How To Do Affiliate Marketing on Instagram?

Affiliate Marketing on Instagram has been gaining much attention lately, both among brands and creators. It has proven a great marketing tactic for brands to increase their sales and for affiliate marketers as another means to promote their products. Affiliate marketing, combined with Instagram marketing, is a multi-million dollar industry, mainly owing to Gen Z, which prefers shopping through Instagram. 

If you plan on starting an affiliate business on Instagram, this article will help you figure out the ins and outs and tips to maximise your sales.

1. Set Up A Creator Profile

To become an affiliate marketer, you must have a creator account. You can create a new one or turn your existing Instagram profile into a creator account. Instagram creator profiles are specially designed for influencers, bloggers, and other content creators to showcase their work amidst a larger audience. It gives you access to tools like follower growth, audience demographics, managing public questions by dividing your DMs, and much more. To turn your Instagram profile into a creator account, follow these steps:

• Go to the Account option under Settings.
• Tap on ‘Switch to a Professional Account’ In the options, choose Creator.
• Choose the category that best describes your niche (preferably one relating to your affiliate products).
• Fill in your contact details, and you’re done.

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After setting up your creator profile, optimising your bio is best. Make it informative, and add the affiliate links and your website address.

2. Choose the Right Affiliate Network

To do Affiliate Marketing on Instagram and earn money, you must partner with brands or affiliate networks that provide good commissions in your niche. You can collaborate with brands directly through affiliate networks or sign up for a good affiliate marketing program. Partnering with a good affiliate network will help you understand the best commission models, connect and promote your affiliate products with micro-influencers and get access to the latest tracking technology. 

After you’ve chosen your affiliate network, you must immediately research and set commission rates. You can set this either on a pay-per-click basis or a cost-per-acquisition basis. To determine the ideal commission rate, you must first analyse your profit margins, conduct competitor analysis, and ask around in your affiliate network if you are new to marketing on Instagram. 

Don’t forget to set your payment terms to typically 60-90 days after the sale.

3. Build Your Network

Getting followers on Instagram is easy, but getting quality followers who appreciate your content and would be willing to buy your affiliate products is a different story. To make money through affiliate marketing on Instagram, you need to create content and build your influence in a way that your followers don’t hesitate to buy from you. Here’s how to do it:

• Consistently create and share quality content.
• Understand what your audience likes and wants
• Create content around specific niches.
• Mostly share non-promotional content. But you can subtly add a link to your affiliate products.
• Publish when the audience is active, and don’t forget to reply to DMs or comments.

4. Make the Most Of Instagram’s Features

Instagram offers a lot of unique features for creators to grow their businesses. As an affiliate marketer, you should experiment with all these features and find out what gets you the most clicks. For example, add links as swipe-up on stories, create memorable branded URLs on images and descriptions, create an Instagram affiliate storefront, a discount code story highlight, etc., to get instant clicks.

5. Create a Captivating Affiliate Program

It’s great to have influencers and micro-influencers collaborate with you to promote your affiliate products. But to do that, you must create a compelling program that motivates influencers to participate and partner with you. 

One approach you can adopt is building a tiered program where every tier unlocks new rewards. It will encourage influencers to promote your brands and service while fairly rewarding them for their efforts.

6. Start Promoting Your Affiliate Links

It is quite obvious that once you’ve set up your creator profile and partnered with an affiliate program, you need to start selling the products to earn a good commission. For that, you must continuously promote the links, put out content that prompts viewers to buy the product, and regularly engage with your audience to get the maximum sales.

Unfortunately, unlike other social media platforms, you cannot directly place a clickable link on your Instagram posts. But how will the audience buy your products unless you start promoting your affiliate links? Here are some out-of-the-box ideas that will help you easily promote your affiliate products on Instagram and earn massive commissions on sales.

1. Add the affiliate link to your bio if you work for a single brand/product. If you have multiple products, you can link a separate landing page or website, where you put in all your affiliate links.
2. Use tools to create a linkable Instagram gallery that helps create a virtual shop of clickable Instagram posts. This is called an Instagram affiliate storefront. It is an effective measure if you plan to do affiliate marketing on a large scale.
3. You can also include the affiliate link as a link sticker on your stories. But you’ll need at least 10,000 followers to use this feature.
4. Advertising your affiliate link on Instagram is another great way to get people to buy your product. Although, we would advise that you use this method only if you’re getting a good commission per sale.
5. Some programs also offer promo or coupon codes linked to your affiliate account. You can use these in your product and image descriptions. People who shop using these codes get a discount, and you will get a commission on every purchase.
6. Label all your affiliate products as sponsored or paid partnerships, preferably tagging the brand or its associated influencer.
7. Use related hashtags to expand your reach.

7. Measure Results and Adjust Your Strategies

As an affiliate marketer, it’s crucial to continuously analyse and measure your efforts’ effectiveness. Thankfully, Instagram provides you with basic analytics to help you track the response and clicks on every link. If you use an affiliate network or program, they may offer tools that provide a detailed report on your affiliate link’s performance. 

It’s also a good idea to track how many of your affiliate clicks result in a sales closure because if your clicks are not converting, there is less possibility of that brand working with you in the future.

Conclusion

Instagram has been continuously evolving to become more creator-friendly, and if you plan on doing Affiliate marketing on Instagram, it’s a good time to get started. To become successful as an Instagram affiliate marketer, you must make sure that your creator profile stands out from the competition, develop good relationships with your audience and influencers, and have a measurable strategy that you can modify according to the results it generates. 

Remember, Instagram is a great platform to grow your affiliate business, but you must tread carefully and know what works best for you.

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