Unless you’re made of money there’s only so much you can do with PPC advertising alone. Eventually then affiliate marketing comes down to being able to promote your website and your brand and to reach a wider audience. This means leveraging the mailing list, blog and social media accounts that you have set up and using them to attract more new visitors and to 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 you and the seller doesn’t really need you, so you need to make yourself indispensable to each. In this case, that means helping the product creator to sell a far greater number of products than they otherwise could. And for the buyer, it means providing great quality content and information and helping to find the best deals and products out there. Every business is ultimately predicated around providing value of one kind of another. This is how the internet marketer provides their value. At the same time, it’s also how you succeed as an internet marketer and how you build momentum and a following.
In this chapter, we will see this link very clearly while looking at the three main types of marketing available to you to promote your brand.
How to Succeed 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 at the same time letting you leverage the power of real world social networks. Compared with e-mail marketing, social media has the drawback of meaning you have to go through a third party – that being Facebook , Twitter or Google. But while this can be a problem, the positive side is that people can share your content with their friends and this gives it the potential to go viral. At the same time, social media is generally more multi media and makes it easier for you to share different types of content. But unfortunately, 90% of businesses and marketers go about their social media marketing in entirely the wrong way. The problem here is that they will spend their time posting to social media but all they’ll post about is how good their business is and it will sound very much like ‘corporate speak’. If this is the type of status you are publishing to your Twitter or Facebook account, then unfortunately you are entirely missing the fundamental objective of social media marketing. This type of content would be fine of course, if you already had an audience and your objective was simply to market to them. What’s actually happening here though, is that you’re posting content to nobody and you’re not giving anyone who might stumble upon it any reason that they should consider signing up. The question to always ask yourself when creating content for the web is: would you follow it? If you saw a social media account like this, then 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 all in the way that you look at your social media and the way you consider it within the broader context of your marketing. Specifically, it’s important that you start to think of your social media profiles not only as an opportunity to promote yourself but actually as a product in its own right. What does that mean? It means that the social media accounts should provide value to the point where people want to sign up to them and would be disappointed if they were gone. Of course you need to do this while also remaining on-point with your marketing and that means you need to focus on whatever niche or industry you’ve chosen. If that’s fitness, then it’s no good for your Facebook account to be all about business. But it’s also no good for your account to be all about how good the product you’re selling is. Instead, you should aim to fill it with inspiring images of people working out and getting into great shape, with interesting industry news about genuinely fascinating new products and with helpful tips and advice. If you’re selling life insurance, then you may find that it’s a little harder to see how you can maintain an interesting and entertaining social media account. In that case though, you simply need to think a little more out of the box. In particular, this could mean that you share pictures of families enjoying life together, or tips for family activities. Maybe you could run a social media account about ‘tips for the modern parent’, or maybe you could give it a humorous angle ‘dispatches from the frontline of parenthood’. Either way, you’ve now created almost a new brand, a new mission statement and a new form of value for that social media account itself and you’ve given people good reason to follow you.
This is how you then build your following and you would find that if you consistently put out good quality in this vein, it would eventually give you a huge audience to market to. Notice here that what’s really important is the value that you are providing.
