Instagram is a social media platform with billions of users registered and with millions of businesses running using it. Out of those millions of businesses on Instagram, hundreds of thousands of businesses are doing affiliate marketing. Yes, you heard it right! They are doing affiliate marketing with Instagram. But HOW?
In this article, let me tell you everything about affiliate marketing and the strategies those businesses are using with Instagram.
Since the audiences and possibilities with Instagram are endless, with its rough estimation of one billion active users per month, the chances of affiliate marketing with Instagram are just uncountable.
It’s time to start from the basics to the advance of doing affiliate marketing with Instagram. So, here’s what you’ll learn in this article step wise step:
- What is affiliate marketing?
- How to start affiliate marketing with Instagram?
- Instagram profile set up for affiliate marketing
- Selecting affiliate programs to promote
- Finding audiences to promote
- Scaling up affiliate marketing business on Instagram
- Growing your page more for more income
Let’s begin to learn everything step-wise-step…!
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry that works based on promoting other people’s products or services for commissions. In this business, you first pick up products or services to promote. Secondly, you find the right audiences to promote. And, lastly, you promote the products or services for commissions.
There are many unique ways of earning with affiliate marketing. But, earning per sale is the most common way to earn in affiliate marketing. In this, you earn for every sale you generate to other’s businesses.
Another popular way of earning from affiliate marketing is earning per lead. This means that the businesses pay you for bringing your audiences to fill up a simple form on their platform(s).
To understand affiliate marketing even better, you can go through the following guide:
Affiliate Marketing with Instagram
Instagram is an ideal platform for affiliate marketers, not just because half of all Instagram users shop on the platform every week, but also because the platform’s content formats — Images, Videos, Stories, Reels, IGTVs and Live Streams — showcase the 360-degree view of anything that most people need prior to purchasing.
Doing affiliate marketing with Instagram is super easy if you get it the right way.
We are building everything from scratch in this article. Let us move towards setting up your Instagram profile for affiliate marketing.
Profile Set Up for Affiliate Marketing with Instagram
While doing an Instagram profile set up for affiliate marketing, there are a few things we should take note of.
Affiliate marketing business performs best with professional Instagram pages rather than the normal ones.
While mentioning professional Instagram pages, it does not mean going to your Account tab under the Settings menu tab and clicking on “Switch to Professional account“. It meant to say running your page in a professional manner.
To run an Instagram page in a professional manner, you need to set up your Instagram page in an optimized and branded way. For this, it all comes down to setting up the username, name, logo, bio and content of your page in a professional way.
Now, we are setting up all these things with one another right away!
Brand Username
You might have seen that whenever some page post content, Instagram shows it with their username in your feed.
Instagram focuses on page usernames than their names. So, we should take full advantage of this feature to grow your business.
Instagram username works based on SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Hence, the more searchable keywords you have in it, the more chances your page ranking on search results.
Keywords are those words that provide meaningful information with less length. That is why they are called KEY-words. Searchable keywords mean those keywords that are searched in more volume than normal keywords.
Searchable keywords in your niche can help you to reach out to the targeted audiences. Because the users who search for any keywords are those who are interested in that topic.
If they see your page in the search list and follow you, this means you have got the audiences who are interested in your niche.
To help you with practical examples, we are taking examples from one of the Business Theme Pages on Instagram, with the username @financecompounded.
In this picture, you see that the username of the page is “financecompounded“. The username contains two keywords which are “finance” and “compound(ed)”. You can consider compound or compounded as the second keyword.
The keywords are searchable and if someone searches for them, there are chances that the page appears somewhere on the search result.
Words like “Business”, “Investment”, “Entrepreneurship”, “Health”, “Motivation”, “Weight Loss”, “Spirituality”, and “Workout” are some of the other keywords with high search volumes. You can use similar or the same keywords based on your niche.
PRO TIPS:
- If you have a brand name, people will trust you more. Because peoples love to trust more brands than non-brands. So, try to build up a brand than just an Instagram Page.
- Make your Instagram page username short and catchy so people can remember it. This not only helps you in brand awareness but also helps visitors to search back your page when they want.
- Including one or two keywords on the username is recommended.
Brand Name
After you set up your brand username for your Instagram page, now comes the part of having a brand name for your Instagram page.
