Instagram Affiliate Marketing: The Complete Guide [2022]

Did you always think that having a 9 to 5 desk job, working long hours beside the usual days and glaring at your laptop every day without fail to such an extent that you have forgotten what evenings look like on weekdays was the only way to earn a decent living? Leading you to Instagram Affiliate Marketing 2020.

Well, me too until I came to know that you could earn while doing your favorite past-time, sleeping. Shocked much? Now, the case is such that a reaction like that is normal.

The coming of social media brought with it the best way of entertainment for everyone. But, by entertainment, I also meant that it will make you earn money. Yes!

The trend that could help you earn huge chunks of money is ‘Affiliate Marketing’. This kind of marketing is a well-known tactic to fascinate the Instagram audience for businesses and in return give exposure and a huge amount of money to affiliates.

Now, we got all the good things about affiliate marketing but what is it exactly?

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is an online sales tactic that lets a business increase its sales by allowing others targeting the same audience- “affiliates”- to earn a commission by recommending the products to others.

The concerned intermediary or affiliate between a brand and its audience earns a commission each time someone makes a purchase associated with their recommendation.

If they perform well, this performance-based collaboration can earn them a decent income like any other person with a good qualification.

Statistics to get a clearer picture of affiliate marketing

1. Affiliate Marketing contributes to 15% of the total digital media advertising revenue.

This cannot be a surprise when you see the ever-expanding Instagram where various businesses are coming up with new techniques to make them bigger.

2. 35% of affiliates earn over $20,000.

Hence, starting your career in affiliate marketing 2020 seems like a decent way to start making money but, doing this can be very troublesome for you. You might understand it better while you’re at it. An established affiliate can earn this much money but a beginner cannot think of such high-income leaps in the beginning.

3. Affiliate partnerships drive more than 20% of the annual revenue for brands, according to the latest affiliate marketing statistics.

Therefore, more and more businesses are opting for affiliate marketing to accelerate their growth in lesser time.

4. In less than a year, the search interest for “affiliate marketing” grew by 44%

So, knowing about affiliate marketing is what you need for your brand right now. More popularity, more viewers, more revenue in lesser time. Why won’t you go for affiliate marketing when you can get anything and everything from it that your business requires?

This impressive leap was observed between December 2017 and June 2018.

How does affiliate marketing work?

Well, it is not compulsory that you get an 80% commission from the sale but, the process of it is near about the same.

Now, to know in detail about how the mechanism of affiliate marketing 2020 is, you need to know who all are involved in it in the first place.

1. The brand/ the seller/ advertisers

It is obvious that this kind of marketing requires brands or companies who want to advertise their products on social media and who are large enough to hire someone for the job. Basically, this is the primary requirement for affiliate marketing 2020.

2. Affiliates/ the publishers

These are the people who play a key role in advertising a brand on their behalf. They act as marketing partners to brands and have the sole authority in experimenting with all kinds of trends in order to widen the outreach of the brand. They can be bloggers, mobile apps, shopping sites, etc.

Here, in this picture, there is the clickable-link of ‘Zara’ for viewers to visit its website.

3. Affiliate Network

When a brand opts for such marketing, they not only hire a person for their services but they have to familiarize that person with their brand and its insights as well. The person has to own the brand and not just work for it for people to want it. This can be a point of worry for the brand as to how the affiliate adheres to such a commitment. So, they have to have a tracking program running to keep a check on what the affiliate is doing. This tracking program is called affiliate network which handles all tracking, reporting, and payments to the earners.

4. Software as a Service (SaaS)

In an affiliate program, SaaS platforms contribute to performance tracking, reporting, and payment to affiliates. They focus on the technical part and run an analysis of the affiliate.

Brands usually don’t use both, any one of the techniques is usually opted. This is because they both serve similar purposes of managing the work done by an affiliate.

5. Audience

The customers come at the bottom of the chain of people associated with the brand. They can either be available for purchase or sign up for a newsletter and much more.

