Does Affiliate Marketing Mix Well With Social Media?

I get a phobia everytime people introduce me to multi level marketing (so don’t try to introduce me with multi level marketing) beside I never make any money promoting multi level marketing.  Then they change the name to “Network Marketing”.

I think when they change MLM to Network Marketing, they actually become more human centric because now you have to build a network and a marketing team.

The important thing with this kind of setup was that you get to build up a network of “downlines” under your own account, and then a percentage of the sales and the referrals of members down the line are credited to you. Some networks over-emphasis the value of earning from directly selling their products more than building a network, but then actually the bigger income usually came from the commissions, assuming you’ve built up of a good network structure under yourself.

How does this apply to affiliate marketing?

This rings true, too, if you monetize your blog through affiliate schemes, or if you’re selling a product or service through affiliates. To some extent, at least.

Social media traffic is good if it is relevant. But useless if it is not-relevant. It is a new trend among online marketers to catch on the social media traffic. Also social media web2.0 websites brings in tons of traffic. Will it be helpful? Since the traditional method of getting traffic is through search engine optimization which takes effort and time or PPC advertisements which also needs time to optimize your campaign but also need a lot of money to see the ROI.

This goes to show also that it’s not how many people you know that counts. It’s who you know that counts. And in many ways, it’s not just who you know, but how well you know people that will count in the end.

How to use social media to boast affiliate marketing

Depending on which side of the fence you’re on, whether as the merchant dependant on affiliates to get your name out there or if you’re the affiliate trying to market a merchant’s products, there can be many ways to utilize social media for affiliate marketing.

For either the merchant or the affiliate, you can consider using video content and create traffic via platforms such as YouTube or iTunes or even your own website.

In the case of an affiliate, this can be done by procuring content from merchants and creating your own viral video or having regular specific podcasts. You can also adapt contents to include affiliate links or combining videos that ends with an ad for the merchant or their products.

The most important thing here is to spread the content on a platform that would have the widest reach of audience in the social media landscape.

Certain social media sites like Myspace and Facebook can target certain demographics and age group. This is quite interesting since no other traffic can do that.

Now that we’re on the topic of social networks, you need to be social and market to friends in social networking platforms such as MySpace and Facebook. Whether you’re the merchant or the affiliate, marketing through such platforms can be lucrative because of the number of people you’re able to reach. These platforms have the potential to grab people’s attention, and you can collect friends (or prospects) and build relationships with them to encourage their loyalty to you as a merchant.

Perhaps you have you own opinion on how social media can help affiliate marketing?  Maybe you had some experience in using social media to market you affiliate marketing?

Popularity: 40% [?]

Related posts

• Alexa Baby, Totally Crapped Over Here. (2)
• Why I think PayDotCom is the Best Affiliate Marketplace on the Net! (0)
• Turn Your Tweet Into Money (1)
• The Cost Of Social Media – How Not To Get Burn (2)
• The Black Holes Syndrome (11)