The Hitflip UK Blog

In our short series about Affiliate Marketing 2.0 we addressed the subject of the new Work With Content and we will continue now with the subject of Working With Social Networks.

Social Media Optimisation (SMO) is already a subject for many companies. Hitflip has had a Myspace site for a long time (and also for Hitflip Germany) where you can add Hitflip as your friend. That aspect of social networking is of course only one part of SMO. Social Networks (such as Myspace, Bebo, StudiViz etc) are also of interest to affiliates! There you’ll find a vast array of users who spend a lot of time there. Naturally these ads are more or less directly placed by the operator but there is still scope for imagination. On the topic of Working with Social Networks for Affiliate Marketing, we believe there are two steps to understand:

1. Potential to build noticability
2. Potential to monetarise noticability

If an example can be given of Affiliate Marketing in Social Networks, it must be Myspace as it is the largest and most popular.

Affiliate Marketing In Social Networks - an example from Myspace:

In order to make it possible to get attention on Social Networks, you must be connected to friends. That happens only when you communicate nicely and reasonably. Spam is punished with elimination from the site and then your efforts are for nothing. Something which is in the background of Affiliate Marketing but which can make sense is to have multiple profiles that are similar. Take for example that you have a profile for a particular type of beer and one for a particular type of car. Friend links with MySpace are also often explicit ‘fan-professions’. You can see that very clearly with band profiles. Many will connect with you as a friend because of that. It can also work with the above mentioned examples of a brand of beer or a certain car.

Of course you shouldn’t just copy the text of your advertisement onto your profile. It is best when it creates more value for visitors and also facilitates the addition of more friends for you. This increased value can occur through lists from funny videos or through a meaningful tutorial. On the subject of beer, for example, you could have a video showing the different ways of opening a beer bottle without a bottle-opener.

When you have a group of friends on MySpace, you then have many opportunities to communicate with them and with every communication you can place an affiliate link at a reasonable point. With MySpace, for example, you have a Blog and when you add something to your Blog your friends are notified. You can also leave messages in friend’s guestbooks, but: Don’t Spam!!

If, however, a friend of the beer profile gets a funny picture about beer in their guestbook they won’t mind. Then you can attach a link to your picture to beerbooks.affiliatedomain.co.uk. and the link is then an affiliate link to Beer Books at Hitflip. (There is more information on this available from our Affiliate Marketing 2.0 topic “Examples of Affiliate Marketing 2.0 with Photo Content“.) Entries such as this can not only be read by your friend but also by your friend’s friends, showing us again the fascinating range of social networks. In particular because these messages come from ‘a friend’ they are better received than an obvious advertisement. You must strike the right tone with these messages in order to be successful in the long-term.

Affiliate Marketing In Other Social Networks:

The following applies for the above examples: If you annoy or mistreat your friends by sending them too many ads, they will a) go and b) there is a high probability that you will have to leave the network. So that is something to avoid. Aside from that, there are many interesting possibilities.

An example from Twitter:

Andre uses Twitter under the name Hitflip (in German). If he posst a message in the Log Files, he can record every visitor who has read it. More fascinating however is that you can make Multi-Channel Marketing from it, that the friends, if applicable, can receive their Twitter MiniBlog Posts by text, email or RSS feed. And without costs or a technical set-up! And the people who added you as a friend want to receive your messages. What more could you want?!

An example from MyBlogLog:

MyBlogLog (Hitflip’s profile here) is really good for building a connection to your readership. You can see what overlapping of interests people have and then create a targeted profile or project.

An example from specific/targeted Wikis:

To use the first example, you could build a Beer-Wiki with your friends from the beer profile. You can do that for free at pbwiki. Ideally your MySpace friends then help to keep the content updated that they then use themselves. Then you can of course include an affiliate link to books about beer or something like that in your wiki.

An example of Social Bookmarking:

We will stick with the beer example, because it’s easier to communicate the ideas using a concrete object. You put together a collection of links on the topic of beer on Delicious or Mr. Wong and mix in a few affiliate links. You’ll find out quite fast, how well it works with your MySpace beer profile or Beer-Wiki.

An example of Social News:

At Digg, Reddit, Yigg, Webnews, Seoigg and co. you can include an affiliate link into some really fascinating stories.

An example of building your own social network:

Instead of ‘poaching’ in other social networks, you can build your own piece by piece (for free at Ning.com) then you can combine and integrate the above ideas to devise your own concepts. There perhaps it is worth ending our study of SEM .

Example from Second Life:

In Second Life you can also see examples of affiliate marketing. One of them is reproduced in the Amazon Affiliate Blog (currently only available in German)

Affiliate Marketing in Social Networks…

…is as versatile as the social networks themselves. With a little bit of imagination - we believe - you can create many new opportunities for Affiliate Marketing 2.0.

Tags:affiliate marketing 2.0, CJU

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Online, Affiliate, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.