Hey friends! I want to make a quick post about guerrilla social media marketing using targeted communities, which is another traffic tactic I like to use for affiliate websites.
If I haven’t already covered it, the entire 3 step process in a very broad sense for making money online via an affiliate website is traffic > website > affiliate sales. So you get targeted traffic to your affiliate website, then they click on your affiliate links, buy the products, and you get commissions.
There are a lot of ways you can get traffic to your website. My favorites are SEO and Pinterest. SEO because people are actively looking for the information you’ve put together, and Pinterest because it’s a highly visually-focused, buyer-centric platform that results in easy affiliate income when a pin goes viral.
Today we’re not talking about either of those. I want to talk about a process for guerrilla social media marketing, in which you leverage targeted communities to get traffic to your sites. This can do 2 things –
- Directly get you affiliate sales, if the post you’re marketing is product-related
- Fill your retargeting audience buckets with targeted traffic, if the post you’re marketing is simply engagement-focused and you plan to retarget to the audience later.
- Fill your overall audience with followers, email subscribers, etc if your website is conversion optimized for those goals.
NOTE: This will actually take effort. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme, and despite the name of “Passive Monies,” making money online actually does take work. So don’t be offended that the process you’ll read below will take some work on your part. 😉
THE PROCESS
- Identify communities that are targeted for your websites.If your affiliate website is well-planned, in an established money-spending niche that people are not embarassed about, there should be communities for it online. These can be Facebook groups, forums, subreddits on reddit, etc. This is where your target audience is hanging out online! (Protip: this type of research also directly applies to client marketing if it’s something you get into.)These communities should be easy to identify, because for any sort of significant niche site beyond a 3-pager, this should be a fundamental part of your initial research before you even build the site.
- Join the communities and become active in them.If this is a personal interest you have, you can join it as yourself. Begin commenting in the space and providing value un-related to your website so you don’t seem like a spammer.If this isn’t a personal interest you have, you can create a separate or anonymous profile or persona to engage with. On Facebook this is a little harder as you might have to make up a fake person, and this can be morally uncomfortable – so if that makes you feel iffy, then just stick with your personal profile. It’s my take that karma comes around to everyone so never do anything morally questionable either under your own name or a pseudonym – you don’t have to be a jerk to make money. The goal here is to help people and genuinely engage.
- Learn what the community likes, and create content that emulates it.Once you’re in the community for a bit, you’ll be able to see exactly what type of content they like. Once your website is set up, you can create content that is tailored exactly to their preferences! This isn’t even something you have to tell them. You can just create posts with them in mind. Whether it’s a product post (ie best boots for hiking!, best wallets for trading cryptocurrency!, etc) or engagement post (how to find the best hiking spots near you, how to pick the best cryptocurrency coins to invest in!), just keep them in mind while creating it and make sure the headline is something they would normally respond to.
- Pixel your content, and share it.Now that your community focused content is created, share it in the groups! If you don’t already have a FB pixel on your website, make sure you add it before you share the post. Whether it’s a product or engagement post, this will help you retarget your future content to the people who clicked on it and visited your site.Always make sure you’re following the group rules, or you’ll get kicked out. A lot of group admins do not like self promotion and strictly do not allow posts that don’t fit right within their topics, so make sure you keep that in mind when creating content.
BONUS:
- This is a great strategy to kick off any new posts on your website, but it’s especially great if it’s aligned with an SEO strategy where you’re also trying to rank for a keyword with the post. Ideally, each post you make will have multiple potential avenues of income in terms of targeted traffic they can receive.
- You can also create your own communities to share this type of content in. If your website is a long term website on a topic you’re passionate about, I recommend doing this. (Like this website and this post.. which I’ll share in our group 🙂 )
PROOF IT WORKS
Here is direct proof that this works with an example from one of my websites.
This is a website that I’ve started only in the sense that the domain is registered, the website is live on WordPress, and it has like 2 affiliate posts on it (one being a post that followed the strategy above.) I’m letting this website age before putting a lot of focus on it, so it makes essentially no money, but decided to make a post following the process above.
It made $76 almost all in one shot from one post, and I expect this single post to bring in hundreds of dollars during 2018 when it begins to pick up SEO steam. Not bad for a couple of hours of work, which will continue to bring in money without me even looking at it.
Questions? Concerns? Need more info? Comment below and I’ll try to help!
