
If you can use your affiliate marketing site to establish yourself as an authority in a niche market, it’s much easier to introduce a new product line. And, as you begin to build a customer base for your products, you can take advantage of more lucrative opportunities to help market complementary brands and products – both off and on Amazon. As long as you focus on customer loyalty, profits will come.

So maybe you're not at the point you can afford to pay Hilary Duff to refer your product, however there are plenty of other influencers out there with small, although still huge audiences you can work with. We touched on influencer marketing in this post and this post, but influencer marketing can be as easy as reaching out to a popular blogger, YouTuber, or Instagramer and asking if they do sponsored postings or if they would like your product for a review. 

Word-of-mouth and Referral Marketing are often confused. Whilst word-of-mouth is the result of customers talking about your brand with their friends and convincing them to try it, this is done without marketing effort and is difficult for marketing teams to influence and measure. Refer-a-friend marketing attempts to harness this customer advocacy and put in place the tools to encourage, reward and track customer recommendations.

1% conversion rate might be the average, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t excel with ingenious strategy and persistence. In less than two years, Jason Stone generated over $7 million in affiliate sales, harnessing the marketing potential of Instagram. Now, Mr. Stone is not the average marketer because he has vast experience in visual media. However, the key the stunning figures @Millionair_Mentor commands lies in his strategic approach. He promotes only to people who are statistically likely to be interested in the product he has to offer. That’s why it is crucial to join affiliate marketing platforms that match the interest of your audience.



In brief, the affiliate marketers promote products or services that don’t belong to them. They do that by endorsement, detailed reviews, or more direct marketing approach. The promotion can happen on the affiliate’s personal website or blog, on a YouTube channel, Twitch stream, over Facebook or Instagram, etc. Anywhere a link can be published or an individual promo code displayed is good.


The use of Viral Marketing is relatively simple. It’s about the fact that people pick up and pass on the marketing message on the internet and social media. That’s why it’s important to first come up with a marketing campaign that’s not just inspirational, but also easy to share via for instance Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn. The marketing message needs to grab people’s attention and generate interest right away. It’s also a good idea to choose a specific target group that is almost certain to pass the message on in their network. That’s why it’s wise to choose a marketing message that’s easy to share with friends, fans or followers. That way, the message can spread across the internet like an oil spill, and even influence other groups via the target group.


In this case, Uber is offering a set monetary reward for every rider or driver referred, as well as the opportunity to earn awards for referring more people. Uber can’t get away with simply thanking its participants. It needs a structured program for tracking when referrals occur, whether or not they’re successful (according to the program’s terms and conditions), and issuing the promised rewards.

Referral Marketing Strategy – It is not easy to convince consumers to buy a product. They are exposed to hundreds of advertisements on a regular basis on newspapers, television, radio, and hoardings. Even as they are partly influenced by the images, sounds, and video they are bombarded with, a lot of people are still skeptical about it. And they tend to seek the help of friends, colleagues, acquaintances or even product reviews before deciding to part with their money.

Images of your product in a supermodel’s hand as she sits looking bored and passive are not going to work in a viral marketing context. To advertise their new LED TVs, Samsung strapped some LED lights onto sheep and ‘created’ works of art. The jump from LED TVs to LED sheep is a big one, you have to make that jump to get to the 19 million views of this video.

On March 6, 2012, Dollar Shave Club launched their online video campaign. In the first 48 hours of their video debuting on YouTube they had over 12,000 people signing up for the service. The video cost just $4500 to make and as of November 2015 has had more than 21 million views. The video was considered as one of the best viral marketing campaigns of 2012 and won "Best Out-of-Nowhere Video Campaign" at the 2012 AdAge Viral Video Awards.






But in a survey (of 1,000 digital consumers) powered by Toluna, a consumer insights company, 53 percent answered "No" to the question, "Have you watched any brand advertising videos via social media networks in the past three months?" But at the same time, nearly 47 percent answered "Yes," and they almost certainly represent the billions of views across multiple video platforms of branded video tracked by Unmetric.
The Environment: Timing is everything in advertising, and this is also true of viral marketing. A company can have the right messenger and the right message, but it may not spread if the social environment is not right. A very basic example of this is that people tend to spend less time online in summer compared to other seasons. This means fewer potential carriers to propagate the viral message. This doesn't necessarily mean the campaign will not be successful, but it can be a factor.

Working with people outside of your usual industry can help you create a buzz for both of your companies. The TV show The Walking Dead teamed up with UC Irvine to create an open online course on what a zombie apocalypse would be like. Zombie lovers ate it up like free brains. Both the show and the university benefitted. HP teamed up with Kiva to allow HP employees an extra $25 to donate to the Kiva project of their choice. Both HP and Kiva gained exposure, while worthy charitable causes received funding.
Make your website and social media suitable for sharing and rewarding just as undergarments company My undies did. They created a special section called invite to boost referral marketing business. They offered $20 for the customer and 20% off for the person who bought on that referral. Or it could be several tiers of rewards based on business volumes and not a single reward. Now for even small businesses, it is easy to implement referral marketing programs on the website with several apps available for customization: some of them are Ambassador,  Friendbuy, Referrify, Extole, Referralcandy.
