Whether you are an entrepreneur launching the next great news content site or a blogger with a huge social following, making recommendations for things on your social platforms encourages your audience to click and buy. We covered the basics of affiliate marketing in an older post, but for a short refresher, affiliate marketing means you can earn revenue by placing trackable links to get paid when your users shop. But once you’ve got the basics down, what’s next?

Know Your Platform!

Social media is arguably the most challenging way to convert users to make a purchase. Why? While perusing Instagram and Snapchat, users want to be inspired and see their friends and family alongside inspiring images. When users are in the mindset to consume content on these platforms, they don’t always want to be immediately directed to a new page to make a purchase. With that in mind, using social media to direct people back to your site is a great way to drive traffic and allow the user to know where to shop a little later.

Instagram Posts: Include “Shop link in bio” in your caption and direct your followers back to a page featuring Instagram posts tagged with the products you are featuring. ShopStyle Collective has a tool called Looks & Collections which makes it simple! The best part? You can link to multiple items, making it even easier for fans to shop your entire look.

Instagram Stories: Swipe up to Shop! For those that have the ability to link in stories, it’s simple to create a shortlink via ShopStyle Collective and direct users to swipe to shop. ShopStyle’s tools auto detect that the user is coming from Stories and offers them the option to enter an email to get a link to shop, or to shop immediately. We’ve seen a huge increase in conversion on “Swipe up” by giving users the option to enter their email and stay within Instagram, or to shop immediately.

Facebook: Yes, that’s right: Facebook. It’s may not be as cool as Instagram, but Facebook is the silver bullet of driving shopping through social. It’s easy to link out and engage with your community — and it’s easy to do targeted advertising to get links in front of the right people. Focus on building your Facebook community by engaging users and seeing what works organically in order to diversify ways to monetize through social.

Hilary Sloan is a director of business development at ShopStyle, the leading fashion search destination, in charge of ShopStyle Collective, the fastest growing network of top fashion and lifestyle influencers worldwide, currently 14,000 strong. Sloan’s team works closely with influencers to successfully monetize their digital shopping content. In addition, Sloan works closely with ShopStyle’s product team, identifying and innovating against future trends and new platforms to create proprietary tools that influencers can use for revenue generation and brand building. When not at ShopStyle, Hilary can be found applying all her skills to her own mini influencer, her dog, Ella Bean.

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