The Ultimate Guide to Promote Affiliate Links on Instagram

There are a number of ways to promote affiliate links online but affiliate marketing on Instagram happens to be one of the most effective and straightforward ways to make commissions even if you are a newbie.

If you are promoting affiliate products using other methods like blogging, you will need to churn out lots of long-form SEO-optimized articles consistently which is not always easy. This method is very powerful but it's not for everyone.

Moreso, even if you choose other promotional methods like blogging, Instagram affiliate marketing is equally a great way to send quality traffic to your blog articles.

In this guide, I'll let you in on all you need to know about promoting affiliate links on Instagram.

We'll discuss all the essential details, from how to start affiliate marketing on Instagram to how to earn a sustainable income through utilizing Instagram for affiliate marketing.

Steps to Promote Affiliate Links on Instagram

Step 1: Choose a Niche

The first step you are required to take in order to start affiliate marketing on Instagram is to select a specific niche you will be dealing with. A niche is a particular focus area or market that you'll channel your marketing efforts towards.

It could be fashion, home decor, or perhaps smartphones, amongst numerous other choices.

It's an amateur mistake to promote whatever comes your way regardless of the niche.

This may give you the impression that you are running an Instagram page with diverse options. But the truth of the matter is that it will likely appear messy and untidy to your audience/target market.

Your audience will not know what you and your business stand for. Prospective clients will leave, tired of scrolling through your feed searching for something they saw recently in an ocean of unassociated and completely different items.

As an Instagram user, it's likely you already have a niche. Your niche may not be as profitable as you may think or you may not have a large target audience on Instagram.

Here are 3 helpful ideas to assist you in choosing an awesome niche for affiliate marketing on Instagram;

Select something you're familiar with: You can not go about promoting items you have absolutely no understanding about. Instagram has a varied user base that will notice something is awry, and they'll likely not purchase from you.

Select a specific niche that'll prosper on Instagram: Despite its regular monthly user base of about a billion individuals, some particular markets aren't doing excellent on Instagram. There just aren't enough people to make your affiliate marketing business to thrive on Instagram. A large percentage of Instagram users are less than 35 years old, promoting products targeting an audience of 55 and above is a recipe for failure in Instagram affiliate marketing.

Choose a niche with diverse options: You need to work with a niche that gives you the opportunity to promote multiple offers. Even if you enjoy a specific niche, you must be sure it has lots of products you can promote. That way, you'll constantly have items to promote to your audience, and your income-earning opportunities will be greater.

A few of the very best niches to work with on Instagram include; weight loss, health, and fitness, dating & relationships, earn money online, self-help, e.t.c.

Step 2: Pick Instagram Affiliate Programs to Work with for Your Chosen Niche

After choosing the specific niche you'd like to promote, the next thing to do is to select affiliate programs to promote your chosen affiliate programs will serve as an intermediary between you and the businesses whose services or items you'll be promoting.

If you desire to utilize Instagram for affiliate marketing, there are numerous Instagram affiliate programs you can sign up for.

The 7 best ones are:

Instagram affiliate program #1: Clickbank

Clickbank is an affiliate network that provides affiliates the opportunity to promote digital and information products across numerous affiliate marketing niches.

On this platform, there are more than 4 thousand offers that you can promote to your audience.

All that's required is to signup.

You can begin promoting affiliate offers from Clickbank on Instagram as soon as you've finished filling your profile and account details.

They are one of the highest paying affiliate networks and lots of its digital products provide as much as 75% commission.

Here's a Clickbank affiliate marketing on Instagram guide that reveals to you how to pick successful and reliable affiliate offers from Clickbank to promote on Instagram.

Instagram affiliate program #2: ShareASale

This is another big name amongst affiliate marketing networks. This platform has more than 4 thousand merchants throughout various specific niches. This platform provides you variety of choices to pick from.

Their merchants provide different commission rates. You can choose to work with merchants which products work best for your niche. Among their special qualities is their purpose-built metrics. These assist you to choose the most satisfying deals on their platform.

ShareASale pays its affiliates on the 20th of every month. They have different custom-made affiliate tools that ease your marketing endeavors.

Instagram affiliate program #3: Rakuten

This company's huge collection of social proof speaks volumes and they proudly display it on their homepage.

They have gotten more than forty-three thousand evaluations from real people and It likewise has upwards of 3 million active users.

Its mode of operation is similar to Amazon Associates. After signing up with them, you will have access to thousands of products to promote.

You can market these items to your audience after discovering the ones with the very best handle in your specific niche.

If you have a lot of Instagram followers and engagement is high on your page, then this program is perfect for you.

Rakuten has instinctive insights and analytics tools that assist you to determine and efficiently track your efficiencies.

Instagram affiliate program #4: Shopify affiliate

Shopify is a big business that can pay you approximately $58 for each sale you make for the company.

Shopify particularly enables you to utilize social networks like Instagram to promote your items. They frequently upgrade their links and banners. This guarantees that you continuously have a fresh stream of material/content to offer your audience.