The Instagram page name also works based on SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
You should be looking to take full advantage of this feature too from Instagram.
As in the above example, the page has used some keywords in its name. Because it helps to come forward in the search results. Additionally, this also helps you to express your niche to your audiences.
Sometimes, you can use your own name plus some keywords in your Instagram page name to provide a short introduction of yourself plus to describe your working field to your audiences.
PRO TIP: Using your name is highly recommended if you are developing a personal brand. If you are developing a company brand, you can use or not your name in your Instagram page name field.
Brand Logo
After you set up your brand username and brand name on your business Instagram page, here comes the part of having a branded logo.
Remember, as soon as someone enters your profile from the feed, explore or search page, they will look to your logo firstly after your username (and sometimes after your name too).
That is why having a branded logo is always necessary for any business page on Instagram. Because, if the visitor like your logo then they will head towards your bio and gradually to your posts. And, if the visitor does not like your logo, they are likely to go back from your page.
So, it is your full responsibility to keep your visitors on your page for further actions and to gradually head them towards your content.
You can have your own photo with a clear view as the logo if you are a personal brand. And, if you are a company brand, you can make a branded logo by yourself or hire someone for it.
PRO TIP: Make your logo simple and catchy so the visitors can immediately remember it. This helps them to recognize your brand the next time they see your logo anywhere. This helps you in your brand awareness.
You can make your logo either by yourself as it is super easy, and you can take the help of YouTube videos. Or, you can simply hire a logo designer on Fiverr for a professional logo for your Instagram business page.
Bio Setup
As soon as your visitors get impressed with your logo, they will directly start reading your bio.
Bio is the feature provided by Instagram to describe yourself or your business(es).
Since it is your Instagram business page, you are likely to describe your business and what you offer to your visitors.
In this example, there are different things included in the Bio. Let us break down each of them to make it simple for you to understand and to set up for your own page.
PRO TIP: Make your bio short and sweet to increase the user attachment rate.
Here’s how you can set up your page bio for your Instagram business page:
- In the first line, you can tell your visitors who the page is for.
- In the second line, express what makes you special in your field.
- In the third line, tell your visitors about what changes your page can bring in their life.
- In the 4th line, include CTA (Call-To-Action) Button for your visitors.
NOTE: You can have any number of lines in your bio and having 4 lines is not always necessary. However, having 3 or 4 lines is recommended for a much more attractive bio.
PRO TIPS:
- Add relevant emoji(s) in each line of your bio. This helps your visitors visualize what you want to express to them. This ultimately helps them to understand you better and it also draws more attention than only having texts.
- Add a relevant link to the profile. Make sure it either helps your audiences to know more about you or your business. If not, make sure it leads to any relevant landing page(related to your niche).
Highlight Covers
The Highlight is a great feature from the side of Instagram. You can utilize it to tell your audiences more about yourself or your businesses.
This does not limit to it only, you can use highlights to keep important and valuable stories for a longer time (as you wish).
In the picture above, you can see Highlights under the yellow-outlined rectangle with bends in corners.
You can place Highlight Covers to make your Highlight collections more attractive. It helps you in leaving a stronger brand image to the audience.
Make relevant Highlights for your page and have related covers to them.
Contents Setup
Contents are the most powerful asset of any Instagram business page.
Peoples engage and follow you because of your content. They will follow you if they want to see your content again in the coming days.
That is why you should have powerful and quality content on your page.
In this, we are taking an example of the contents from @financecompounded on Instagram.
In the picture above, you can see that the posts are well organized, branded and optimized well. All of these make them quality posts with the values they contain.
Always upload the relevant content over your page so you can hook your audiences to your page forever.
PRO TIPS:
- Provide as many values as you can, within your niche, in your posts.
- Do branding to your posts.
- Manage posts in proper order/layout.
You can learn about content creations from YouTube and Google. Or, you can join online tutoring on content creations to learn everything in making professional quality content for your page.
Growing Audiences
Audiences are the viewers and the followers of your page. The more you have them in numbers, the more you can be exposed to them. That is why growing audiences is one of the impactful factors on Instagram.
But, Always remember that quality traffic has no comparison with non-quality mass numbers when it comes down to followers. That is why you should always focus on developing quality traffic to your Instagram page.
