It turns out you don’t need an audience of hundreds of thousands to succeed as an affiliate on Instagram. Accounts with less than 5,000 followers that create a community around relevant content have all the ingredients to nail the “know, like, and trust” recipe.

What are social affiliates?

Social affiliates or social media affiliates are individuals promoting your business and earning commissions for their referrals in social media. Affiliates can be anyone from your existing customers, brand ambassadors, influencers, industry experts, etc. They promote your brand and promotoes essentially through their social media (including Instagram) using referral links and discount codes to send traffic to your site.

Providing relevant affiliate links to trusted products that your audience wants or needs means they spend less time on research before a purchase. Instagram users see this as a benefit, and recommending relevant products allows creators to add a semi-passive income to their revenue stream.

Instagram for Affiliate Marketing

It’s no surprise that the platform most known for influencers is also an affiliate marketing favorite. We’re talking massive profits for minimal effort for brands and businesses. Not to mention Instagram’s Shoppable Posts and Product Stickers features all make Instagram prime for Instagram affiliate marketing.

Read more: Affiliate Social Media Marketing – How to run your affiliate program

Affiliate links on Instagram are one of the best ways to passively make money on the platform. This marketing strategy allows anyone with a growing and engaged following to monetize Instagram. 

Instagram for affiliate marketing for brands or any other business usually consists of an agreement between a product company and a marketer. Often you will see discount codes or affiliate marketing Instagram influencers advertising special offers in their Instagram captions. In Instagram affiliate marketing and almost any marketing, it’s all about tracking conversions.

Tips for Affiliates on Instagram

Becoming an Instagram affiliate is just like any journey — it’s not always linear. However, there are some fundamental tips for affiliates on Instagram to follow on your path to success. Keep in mind that these strategies are adaptable and will depend on your niche and personal preferences.

#1 Find your audience

The most important thing about Instagram is engaging content. Your content must speak to your audience so that they can speak back. Engaging content looks different for every niche. Some audiences, like travel, are best suited to photo content, whereas fitness niches favor video content. For information-heavy audiences like personal finance are full of text and infographics.

Knowing which content formats work best for your audience is vital for developing ​​your Instagram audience.

#2 Build a community

Your audience is central to how you show up as an affiliate on Instagram. Your followers need to feel like you are there for them — and in return, they’ll be there for you.

Instagram is a place where being friendly goes a long way for growing your audience. Make friends with content creators in your niche and other affiliate marketers, build partnerships, run Instagram Lives and Reels, and collaborate with people in your niche. Also, usually, interactions go both ways, so don’t be shy to reach out, comment, like, and follow accounts that fit your niche and interests.

#3 Place your links

Instagram is adding more resources for creators every day, including more linking capabilities, so Affiliates can monetize their following.

Links in bio

You can only have one link in your bio at a time. This lets you keep just one permanent link in your bio that directs your audience to all your offers and makes it easy for them to click the one they’re looking for.

Links in Stories

The link button is a link that you can add to your stories.

Highlights

Story highlights not only let you preserve your story content beyond the 24-hour timeframe, they’re also a helpful organizational tool for directing your audience to specific content.

Put it in captions

Mostly for users that browse Instagram on Desktop, links work well in captions, too. Just tell readers to copy and paste the link.

#4 Remind your followers to click

Once you have your links in place, you need to keep reminding your followers where they are. Instagram’s algorithm-driven feed means your followers won’t necessarily see all the updates on your profile. Don’t be shy about promoting your offers through multiple content types.

A simple formula is to match your stories with your posts. When you post something — whether that be a photo, an infographic, or a reel ​​— you use your stories to provide a more in-depth explanation and link back to that post.

#5 Build relationships with your favourite brands

Unlike conventional advertising, Instagram offers its users personal engagement. Likes, comments, shares, and direct messages are channels that followers use to communicate directly with brands and influencers.

But people don’t want to talk to businesses — people want to talk to people. Brands know this, and this is where Affiliates on Instagram come in. Choosing brands that fit with your audience and build strong and lasting relationships with them to create consistency for both the brand and you. You can always log in to VoxFeed and find out which brands are running affiliate programs for you and contact them.