affiliate marketing facebook profitsIf you’re going to be an affiliate marketer, sooner or later you’ll come up with the brilliant idea to market affiliate products directly through social networks.

One of the best networks for this is Facebook, due to both its immense size and lenient policies around affiliate links, but that doesn’t mean that affiliate marketing using Facebook is an instant profit-machine.

In this post I’ll go through some pointers based on my experience using Facebook as a marketer.

HyperActive Social Accounts Are Rarely Worth It

The first point I want to make is that I’m not really a big fan of spending a lot of time and money developing active social media accounts with thousands of followers.

In my experience, it’s simply not worth it.

Unless you’re willing to pay up, it takes a lot of time to generate genuine followers (it’s easy to get “like-back” followers…which don’t really count) for commercial social media accounts. When you do get those followers, theres still no guarantee that your users will see your posts or click through and buy products you recommend.

The reason? They’re simply not targeted enough. This is because we, as individuals, tend to have clustered social networks, only a small subsection of which will share any single interest.

As an affiliate, I’m really only interested in that small sector that has that interest (aka: whatever product or service you’re promoting), which means that conversion rates are low because you’re reaching people completely irrelevant to your aim.

Paid Search Is Better…If You Have A Targeted Consumer

The alternative, and the better way to profit on Facebook, in my opinion, is to leverage paid advertising.

Facebook allows you to direct link affiliate products within an ad (Google frowns on this with Adwords), which means that you can send users directly to your partner site, without ever having them see your own page.

This can help get you a positive ROI on your campaign, but only if you’re able to run a targeted campaign.

Unlike search ads, Facebook doesn’t let you bid on keywords. Instead, you can select categories of interest, and Facebook will determine which users have those interests. This works great for some products, and horribly for others.

For example, if you’re trying to promote something related to the latest Hunger Games movie, having this interest-filter can work wonders. If you’re trying to do lead-gen for a law firm, then, well…not so much.

All in all, I think that using Facebook can be a good weapon in your arsenal, as part of a broader affiliate marketing strategy, but I wouldn’t put all my resources into running Facebook campaigns, because they require active investment (either time or money) to work.

I’d rather focus on building a passive income portfolio.