Now coming to how we have to go about it:

Affiliate Marketing 2020 is a web consisting of multiple links and structures to it. It is very complex as getting paid for an advertisement does not depend on one or two factors, instead, it depends on a chain of factors.

The main aim of this kind of marketing is to create a win-win situation for both the brand and its affiliate.

Step 1: Affiliate of brand posts and publicizes it on Instagram

Step 2: Buyers click on the post on the affiliate’s feed and a piece of data is saved on their browser.

Step 3: Customer is redirected to the brand’s site.

Step 4: Customer purchases the product or its service.

Step 5: Then comes the turn of analysis of the process in which the work of the affiliate is checked using SaaS or an affiliate network.

Step 6: This way an affiliate is finally paid according to the various parameters enlisted in the affiliate network or SaaS and earns money accordingly.

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Parameters to earn money from Instagram Affiliate Marketing

Number of sales or conversion rate:

The conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors. For example, if an eCommerce site receives 100 visitors in a month and has 20 sales, the conversion rate would be 20 divided by 100, or 20%.

A conversion can refer to any desired action that you want the visitor to take which is in benefit to the brand.

Number of leads

These are the prospective customers of the brand who show interest in the product or service.

•  The number of clicks on the clickable-link provided in the caption or bio.
•  New vs returning customers
•  Registrations, giveaway entries, email sign-ups
•  Customer Lifetime Value
•  Number of subscriptions

Why become an affiliate?

1. Being an affiliate is risk-free. You do not have to invest anything on the products you advertise which saves a lot of start-up money

2. You do not have to make any separate merchant account for the publicity. All you have to do is propagate it through your account to your audience on your feeds and gain responses.

3. Most importantly, you will be working from home and at flexible working hours. You do not have to worry about getting up early for a desk job so, you won’t be under pressure of time-limits.

4.  Moreover, you apart from being an affiliate get recognized as an influencer or blogger or whatever you do currently. It will be great exposure for you.

Common affiliates’ marketing channels

Now an affiliate becomes an affiliate while doing something else. It’s not their primary agenda to be an affiliate most of the time. So, these are the various channels through which affiliates usually work as:

1. Influencers
2. Bloggers
3. Online Website
4. Email Lists

These are one of the ways by which you promote a brand’s product by using emails to create a relationship with your customers/buyers.

Paid search focused micro stations

Many of you might not know what a microsite is while others won’t know how to go about it. A microsite is a website/ webpage designed to promote a brand and achieve small targets like, specific product campaigning, or targeting a niche-specific audience.

Affiliates often indulge in making these microsites which only deal in small domains as specified before. It can be a unique and vibrant way of fascinating customers to a different place altogether to serve a part of a goal.

A tip question: How would you scale the following Instagram affiliate marketing channels in 2020?

Tips to become an affiliate

Create a rapport

Before starting marketing, you need to create a base. You cannot expect people to start liking the kind of marketing you start posting without any clues. So, interact with them, see what they like and create a good bond with them. Then, steadily start advertising when you think they have started trusting and admiring you.

Stay updated

Being an advertiser, you need to know the latest trends on Instagram. So, keep looking at different pages with similar niche to learn from them and create your personal thing. Whatever you do should be fresh and enough to make the other brands feel under-equipped.

Experiment on different platforms

Don’t just stick to a particular platform. You can even make money by blogging side by side, or you can interact with your audience on your social media account. Keeping just a single way open will make you stuck on it when the way ends. Therefore, always keep your options open.

Research well

Always know what the background for your advertisement is. You cannot just post anything you feel would look good. Create a theme and work on it. Send a message from your ad. People will be fascinated by motivational advertisements rather than normal publicity.

End Words

This, and much more is there when it comes to affiliate marketing. However, one thing is clear. ‘Affiliate’ is another name for “Simple Modern Work Life”.

Seriously, in today’s time, what can be better than this when you have nothing to compromise with?

Hence, give a thought because that will be the start of your imagination to advertise and it’s certain that it will be unstoppable.