Having 100 followers that are going to be converted is far better than having 100K Followers that can not be turned into cash. So, always focus on developing quality and targeted audiences in your niche so you can get the conversions easily.
On Instagram, a lot of pages already succeeded to make money with not even the first 50 followers. And, that is because of their quality audiences and targeting, with Sales strategies applied.
Sales are not going to work until and unless you have audiences that need your products or services. So, by meaning quality and targeted audiences, it refers to having audiences who are interested in your products or services so that you can convert them easily.
On Instagram, targeted audiences help you to bring more similar audiences. Similarly, it works with non-targeted audiences too. So, focus on building a chain and then an empire of targeted audiences than applying the same principle to non-targeted audiences.
Remember that your NETWORK is your NET WORTH. So, always try to make a quality NETWORK to have quality NET WORTH.
Selecting Affiliate Programs to promote
While you start your Instagram business page for affiliate marketing, it all comes down to selecting affiliate programs to promote.
Under a particular niche even, there are tons of different kinds of products or services you can promote.
Selecting the right products or services to promote is a key factor that impacts your figures on the affiliate dashboard.
While selecting the right products or services to promote, I recommend you to follow these principles:
1. Select the products or services you know about.
2. Select the products or services with demand in the market.
3. Select the products or services you love.
Selecting the right products or services to promote is very much an essential thing in affiliate marketing. I recommend you to learn in detail about it from this article.
Finding audiences to promote
As soon as you have the right products or services to promote, you are all set to start promoting them. But, with whom?
The answer is very simple: To the right audiences.
The more right audiences you find to promote, the more chances of conversions you will have. That is why you should be looking to promote your offers to the right audiences.
Right audiences are the audiences that need the products or services that you’re promoting.
When you started growing audiences for your page, following one of the topics above, you have already focused on getting the right audiences for your page.
If you grow your audience on Instagram with quality and targeted audience, you are ready to promote your offers to them.
Even if you have no followers or visitors to your page, you can still promote it on Instagram.
We are looking over various ways of promoting affiliate offers on Instagram in the following topics.
Paid Methods and Free Methods
You get options to promote your affiliate programs on Instagram with both Paid and Free methods.
We are discussing both of them in this article.
Paid Methods
The best forms of promoting affiliate products or services on Instagram with paid methods are to run ads. Out of this, influencer marketing also works at its best.
When you choose to run ads, it is all about running ads on Instagram. You can run ads on the Instagram feed(post form), Instagram Stories, Instagram Reels or Instagram IGTVs.
PRO TIP: Run Facebook Ads and target on Instagram rather than running Ads directly from Instagram. You can target your Ads much more effectively with Facebook Ads.
Using Facebook Ads, we are running Ads on Instagram. While doing so, you can target your Ads in positions and other factors much more effectively than Instagram Ads.
You are not supposed to click on the “BOOST POST” option on the Instagram posts and start runnings ads with it.
You are rather supposed to go to your Facebook Ads account and start with Instagram Ads over there. In this way, you can target audiences much more effectively. And, you know how impactful is “targeting” while running Ads.
You can target the location, age, gender and much more things with Facebook Ads.
PRO TIP: Ads on Instagram Stories seems to work more effectively than running it to other positions. You can utilize this tip to boost your income growth chances.
Out of running Ads, influencer marketing is something you can consider to promote your affiliate offers. Influencer marketing is growing all the time in the past few years.
If you choose to go with Influencer marketing too, you can select to promote on Stories of their pages to see better results.
Free Methods
While talking about the free methods to do affiliate marketing with Instagram, there are multiple ways for it. Let us talk about them in detail in this article.
If you have followers or visitors to your page, you can promote the products or services with information about it on Posts. It can follow the same with Reels, Videos and IGTVs too.
We are talking about promoting your offers on Bio, Stories and via DMs in much detail below.
Promote on Bio
Promoting affiliate links on Bio work effectively if you have targeted audiences.
Undoubtedly, it works more effectively with the more targeted audiences you have.
To get the best results with it while having targeted audiences, add a CTA message on your bio.
CTA refers to Call-To-Action, which means anything that calls someone to take certain actions. Like: “Follow me” calls your audiences to follow you on Instagram.
CTA helps improve engagement and conversions from the side of visitors. That is why it is a very much important and most considered thing in marketing.
