In this most detailed Instagram affiliate marketing guide on the internet, I’m going to show you how to start an affiliate marketing business on this powerful social media platform.
Today, you’ll learn all about how to get the most out of one of the best free traffic sources for affiliate marketing which is Instagram.
Here is what we’re going to cover:
Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
1. Select a Niche
The first thing before going to Instagram is to select your niche because this is going to determine how you are going to create your Instagram page, what kind of content you are going to post, and the type of audience that you’re going to target.
In fact, you have a lot of options when it comes to niches that work well on Instagram:
You got it.
We are talking about the niche of your products that you want to promote as an affiliate.
And choosing the right niche is crucial.
At the end of your journey, this is going to be the difference between saying “affiliate marketing doesn’t work” and say, “affiliate marketing is my current 9-5 job”
I know you want to make money in the first-class niches which are to make game-changer sales?
I get it, and it’s fine.
My only 2 recommendations are this:
You need to like to talk about these things. You should easily talk about topics related to this niche and don’t feel worried.
You need to have at least a little bit of knowledge that you can use to teach to people who are less knowledgeable in that particular niche.
You don’t need to be a guru to try to make money in a certain niche.
Niche Down to Find the Perfect Niche
Knowing this, the next thing that you must do is niche down in some specific area of your niche for these two reasons. First, you are going to grow your Instagram page more easily.
And the second reason is making sales will be easy as well.
For example, if you like fitness, examples of sub-niches are:
If your target niche is the wealth niche the sub-niches are:
You should dive in even further to find a perfect niche.
Once you select your sub-niche, now you need to go to Google Trends and follow this advice.
Type a basic keyboard of your sub-niche. For example, “how to lose weight”.
And as you can see, there is a worldwide interest in this topic.
But what you should do is focusing on the map and you will figure out if our ideal customer is searching a lot about this.
Who is our ideal customer?
Look for people interested in your affiliate products in countries like United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, for the most part.
If there is a high interest in your topic in these countries, you are ready to go.
Looking for other samples, you can see which niches have more interesting than others.
Now, let’s take a look at how to choose an affiliate product to promote on Instagram.
💡 Pro Tip
If you’re struggling at this point, make sure to check out this tutorial on how to find a niche for your online business.
2. Choose a Product to Promote
To get some conclusions about your strategy and the affiliate product that you’re going to promote, there are hundreds and hundreds of affiliate products that you can choose. But my top recommendation about this is Focus.
Please focus on one single product.
Concentrate on one product and you will have all the money that you want.
Searching online, you will find products on ClickBank, Jvzoo, ShareASale, Digitstore24, or other affiliate marketing networks to choose products to promote.
These networks have products in every niche that can make you potentially a lot of cash.
That’s the way we like it, isn’t it?
But obviously, you can search for products outside these marketplaces and become a Builderall affiliate, so you make monthly recurring commissions.
You can also check out other powerful affiliate programs:
3. Create Instagram Affiliate Page
This is something very straightforward but I will give you some tips here.
Step 1. Find The Right Username
Your username is that which recognizes you on Instagram and the full name will be the name of your page or you can use it to describe in 2-3 words your page.
For these things use words that are searchable and SEO-friendly.
Come up with the name and the user name using a combination of words related to your niche.
Step 2. Optimize Your Bio
Once you do that you need to create your bio and paste here your affiliate link.
Your bio is the only place where you can do it for now.
And on the page, the affiliate link will be below this message.
Step 3. Design Your Logo
Your logo is how you are going to make breathe and living to your page. Without this, you don’t have a page but you have a ghost on Instagram. Your logo should obviously relate to your page.
To create your logo, you can use Canva.com or other free affiliate marketing tools.
You can also outsource this work on any freelance website and we’ll talk more about outsourcing later.
Step 4. Switch to Instagram Business Account
In order to do what I will show you in the next steps, you need to change your Instagram page from personal to business.
It’s something really simple. The only thing you need to do is create a Facebook page and connect with your Instagram page.
