If you want to increase your income, perhaps the most obvious thing to do is just to start another business. However, this can be costly and time-consuming. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a way of making more money without doing more work?

Essentially, that’s what happens with affiliate marketing. Advertisers pay commission to anybody who enables them to get their advertising to their target market. In these days of universal internet access, social media platforms are often the best choice for affiliate marketing.

According to Sathish Krishna of Tier5 LLC (a US company that provides digital marketing and web development services), the great thing about affiliate marketing is that it requires little or no experience or initial investment.

Types of Affiliate Marketing

In 2009, the millionaire creator of The Smart Passive Income Blog, Pat Flynn, identified three main types of affiliate marketing:

Unattached

Unattached affiliate marketing is by far the easiest type to do. You don’t need to know anything about the product you’re promoting, you just have to incorporate a link on your page, and every time someone clicks the link, you get paid a commission. Passive income doesn’t get much easier than that!

For example, if an article about different types of affiliate marketing has a link to Casumo, and the casino pays every time one of the article’s readers visits the Casumo website, that’s unrelated affiliate marketing.

Related

Related affiliate marketing is what you’re doing if you use your social media presence to promote something you don’t use yourself but which is related to something you do use. For example, someone with a website for obedience training puppy classes might feature an advert for dog beds or other accessories the owners of the puppies might need.

The problem with this type of affiliate marketing is if you don’t use the product yourself, it could turn out to be a dud product. Plus, If you’ve recommended or promoted it, there goes the hard-earned trust of your followers.

Involved

Finally, involved affiliate marketing is when you promote products or services that you know, from personal experience, are outstanding. The people who view the link for the product on your page have to have confidence that you wouldn’t promote anything that wasn’t of great value.

That kind of confidence can’t be built up overnight. You have to demonstrate that you really know about the product, and your judgment can really be trusted. However, if you do manage to build such confidence among your followers, involved affiliate marketing can help you make a lot of money.

Top Social Media Platforms for Affiliate Marketing

1. Facebook

Not surprisingly, the number one top social media website where affiliate marketers can create a passive income is Facebook. Everybody is on Facebook.

The other good feature about Facebook is how interactive it is. Every time users interact with other users, posts, and media, the trusty Facebook algorithms learn a little bit more about what kind of advertising is likely to catch the users’ attention.

The downside with Facebook is that it’s now so vast it’s impossible for them to maintain much control. Thus, there’s always a possibility that your affiliate marketing message could end up in close proximity to posts you really don’t want your followers to see.

The younger generation seems to be getting a bit tired of Facebook, so if your advertising target is youngsters, you might prefer one of the other featured sites below.

2. Instagram

Most people have heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Nowhere is this more true than in advertising. Reading sentences about products just doesn’t create the same impact as viewing cleverly designed images. That’s why Instagram can be such a powerful platform for affiliate marketing: it’s all about images.

However, depending on the product you want to promote, you might decide that Instagram is not for you. It tends to attract younger followers, so products that don’t appeal to this age group may not succeed here.

3. Twitter

The best feature about Twitter is its reach. Twitter has over three million users, who send out over 500 million tweets per day. You can add images or videos, but you’re only allowed 140 characters, so this isn’t the best channel for broadcasting in-depth product information.

Since the amount of interaction possible on Twitter is limited anyway, and because messages have to be so short, you can use various tools to send out scheduled tweets automatically, which can save a lot of time.

Final Thoughts

The three featured social media sites, as well as many others, can really power up your affiliate marketing success. Good luck!