The Inside Scoop on Instagram’s New Affiliate Marketing Test

Affiliate marketing has long been a mainstay for influencers. People that just generally try to create multiple streams of income tend to prefer affiliate marketing as well because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up allowing them to earn passive income which can often be a little too difficult to come by. Affiliate marketing has often been facilitated by platforms such as ShopStyle collective and most people that dabble in it agree that these platforms do quite well.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that the world of affiliate marketing might soon have a new player that would have the potential to take it by storm. This player is none other than Instagram, and a select group of influencers were chosen to participate in a beta test of the program. These influencers are now revealing a few secrets about what this program might look like and how much they have earned from it so far.

The average affiliate marketer can manage to earn about $100 every month from your standard affiliate marketing platform. This doesn’t seem like a lot but it’s pretty much just money that comes in regardless of how much work you have done and it can add up if you save it up over time. About a hundred influencers have been added to the beta test so far ranging from small scale influencers all the way up to those that have hundreds of thousands of followers.

The way that this affiliate marketing would work is that whenever an influencer adds something to their Instagram story, they would be able to add product tags to it as well. If a viewer or follower ends up liking something in the story they can potentially tap on it, see the tag that would tell them about the brand and subsequently end up purchasing the product if it’s something that they truly prefer with all things having been considered and taken into account. The influencer would then get a cut of the profits.

Influencers have already been able to tag brands in their Stories but if they wanted to earn through these tags they would have had to contact the brands directly. These tags benefited Instagram and will continue to do so due to the reason that they would help drive consumer engagement in the social media platform’s growing ecommerce department, but is it benefiting creators? The platform is clearly trying to help creators a cut of the earnings that they are sending the company’s way, and for the most part they have been successful.

Brands are offering anywhere from 10-20% in terms of commissions. It depends based on the brand and influencers would be able to look through brands and see what commission rates they are offering and choose what brand to advertise accordingly. If things work out the way they have been, influencers could potentially end up finding themselves with a brand new source of income. This would increase the number of influencers that are active on Instagram as well which is another thing that would benefit the company as well as the industry as a whole.


Photo: NurPhoto via Getty Images
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