You will have available some advanced metrics and analytics to analyze your performance.
4. Create Killer Content
Step number 3 is to get free traffic for your affiliate product here on Instagram.
And there is one simple but very effective strategy to do that, content marketing, part of something bigger, attraction marketing.
Instead of chasing people all day long on Instagram to convince them to buy your product, with this strategy, the only thing that you need to do is to put some cheese out there and naturally people come to see what you have to offer to them.
You are going to create content for a brand-new Instagram page and start building that fierce source of potential buyers.
In this case, if you think you don’t have the creativity to do something like this, listen carefully to this now.
You only need to focus on at least three types of content on Instagram, which works in almost every niche.
If you don’t have any idea of what posts to create, don’t worry, you can start anyway.
Go to the hashtag and the explore page and you can start to find interesting content which Instagram is promoting outside.
And you can get inspiration with these images to create your own posts, or simply you can repost these images straight away (always giving credit to the author) and provide content for your page fast.
But if your idea is super and something unique and powerful, a solid Instagram affiliate business, the best approach that you can take and create your own posts with your own logo and branded colors.
There are more profits waiting for you in the long term if you take this approach.
To create this content, you have 3 options.
1. Canva
Number one, for free, you can go to Canva.com and start creating your posts or recreating someone’s posts which already exist.
Go to the Canva, select create a design and choose Instagram posts.
Naturally on Canva, you can design with the style that you like the most, especially if this is any for graphic style, add cartoons, letters, and more cool stuff.
2. Photoshop
Number two is using some kind of a professional photo editor like Adobe Photoshop. Here, you can have more of the signing freedom to make the posts, whatever the styles you want.
Also, it’s true that this is the most expensive option. Personally, I use a very old Photoshop version, a portable version from 2007. And by this way, I am able to create my own posts and the thumbnail for paid ads.
I only recommend it if you already have Photoshop and you want to take care of the content creation for yourself but of course, this is going to be time-consuming.
3. Outsource Content Creation
You can also outsource completely to content creation on platforms like Fiverr and buy and get ready, your content for very cheap prices, even in the business and the fitness niche.
Or go to upwork.com and hire a professional designer to make all your quotes with very high quality.
Now you’re hiring people for your business, not being hired by someone else.
And I want you to do something before I show you the next step.
Please, with the shortcut mindset at the time to make money online, it just can’t happen.
Every people promise you to make $10,000 per month in 22 days.
It’s just lying, that is impossible.
Even more, if you have little or no money to start something that you can build in one day will be destroyed in one day too.
It takes a long time to grow an Instagram page organically.
And with that being said, check out this now.
5. Grow Your Instagram Page
Now is the time to attract people and potential customers to your Instagram affiliate page and eventually to your affiliate offer to make money online.
Let’s divide this step into three stages.
The first one would be going from zero to 1000 followers. And I just want you to do 4 basic things with consistency to achieve this goal as fast as possible.
Step 1. Hashtag Research
Hashtags are one of the best ways for new pages to start getting the first amount of followers. And you can do this research for free using 2 methods.
Go to the top hashtags related to your niche and start diving and collecting these hashtags that you see right here.
The more targeted and related is this hashtag to your sub-niche, the better.
And preferably, choose it below 100k posts to see the best results.
And the other method is going to some free hashtags generator.
In this case, I’m using the Kicksta hashtag generator.
Select the best match, the choice, and type the keyword that you want to dive in and you will find other combinations of hashtags.
Kind of similar to the first one.
And use this in combination with the first method.
This pool will give you some ideas of hashtags.
Your work is to collect and save at least 250 hashtags and create 28 lists of 9 different hashtags each.
Because if you will post 4 times per day for maximum growth for the 7 days of the week you have 28 posts and you use 9 hashtags for every post.
You will need 252 hashtags to avoid repeat hashtags often with this method your repeat your hashtags just 1 time per week to avoid the shadow back.