PRO TIP: Adding CTA messages on the last line of Bio works more effectively than adding it on any other lines.
Promote on Story (Swipe Ups and LINK Button Features)
Another interesting way to promote your affiliate offers on Instagram is to promote them through Stories. There are two ways you can promote for much response:
- You can add links to Swipes if you get over 10K Instagram Followers to your page.
- You can use the feature of the “LINK” option on Instagram stories to link directly to your landing page or offers with any number of followers on your page.
Promoting affiliate offers on Instagram Stories has an awesome response rate.
Promote via DMs
One of my favourite methods of promoting any products or services using Instagram is to promote them via DMs.
Instagram DMs are much more effective if you have the right sales skills.
The cool feature of Instagram that lets us message almost anyone on the platform makes it super simple for you to land on their DMs and start building relationships with them.
Building relationships is very important when it comes down to sales. And having this awesome opportunity to build relationships with anyone makes it easy for you to take your sales to the next level.
If you find the right ways to build the relationship and the right time to pitch in the conversation, you will BOOM the earnings.
Reinvesting income to scale up an affiliate marketing business
Once you earn from affiliate marketing using Instagram, you will be looking to scale up your affiliate marketing business.
We have brought up this topic to help you with when and how to scale up your business.
The best time to scale up anything is after being comfortable with the current work. If you are not satisfied and can not handle all the activities involved in your everyday work easier, you will mess things up if you add additional work. That is why always make sure that you are comfortable and feel easy to handle all activities in the current position before scaling up your work or business.
While you are into affiliate marketing with Instagram, the best time to scale up your business is after you achieve your target and find it easy to do affiliate marketing on Instagram.
After you feel ready to scale up your business, you can start planning your new targets for scaling up your business.
While looking to scale up your business, you should know how to scale it up.
Scaling Up #1
The best method to scale up your “affiliate marketing with Instagram” business is to take it from Instagram to multiple social media and forums. If you are already playing the affiliate marketing game well with one social media platform, you can play the same game with other social media as soon as you understand the nature of the social media you are looking to enter. So, try to look over how one social media or forum works and set up the primary things professionally. Then, you are all set to kickstart your journey on those platforms.
It does not stop only with this.
Scaling Up #2
One of the other ways to scale up your business is to start building audiences in your email contacts. You can start building up your email lists with targeted audiences that will help you to increase your income. Not only that, but with email marketing, you can re-target the same audiences repeatedly to sell multiple products or services for affiliate commissions.
These two can be your major scaling steps in the first step. Gradually, you can scale it up to other online business models. You can start expanding your business to other marketing businesses too. And, gradually can start making up a team to work to increase productivity.
Many marketers scale their businesses by developing courses in their fields. They also start agencies to boost their business while scaling up massively.
Growing Page for more income
After you have started working smoothly with all the strategies and started seeing good results, the part of growing the page ultimately helps you increase your affiliate income.
This topic has been placed after scaling business because you can expand your online presence and build even more email lists even after you have already scaled up your business. Growing your business is never stopping phenomenon.
You can use your audiences in your different social media pages, forums, and email lists to circulate them over your various online presence. This helps you grow the online company, ultimately enabling you to generate more income from your online businesses.
Another effective and considerable way to grow your page and online presence is running giveaways that skyrockets your exponential growth curve. You can see the massive impact of running giveaways on audience engagement and the growth of your online company.
Keep doing influencer marketing on your niche out of the many ways to grow your page or audience. This helps you a lot in increasing your page and audiences.
Conclusion
To summarize this article, we have learned about affiliate marketing and its scope with Instagram. We then learned in depth to set up an Instagram profile for affiliate marketing professionally, including 6 very important in-depth parts of setting up an Instagram profile for your business. We also learned about the content and growing audiences on Instagram. After that, we discussed the 3 principles to consider while finding the right program to promote as an affiliate marketer. We discussed finding the right audiences to promote and the different methods of promoting your offers. After you start making money with these strategies, you need to reinvest some part of your income to reach new heights, and we talked about it in detail in this article.
And, at last, we discussed continuously growing your page and increasing your audience circle to increase your income every new moment.
Feel free to comment below on any queries, and I look forward to responding to you very soon. Bookmark this article if you are starting your journey on affiliate marketing with Instagram so that you can easily access and follow up with it!