How to Increase Affiliate Marketing Income Through Social Shares

One of the biggest problems that marketers face in 2016 is the drop of social media reach. Recently, Facebook announced they will lower even more the organic reach for pages since they will favorite more content from family and friends.

While for the average Facebook users this may be good news, it’s a big problem for marketers and affiliate bloggers because they will need to come up with new ways to increase Facebook reach for the pages they manage.

From what Facebook announced earlier this month, the only way you can possibly reach more people is to encourage them to share your content with their friends and family. Can this be achieved for affiliate blogs? Can you use the recent Facebook change to increase your affiliate marketing income using social shares?

It’s all up to you…

Start by doing your social media research

You need to find out how this change in the Facebook algorithm is influencing others and see if they have any advice. Are they reporting lower traffic numbers? Lower conversion rates? What have they done to fix this?

After this, try to do your homework and understand why people share things on Facebook and other social networks. You can use this to your advantage when creating your affiliate marketing content strategy. Don’t limit yourself to published studies about social shares, go further and ask your audience, your friends and family.

Discovering share-worthy content is a big quest for affiliate marketers so finding any relevant data is a big deal. For example, look at this pie chart of what’s the primary reason people share content on Facebook. 

The data comes from Fractl latest study about social shares. You can see what content is going to be shared the most on Facebook starting to what people find interesting, followed by what they care about, what they find to be useful and what makes them emotional.

Of course, there is a need for bigger studies in this area but this is a good starting point for your affiliate marketing efforts.

How to adapt your content strategy to get more social shares

Not doing anything to adapt to these changes will surely result in a lower conversion rate for your affiliate marketing strategy. Making the right changes and applying them to your content creation strategy will allow you to increase your income by using social shares.

Change how you create content.

There’s a high chance that your content creation strategy revolves around products and not on an audience. That needs to change. Look again at the pie chart above and see what changes can you make to your creation process. If you were focused on long-form content and trying to get social shares from that, it probably won’t work anymore (or it won’t be as successful).

The alternative to extremely technical blog posts is to write content targeted on social questions that will result in social shares. People will continue to search for product reviews but they’ll keep that information for themselves, rather than share it on Facebook or other social networks. Here are several changes you can apply to your content creation process to increase the number of social shares.

Focus on emotion rather than the product. 

Your affiliate blog is probably focusing on just one niche, right? Let’s say you’re using a blog from the coffee niche to sell coffee machines and related products. Try to focus your content creation strategy on the emotion that people get when making and drinking coffee. Write blog posts that remind people of these feelings and use viral videos and images to spark up the social sharing process.

Always tell a story, even in your email marketing strategy.

Sending boring newsletters to your subscribers won’t increase the number of social shares. Use the tactics you’re using in your content creation strategy and tell a story in the emails you’re sending to your subscribers. Try to be intriguing but don’t use click-bait. Make people come to your affiliate blog, read the article and share it with their family and friends.

If you’re looking for an online tool that creates successful email sequences for your email lists, you want to give Scriptly a go. We have a lot of email sequences and autoresponders that you can customize even further to get more social shares.

Make people feel connected to your content.

One of the reasons why people share content on Facebook and other social networks is to stay connected with friends and family. You can use this to your advantage and make your readers feel connected to your own content. If you allow your readers to identify themselves with the story you’re telling, there’s a high chance that they’ll share that content on social networks.

You can make people feel connected to your affiliate content by doing one of the following:

• Write topical and seasonal content (breaking news as they develop, latest topics, things people look for in Summer and other seasons).
• Improve your headlines and use proper headings since people rarely read full web pages and just pick out words and sentences.
• Add an emotional appeal when creating blog posts.
• Always have a positive tone (you can use images to improve this).
• Post relevant content and tie it to stunning places in the world. Since we were talking about an affiliate blog focused on coffee products, a blog post about “X places in the World with Amazing Coffee” with amazing images and videos will get a lot of shares on Facebook.