One thing indispensable to every affiliate marketing campaign is traffic.
With 3.8 billion people on social media, you want to be right where your target audience is. No matter what your niche or affiliate product, there is no better place to find it - than Facebook.
By Q4 2019, Facebook had almost 2.5 billion monthly active users.
This makes Facebook the biggest place for internet marketing. More amazing, is the fact that you can promote your affiliate offers to a laser-target audience, because Facebook knows how to narrow down its users with the use of their interests, activities, behaviors, ages, and other factors.
Awesome, right?
Facebook ads are very useful for affiliate marketing. Here are quick ways to boost your affiliate marketing sales with them.
Affiliate Marketing Strategy on Facebook
There are several ways to get traffic on Facebook for your affiliate offers. These may not work the same way or yield the same ROI, but they work nonetheless.
1. Direct Selling
When you promote using Direct Selling, you run a Facebook ad to target a particular audience. You’ll add a picture or a video and call to action button to this ad, and once the user clicks on the call to action button they are taken to the landing page where they complete the transaction. Voila! You’ll get your commission on the sale.
However, this route is very restricted.
First, though you can do this in your personal or business posts - Amazon does not allow affiliates to promote Facebook posts containing its affiliate links. You’ll get thrown out of the Amazon Affiliate Program for doing this.
Second, one of the biggest affiliate networks that gives commissions as high as 75%, ClickBank, also doesn't allow this. You can get banned for promoting ClickBank links with Facebook posts or ads.
Your next thought may be to cloak links from any of the above affiliate networks, but Facebook has marked all links from Bit.ly as unsafe and abusive.
You still can..
It is not the case that you can’t promote affiliate products on Facebook, you can. The affiliate network may allow you to promote the product on Facebook. If this is the case, just be sure to follow the guidelines of Facebook and the affiliate network.
Get a video or a picture with a call to action and run your ad.Check out affiliate links yourself to confirm that they are not dangerous and are safe. Note that Facebook verifies these links and can have you banned if they find them suspicious.
2. Alternate Direct Selling
This is also direct selling, but you are making it more secure.
What you do is to create an ad, place a catchy picture and description, and laser-target prospects. This is, of course, after setting your objective. You may want to use ‘Conversions’ as your objective.
With this method, you must build a landing page. You can create landing pages with Optimize Press 2.0. A landing page contains a title, content, and call to action. The content can either be video, text, or pictures. Just make sure that whichever format you use, ensure it is explanatory enough. The call to action button takes the person to the final page to complete the intended action, whether that may be to enjoy a free trial, set up an account, or complete the purchase.
This method will be particularly useful when you offer free trials of software or digital products that can be used right away, and helps you avoid issues from either Facebook or affiliate networks.
3. Lead Generation
This way may not be particularly fast, but it is a way to build a brand and make sales at the same time. This method will not only be useful for the moment, but will prove highly indispensable in the future.
This is email marketing.
What you do is to generate leads to your email list. Once you have them there, you can then send the affiliate offer.
An email list is very valuable. When you grow it, you can always use it to make more sales for almost nothing.
More, you can keep expanding it. You can even have multiple lists for multiple niches where you can run several affiliate campaigns at once. Imagine the potentials of an email list containing over 500,000 subscribers.
With Facebook ads, you can grow your email list cheaply. Select ‘Lead Generation’ as your objective, select your target audience, choose what information to collect, and set your budget. It’s that easy.
You’ll want to note that pictures attract more attention, as well as that attention-grabbing pictures - grab more attention. Put in a couple of words to interest your prospect on what they will get in return. You can use a free report, book, discount, coupons and any other lead magnet. Then, include a clear call-to-action.
4. Content Marketing
This is when you use Facebook ads to draw traffic to your website.
You’ll want to ensure that the post welcoming them has your affiliate links on your website.. Your post does all the pitching and promotion to get your audience interested in taking the required action.
This is very safe, widely-used, and will help boost your brand in the long-run.
Content marketing may not be the fastest way to make affiliate sales using Facebook ads, but it is a lot safer than boosting posts with affiliate links on Facebook.
Tips on Marketing with Facebook Ads
If you are a first-timer, start with a Fan Page
Facebook marketing is easy to do, but your campaign may not be approved or may be delayed if it is your first time. This is especially when you are running Facebook ads for an external link.
Facebook likes to keep its people on Facebook.
Building a Fan Page in a niche will help you grow an organic audience you can reach with your offers. Of course, a Facebook fan may have lesser value than an email lead, but the more likes you have, the more your sales potential.
By posting links to your blogs, you can drive traffic and convert them easily.
Watch your ad spending closely
You want to be careful about how much you spend on campaigns. If you don’t know how to do it right, it can become expensive and you will lose money. If what you want to do is grow likes on your fan page, you want to start with a daily budget of about $10 at most. See the estimated likes per day and know the exact number you want.
If you are running ads for lead generation or an affiliate offer, you also want to take note of this.
This is where targeting comes in.
Targeting
Proper targeting is what makes your campaign very successful and improves your ROI.
First, do not be too broad. Even if your product will be helpful to people in the United States and Canada, who are within the ages of 22 - 50, and own at least one car, you shouldn’t do that.
That makes it very broad. There are millions of people on Facebook with that peculiarity.
Keep it laser-focused.
Target them by their interests.
What interests do they have that nobody else does?
Type the possible interests in the suggestion box and Facebook will give you suggestions. You can also target by behaviors and income range. For instance, if you sell engagement rings, targeting by income would work for you.
Use CPM, then CPC
Starting a Facebook ad campaign with CPM (cost-per-mille) can be highly beneficial in testing what will work best. CPM means that you pay per 1000 impressions.
You can run three ads with different pictures and descriptions to see the one with the most interaction. You can then run the best one. Affiliate marketers do this to know which picture and description attract the best engagement. It is referred to as A/B Split testing.
Final Statement…
Facebook has the largest audience on social media. It gets bigger by the day and this makes for a more diverse audience.
Organic posts don’t go far, so marketers use ads.
You can make a lot of money quickly with ads, but you have to abide by community guidelines and those of your affiliate network.
Facebook is very large and you want to laser-target your audience. Be careful about how much you spend, and work towards building a brand.
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