Affiliate marketing has been very popular on Amazon for a while now. It is used by Amazon’s wide range of products. For example, you may be a photography enthusiast and have a website where you share your experience and tutorials on photography. If you wish to earn a little extra money, besides offering spaces for Google ads for some revenue, work on including product recommendation links through Amazon affiliate purchases in your posts. As long as a user clicks on these links and makes a purchase, you earn some commission. Many bloggers have benefitted from the income generated through this affiliate marketing scheme in the early days, and it has also attracted some websites that previously had no useful content to place affiliate links to similarly earn a commission. As the number of merchants on Amazon diminishes, many people who previously used Amazon to generate affiliate marketing income for themselves have switched to Drop Shipping on Shopify. It seems, however, that Instagram has, in hindsight, decided to add affiliate marketing functions to its platform.
Discount Codes Are a Commercial Collaboration
When influencers collaborate with brands on Instagram, a lot of the content is supplied by the brands themselves. This includes content relating to cosmetics or apparel from certain brands, for instance. Such collaboration is primarily aimed at brand and product exposure, which may or may not lead to actual sales. As the online retail scene matures, brands may provide discount codes when collaborating with influencers to track the sales brought in by different influencers, which would also involve sharing the benefits of such collaboration.
Instagram: Traditional Mechanism, New Packaging
The method of using promo codes as a form of affiliate marketing is too passive. The feature that Instagram is planning to add is to directly track the number of sales on a brand’s Instagram shop after customers click on the products tagged on Instagram posts. The whole process allows users to remain on Instagram, providing them with a better user experience. The process of tracking is closer to the one-click Amazon affiliate marketing on other websites, which seems to be more popular.
Don’t Hard Sell, Content Is Still Key
The experience overseas is that the adoption of influencer marketing is more mature and transparent. Foreign influencers do not mind letting followers know that their post is a brand-sponsored advertisement, and followers themselves do not seem to mind. The most important thing is to have high-quality content. Therefore, when the affiliate marketing function is enabled, the port will indicate that the person who made the post is “Eligible for a Commission.” This informs users upfront that clicking to purchase will help the influencer earn some commission. When this feature is launched in Hong Kong, the result remains to be seen, whether it will give more influencers the resources and motivation to produce better quality content or whether it will mean more content that focuses on hard selling for the sake of earning a commission. Regardless, brands and influencers will be more conscious of the quality standards of content.
Original Source: https://www.visiongo.hsbc.com.hk/zh-HK/article/instagram-affiliate-marketing-is-nothing-new
