Unless you have money, there isn’t much you can do with PPC advertising alone. Ultimately, affiliate marketing comes down to being able to promote your website and brand and reach a larger audience. This means taking advantage of the mailing list, blog, and social media accounts you’ve set up and using them to attract more new visitors and 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 it and the seller doesn’t really need it, so it must become indispensable for each one. In this case, that means helping the product creator sell a much larger number of products than he otherwise could. And for the shopper, it means providing high-quality content and information and helping them find the best deals and products out there. Every business is ultimately predicted around providing value of one kind from another. This is how the internet marketer provides his 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’ll see this link very clearly as we look at the three main types of marketing available to promote your brand.

How to be successful 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 also allowing you to harness the power of real-world social media. Compared to email marketing, social media has the drawback that you have to go through a third party, be it Facebook, Twitter, or Google. But while this can be a problem, the silver lining is that people can share your content with their friends and this gives it the potential to go viral. At the same time, social networks are generally more multimedia and make it easier for you to share different types of content. But unfortunately, 90% of companies and marketers do their social media marketing completely wrong. The problem here is that they will spend their time posting on social media, but all they will be posting is how good your business is and it will sound like “corporate talk”. If this is the type of status you’re posting to your Twitter or Facebook account, you’re sadly missing the whole point of social media marketing. This type of content would be fine, of course, if you already had an audience and your goal was simply to market to them. What’s really going on here, though, is that you’re not posting content for anyone and you’re not giving anyone who might stumble upon it any reason to consider signing up. The question you should always ask yourself when creating content for the web is: would you follow it? If you saw a social media account like this, would you subscribe? If the answer is no, then you really need to rethink how you might be providing your value.

How to do social media right

The key is in the way you look at your social networks and the way you consider them within the larger context of your marketing. Specifically, it’s important that you start thinking of your social media profiles not just as an opportunity to promote yourself, but as a product in and of itself. What does that mean? It means that social media accounts need to provide value to the point where people want to sign up and would be disappointed if they went away. Of course, you need to do this while staying on top of your marketing and that means you need to focus on whatever niche or industry you’ve chosen. If that’s fitness, then it’s not a good thing for your Facebook account to focus only on business. But it’s also not a good thing for your account to focus only on how good the product you’re selling is. Instead, you should try to fill it with inspiring images of people working out and getting fit, interesting industry news about really exciting new products, and helpful hints and tips. If you’re selling life insurance, you may find it a bit more difficult to see how you can keep a social media account interesting and entertaining. However, in that case, you simply need to think outside the box a bit more. In particular, this could mean sharing photos of families enjoying life together or tips for family activities. Maybe you could open a social media account about ‘advice for modern parents’, or maybe you could give it a humorous ‘dispatches from the front lines of parenthood’ angle. 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 and you’ve given people a good reason to follow you.

This is how you build your following and you will find that if you consistently offer good quality in this regard, it will eventually give you a large audience to market to. Keep in mind here that what is really important is the value you are providing.