From 9 – 15 hashtags per post will be enough for our purpose of growth.
Step 2. Interact with Similar Pages in Your Niche
This is going to be crucial in the beginning if you want to be noticed on the battlefield.
You need to go to those pages which have similar content and are in the same niche with content that spread a message or is a bit similar to yours.
You need to follow them and activate their notifications because every time they post something new in their feed.
You need to be fast and type an insightful and meaningful comment related to the post so you’ll stand out from the first minute, and you will have a ton of eyes focusing on you.
Repeat this process 10 – 15 times per day consistently and you will see how you can build a strong number of fierce followers just using this tactic.
Another tip about this is that in these popular pages by clicking “following” you can check the pages that these big boys are following.
Most of the time, these are pages that will be interesting for you to keep applying this simple, short and fast, but effective trick.
Step 3. Interact with Your Audience
This is the part in this stage where you just start transforming these random people into real followers, and eventually, some of them will become buyers, ready to give you their money for the value of your affiliate product.
Creating as much engagement as you possibly can to make to the Instagram algorithm to show your content to people who don’t know you and increase the reach to your actual followers. Everything organically.
Here are few things that you can do.
Reply to their comments
Go to their pages
Like their posts
Comment something insightful
Start a conversation with them through DMs
Ask them what problems they have and start providing some tips for free to help them.
But the key is this, they are telling you for free what their problems are.
Now you have the right information that you need to know how you should communicate your offer in a way where they can see a potential solution for their struggles.
Interact with them also through:
All these things are going to build the most important assets in your affiliate business.
A larger community with an emotional connection with you.
At least once per day, you need to create some kind of poll or something that call to participate and give opinions like:
- What do you think about this quote of Steve Jobs? Do you agree?
- What is your favorite entrepreneur?
- What do you think is the best online business model to start?
You need to make people interact with your page and your brand as much as you possibly can.
You can also use the aims to interact with your followers but not to sell them.
And a bonus tip here in this stage, don’t promote yet, your affiliate offer.
Yes, I know this sounds confusing, but here’s why.
Anyway, you are not going to make any sales with the amount of traffic this first time.
Go and focus on this time to build your following and create connections on this social platform because if you do this right without BS, like follow/unfollow, you will see how every single sale will be effortlessly applying the ultimate strategy for every single affiliate marketer.
Once you have established your traffic on Instagram and you have your first funnel ready to make commissions, we enter the third stage of growth from 1000 to 10,000 followers.
Keep doing it like in the first stage.
But now add these two things…
Step 4. Collaborations
You can also make friends with accounts similar to you and mention it one each other in their stories are reposting their content.
The first step to create a network of small influencers to gain even more exposure with their audiences.
It’s all about setting strategic relationships with other related Instagram pages to increase, reach mutually, always in the same niche and with a kind of similar size, doing free channels on stories to meet multiple new audiences and repost some mutual content.
Step 5. Find the Best Time To Post
Discover the best time to post to maximize organic reach with your followers.
You can analyze that in the Instagram creator studio, or you can go to a place like Inflact.com and use the profile analyzer.
And in this section, you will find quickly the best time to post for you based on your story profile.
And the other thing that you should do is ask your followers, what is type of content that they like the most so you will have a better idea of the future and the right content that you should post out there.
Step 6. Watch Your Analytics
The next step is to start watching your analytics. Once you reach 100 followers to understand and analyze where is your audience, cities and countries, the most common gender, and what time they are more active so you can post at those moments to reach them more easily.
Analyzing these metrics will be key to your success.
Data is everything in the affiliate marketing game.
Step 7. Get Instagram Influencers to Promote Your Affiliate Products
The method is to approach micro and macro-influencers and pitch them to promote your product to their audience.
Start following the accounts that cover your audience. You can contact them in two ways: either by email or through Direct Message.
Here is how to do that.
Don’t try to approach accounts’ with 100k+ followers in the beginning (You can do this if you have something great to offer)
Try focusing on accounts with 2000 to 20,000 followers. They are called micro-influencers.
