Affiliate Marketing with Social Media

You can do affiliate marketing with social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

• With Facebook, you'd simply add your affiliate link on your Facebook page or in a post.
• With Instagram, you'd add your affiliate link in your link in bio, on a separate Instagram page in your link in bio or in the swipe up link on Instagram stories.
• With Pinterest, you add your affiliate link right in the link area of creating a Pin.

However, affiliate marketing with social media (in my experience) is not as precise and targeted as affiliate with SEO blog posts. Here's why.

REASON ONE

When you talk about a product on social media, you are sharing it with all your followers who may or may not be interested in that product and may or may not buy it. The chance that they're going to click on a link and buy from you is low, which means that your conversion rate is low.

Conversion rate is the number of visitors to a website that complete a desired goal (a conversion) out of the total number of visitors.

REASON TWO

When you post on Facebook or Instagram, your posts get pushed down in peoples' feeds after a day or two. These posts are not evergreen meaning they are not searchable in a few days or few years.

Pinterest does have evergreen Pins, meaning Pins you Pin onto Pinterest will exist in a few days or a few years, but in 2020, their algorithm has shifted to focus on fresh, new Pins.

As a result, to keep on earning affiliate income from your affiliate links, you will have to keep posting on these social media sites at least daily or weekly to make a good amount of money and/or you need a large following to get a stable income.

Affiliate Marketing with SEO Blog Posts

Affiliate marketing with SEO blog posts is a much more stable and efficient way to make money because of two reasons that counteract the downsides of doing affiliate marketing with social media.

REASON ONE

Unlike with social media, when you write about an affiliate product with specific keywords, you can specifically target the exact person who wants that product and who is searching for it on Google.

Your conversion rate will be higher since the person searching for the product you're talking about is in their purchasing decision stage (vs. when you share a product on social media, your followers most likely weren't even thinking about that product).

REASON TWO

Blog posts are evergreen meaning once they propagate into Google's algorithm and start to rank, they can be searched for five months or five years from now (granted you are updating your post and maintaining your SEO strategy).

As your posts gain more traction in Google the longer they exist, they have the potential to have more eyes on them. You do not have to keep posting like you do on social media for blog posts to convert.

SEO blog posts with affiliate links you wrote months or years ago can bring you money today.

For example, this post I wrote almost a year ago brings me in hundreds a day today.