Social Networking Sites For Affiliate Marketing

Here’s another great article submited by one of our readers, Keith Lee of The Affiliates Landmine, thanks Keith! keep ‘em coming!

This is just the sort of content we are looking for at Affiliate Marketing for Dummies, so if you have an exclusive article that is related to this site and will help our readers please let me know.

Neil

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Social Networking Sites For Affiliate Marketing 

One great way to drive sales of affiliate products is to set up your own profile at social networking sites so as to cultivate a relationship with a network of people who could be interested in what you’re offering.

This might surprise you, but youngsters and teenagers are not the only ones using social networking sites anymore. In fact, social networking sites have changed drastically from what they once were – groups largely made up of teens – to something different.

Today, social networking sites cover a wide range of people of all ages. Although teenagers are still the best users of these sites, there are now niche social networking sites, which target people with some common interest, such as worm breeding or scramblers.

Furthermore, apart from the usual teenagers, social networks are increasingly being used by another group – businesses. Many mom-and-pop businesses and medium to large enterprises are now using social networks to promote their services and products in a not-so-obtrusive manner – and then cleverly duplicating their messages within the social networks via technolgy and infrastructure that are already present.

The most establised and popular social networking site is MySpace, which has a growing community of one hundred million members.

If the affiliate product you are selling has a broad appeal, you may want to use MySpace to market your product, as you will be able to reach the widest audience quickly.

Now, there are quite a few methods to do that in MySpace. One way is to create a free account, and then use an automated script or software called an “adder robot” to quickly add friends to your list. The robot can add as many as 300 per day without any problems. There are so many good ones these days that finding one is not a problem. Just do a Google search for “adder robot”.

Depending on your goals, you may want to add a personal profile for yourself and then talk about your business/product on your page; or you may want to simply create a profile for your business and use that to market your product.

While you can post promotional bulletins about your product through MySpace, this is generally frowned upon by MySpace and could lead to your getting banned. MySpace is actively clamping down hard on these practices. Thus, it is wise to avoid this; instead, send out messages and comments that don’t directly promote your product, but talk about something similar.

This will drive interested visitors to your page, where they can learn more about the affiliate product you are selling. However, as MySpace bans affiliate links, it is probably a good idea to link to a non-affiliate page, such as a landing page that you host. You could capture email addresses or provide relevant content on these landing pages. Try other social networking sites once you get the hang of MySpace marketing.

One other large site is Friendster. This site is generally very popular in many Asian countries. Another popular site is Hi-5. Facebook is another largely popular social network and it focus more on students from colleges and high schools. In order to market to a more targeted crowd, it will serve you best to also search for niche networking sites.

Whichever sites you decide to use, keep the following in mind: your goal should be to develop a network of people who share a common interest and could potentially be interested in your specific product. For this reason, it is always a good idea to think long term and concentrate on building your network and introducing them to your affiliate products.

Keith Lee maintains a huge database of articles at Article On Demand on wide-ranging topics and niches. You are welcome to signup freely as a member.