They wouldn’t have got many offers to make money and with a good offer, we can make them promote your product.
Also, you will receive a good response from micro-influencers when compared to macro-influencers (since they are already flooded with offers)
Don’t try to send more than 50 messages a day and 200 messages a week.
Instagram has some strict policies and your accounts may be shadowbanned.
When you send 50 messages you would get responses from a few people.
Don’t be discouraged, you won’t get a reply from everyone.
When you get responses from 8 to 10, you can convince 3 to 5 people to promote your product.
So in a week, you could get 12 to 20 people to promote your affiliate links.
Repeat the process and with few accounts, you will receive a good response on comments and sales page traffic, but may not get sales, sometimes you may get less traffic but a good conversation rate.
You need to try different things to get to know what works out.
💡 Pro Tip: How to ask an influencer to promote your product for free
The problem here is you need to pay those influencers to place your affiliate links. There is a way where you can get it for free. Offer something for free and ask them to make a post in exchange.
Here is how it goes: There may be 100s of free ebooks, Slide Share documents, and articles. Get those free stuff and add little value, convert it into an eBook.
Text them that you would like to offer your eBook free in exchange for a post.
Create ebooks on the niche or something like how to earn from Instagram, how to get more followers in
Instagram. This would interest them and you could get a good response.
With big influencers, your post may stay for a maximum of 24 hours with the link in the bio, have some good
conversation with micro-influencer and ask them to have it for few days.
Sponsorship and influencer marketing is a great way to grow your Instagram affiliate page but the real deal is in building an email list and creating a sales funnel.
By owning the content of your followers with their email you can contact them whenever you want and increase your revenue.
So, now I want to show how to create an Instagram sales funnel.
6. Build a Sales Funnel
In this step, you want to learn and start building your first sales funnel.
Every professional affiliate marketer uses a sales funnel process.
If you’re not using a sales funnel, chances are, you are losing 90% of your potential sales.
We don’t want that.
Now let me show you 5 things you will need in your sales funnel in order to make all the sales that you want.
💡 Pro Tip
See how to create a sales funnel for free in this step-by-step tutorial.
Step 1. Lead Magnet
This is some kind of freebie, a piece of content that you’re going to give for free, which appeals to most of your audience and matches the same idea of your affiliate product.
Some affiliate products provide you with lead magnets to attract customers.
For example, “Custom Keto Diet”, a digital product from Clickbank that teaches you how to lose weight using this specific diet.
In their affiliate resources, you will find a lead magnet to use in your campaign.
There are more ways to find lead magnets.
You can use Canva to create your lead magnets, ebooks, checklists, and little things like that.
💡 Pro Tip
See how to create a lead magnet for affiliate marketing here.
And why do you need a lead magnet?
Because you offer this thing for free in exchange for the email address of your potential customer.
Where are you going to do that transaction?
In something called an opt-in page.
Step 2. Opt-in Page
Here’s where you announced the freebie and where you are going to ask for the contact information of your potential customer.
This thing is what you need to promote in the link of your bio.
It’s the only way for now where you can put a link on Instagram.
By owning the contact information you’ll not only have the chance to promote this affiliate offer more effectively but on top of that, you would have the chance to promote all the related products to make even more money.
Step 3. Thank You Page
And later, your customer will see a thank you page where you can show them a video talking about the products and their benefits.
Or you can show right away the sells page to expect a few sales, just a little bit, because almost all the sales, of course, in the backend, in your first email follow-up.
Step 4. Email Follow Up
In your email follow up your work is to start building a stronger relationship with the prospect plus start showing and talking about the product.
People need to watch at least 7 times a product to make a purchase decision.
This is why email affiliate marketing is very important.
In the end, there will be a final email with the last chance to sell.
Step 5. Affiliate Sale
And now, finally, your affiliate sale is made.
