
You can utilize the Facebook Watch feature to convey a message to your audience or publish interesting videos to increase exposure. In general, videos attract people more than photos. Also, videos are the go-to solution if you want to a story to your audience.
Great!
However, there’s a setback that will affect the Facebook Watch creators with a small Page following.
If you want your videos to appear in the “Watch” feed section of people, your Page should have 5,000 followers or more. I feel this is a setback for newcomers. However, reaching 5,000 followers isn’t as difficult as you imagine.
Facebook Live
Facebook Live is a feature that lets you broadcast a live video using the camera of your smartphone or computer. I’m pretty sure that most of you will be aware of this feature.
The launch of Facebook Live was back in April 2016. Since then, all types of digital marketers are utilizing it because of the benefits it offers.
Facebook Live videos get several times better engagement than traditional videos as it’s real-time interaction. It lets you connect with your audience and answer their question in real-time.
Moreover, as an affiliate marketer, you can utilize the live session to demonstrate to use a product and bring in several affiliate sales.
Leverage Facebook Ads
Though your organic Facebook posts can bring you affiliate sales, we should all agree to the fact that Facebook’s organic reach is declining.
The reason behind the decline in organic reach could be that Facebook encourages people to run advertising campaigns.
If you’re on a tight budget, running ads won’t be a wise solution. However, if you can afford to spare some money on advertisements, you can unquestionably run advertising campaigns as it will be worth it.
Advertisements can give your business greater exposure, and it helps to increase the brand awareness.
If this is your first time running an Ad on Facebook, I suggest you start with a minimal investment. By doing so, you can gain the skills that are required to run it.
The success of your Ads depends on how well you optimize them. So, learn the advertising strategies by spending minimal money. Once you complete learning, gradually scale your budget.
Now let’s see how to promote affiliate products through Facebook ads.
Similar to organic Facebook posts, you shouldn’t directly promote an affiliate link in your Ad. Instead, the promotions should be indirect.
You can follow the methods explained above to promote affiliate products effectively. The procedure for marketing the affiliate products is the same for both organic Facebook posts and Facebook Ads.
The primary advantage that Facebook Ads offer over organic posts is an increase in exposure and engagement.
I hope that now you’re clear with affiliate marketing using Facebook Ads.
Leverage Facebook Groups
A Facebook Group is a space where people with similar interests can interact and share their knowledge.
A Facebook Group and Facebook Page are pretty similar. The primary difference between them is that a Facebook Page can never be private. On the other hand, a Facebook Group can be both public and private.
If growing your affiliate marketing business is your primary goal behind creating a Facebook Group, you should make the group public. If you keep it private, you’re drastically reducing the growth potential.
Here’s how you can utilize Facebook Groups for your affiliate marketing business.
Say that you’re an affiliate marketer and you primarily promote digital courses. In this case, you can form a group with people interested in digital courses and interact with them. Once you build trust with them, you may promote your affiliate products rarely – but not frequently.
I would once again like to remind you that providing value to your audience should be your priority as an affiliate marketer. If you get it correct, you’ll succeed in the Facebook affiliate marketing world.
Conclusion: Is Facebook affiliate marketing effective?
YES, Facebook affiliate marketing is effective!
Facebook is the most popular social media platform with one of the highest user engagements. This popularity aspect of Facebook benefits several businesses, including affiliate marketing.
In recent years, Facebook’s organic reach is declining. However, as an affiliate marketer, you can still do a lot with Facebook. You can use Facebook to grow your brand presence and build a fan following, which you can utilize to drive traffic to your other marketing channels like your website.
Besides Facebook, you can also give Instagram a try for your affiliate marketing business. As you all know, Instagram is a subsidiary company of Facebook, and it’s currently one of the biggest social media platforms in the world. So, why not utilize this opportunity also to grow your affiliate marketing business?!
I hope this blog gave you a clear idea about Facebook affiliate marketing. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comment section below.