Remember one thing, this is why affiliate marketing is the easiest business model to create a passive income because all this process, the sales funnel and the follow-up emails will be built at once.
Later on, it’s just about tweaking it and optimize it to get better results.
💡 Pro Tip: Best Way to Create a Sales Funnel
You can do everything, every single process with Builderall, the best sales funnel builder for affiliate marketing.
This software can help you to achieve your business goal at the cheapest price in the market.
There is no competitor offering so many features and with such a low price.
Start your Builderall 14-day free trial and build your sales funnel and email marketing campaign in minutes.
7. Scale Your Instagram Affiliate Business with Instagram Ads
Instagram ads are a great paid traffic source for affiliates.
Paid advertising is the difference between a page that makes $1,000 per month and another which makes $10,000 per month.
Re-investing your profits.
This is your business.
And if you want to make more cash, you need to put some cash too.
And don’t worry, it doesn’t cost too much to make a really good extra income.
The first thing is to start running Instagram ads, but only this is key.
Only to people which have been watching and interacting with your content.
The well-known retargeting ads.
In this way, you are reaching faster, even more, potential customers that already know you to show them your opt-in page so your ad cost will be way lower than the average ad spend.
It’s like running any other ad.
The only difference is that you’re going to only target people which have interactions with your page, that’s all the difference.
8. Automate Your Instagram Page
This step is huge in order to save a lot of time while you focus on other things which are more important for your success.
Here you’ll schedule your content for free with Instagram Creator Studio.
Step 1. Use Instagram Creator Studio
Using the Instagram Creator Studio which Facebook gives you for free you don’t need any expensive social media tool to schedule your posts not anymore.
You can do it completely for free.
Go to Instagram Creator Studio.
Click on “Create Post” and you decide if you will publish in your feet or some video in IGTV.
And here you start to upload the image and select places if you want to target some specific country or city.
You also write your description which I recommend to you, this needs to have some type of call to action to visit your page to gain followers.
And below let the people know about the offer that you promote.
Of course, don’t do this with any spam message
write something that can trigger the curiosity of your potential customers to make them click once they go to your page.
And below you paste 1 of the 28 different lists of your hashtags that you should have ready to use.
And finally, select the moment when you want to publish your posts or video as simple as that.
Step 2. Use Instagram Automation Tools
Instagram growth tools are not about bots and fake followers.
Those days are gone and I don’t recommend you expensive garbage like that.
I’m talking about something like Kicksta, a service cool that helps you to grow your Instagram account.
You sign up and try the tool for free and they will give you a personal account manager dedicated to growing your Instagram account.
It’s a great way to outsource your work to create an areal audience and boost your engagement so you can dedicate more time to the most important thing, your Instagram affiliate marketing business itself.
it’s important to know that they don’t and they can’t promise a super-specific amount of growth.
This is something unpredictable.
We’re looking for real people to follow you but if you post with consistency something that you already do your chances of growth can skyrocket.
You can use some tools like Kicksta to automatically interact with new people and increase your followers organically.
Nothing related to spam or bugs.
You need to look and be clean if you want to crush it on Instagram.
Step 3. Outsource Instagram Marketing
And the other way to automate your Instagram affiliate page is outsourcing. Now you’ll have everything scheduled and ready to go with the Instagram Creator Studio.
But this can become a fully passive income business if you now can hire a professional designer to get your posts ready with any work coming from you.
💡 Pro Tip
See this guide on how to outsource Fiverr work and find the best gigs and freelancers to work with.
Instagram Affiliate Marketing: Wrapping Up
Are you ready to start Instagram affiliate marketing?
Remember always that the first step is always the hardest. What separates you from being an employee to be a boss.
If you find this guide helpful, please share this with other Instagram entrepreneurs.
Another great way to start scaling your affiliate business is to post the same content on TikTok that you post on Instagram.
If you would be interested in doing affiliate marketing on one of the fastest growing social media platforms, make sure to check this thorough guide on how to do affiliate marketing on TikTok.