Their data tracking system assists you to determine your efficiency. With this information, you can detect the areas you need to boost your marketing efforts.

Instagram affiliate program #5: CJ Affiliate

This platform tilts substantially in the direction of blog sites but it's still extremely helpful for you if you're using Instagram for affiliate marketing.

CJ Affiliate has actually been in existence for over 20 years. Now, it flawlessly links approximately 4 million affiliates, online marketers and marketers, each year for service functions.

The platform has a number of ingenious and beneficial functions. Among them is cookieless tracking. It is a privacy-friendly function that assists you to track your consumers without always putting cookies on their gadgets.

That is, you can see whether they've purchased your item and expect your commission.

Apart from that, it likewise has extremely helpful analytics and insights. These assist you to take a deep dive into your efficiency and see how well you've been converting your leads into customers.

The platform prepares for you a full-program analysis to assist you to see where you're doing terrific and where you might utilize some work.

Above all this, they have exceptional client assistance whenever you require to get an issue fixed.

Instagram affiliate program #6: Amazon Associates

Amazon is among the most significant e-commerce shops on the planet. Amazon is a conversion monster and this is good news for affiliates because more sales bring more commissions.

Partnering with Amazon as an affiliate needs just 3 easy actions. The very first is that you'll register with them.

This takes no time at all and is enhanced such that you can finish the procedure yourself rather quickly.


The 2nd action involves choosing products to promote and promoting your affiliate links on Instagram.

The last and 3rd action is to begin getting affiliate commissions from Amazon after your audience has actually purchased with your link. Amazon provides a maximum of 10% commission on items offered.

Instagram affiliate program #7: eBay partner network

eBay has several thousands of offers you can promote as an affiliate. eBay is a popular and trusted company, this makes your audience more likely to buy the offers you promote.

This affiliate network gives you a deep insight into your performance. This helps you evaluate the efficiency or otherwise of your strategy.

Here are two ways to execute this plan:

a. Use an Instagram bio link tool

Instagram bio link tools are tools that are designed to create micro landing pages to promote multiple links on Instagram. Shorby is a link in bio tool that gets this job done in a simple and efficient manner.

With this tool, you can arrange your affiliate links along with links to other social network accounts.

As soon as the landing page is produced, you can then link to it in your bio.

Beyond assisting you to produce landing pages, Shorby likewise aids with some other Instagram marketing functions. Among the most beneficial to your marketing is that it links to your messengers.

This consists of Facebook, Telegram, Viber, WhatsApp, and so on. The benefit of this is that your potential clients can easily contact you if they wish to know more about your offerings.

Some affiliate links are quite long & look spammy and Instagram has a severe issue with long and suspicious links.

You might wake up one early morning to discover that your bio link is no longer working if your bio contains such a link.

Shorby can assist you to prevent such an ill fate as it comes with a link shortener that works great on Instagram.

b. Use a landing page builder

This is another tool that supplies a legitimate option to how to post affiliate links on Instagram. Just like a bio link tool, it enables you to produce a landing page that you can link to in your bio.

Affiliate landing page builders like Builderall can help you build a landing page to promote multiple affiliate links but more importantly, they help build an email list in the process.

With this e-mail list, you can promote affiliate links even much better outside of Instagram by means of e-mail marketing. This way you can continuously send your leads emails promoting affiliate links whenever you want.

Constructing an e-mail list for affiliate marketing is very crucial. With this list, you can build a 7 figure automated affiliate marketing business outside Instagram.

Step 4: Grow Your IG Account for Affiliate Marketing

It is really challenging to practice affiliate marketing on Instagram with a bad following. You can either grow with paid advertisements or organically.

If you plan to grow your Instagram organically, here are 4 primary techniques to assist you:

1. Grow your Instagram Audience

The amount of followers you have is important while attempting to make affiliate sales on Instagram using an organic traffic strategy. The higher the number of engaged followers you have, the higher the number of potential consumers.

You can grow your audience organically on your own or utilize the help of an Instagram growth service. There are a lot of these services out there, however, the majority of them simply do not do a good job.

Even worse still, they can get your account suspended.

I've attempted a lot of them and Stellation Media and MrInsta are the only ones I've discovered to do the task well and provide amazing outcomes.

Stellation Media is my number one recommended Instagram growth service but it has no free trial.

Click the button below if you will like to start getting some free targeted Instagram followers right now and have a substantial month-to-month boost in the number of your target audience.

2. Develop Audience Engagement

Growing an audience is insufficient to get you a good number of affiliate sales, you are required to engage with your audience in order to increase your conversions.

When your audience engages your content right after upload, it sends out a message to Instagram's algorithm that your content is of high quality.

This forces the algorithm to show it on other Instagram users' screens.

Stellation Media or MrInsta helps you bring an audience that is engaged to your specific niche. To keep the momentum going, you are required to produce quality content.

To do so, you can utilize tools like Canva. This assists you to produce premium graphics that are Instagram-worthy.

3. Do Hashtag Research

Hashtags are necessary for assisting you to reach an audience that isn't even following you. Fortunately, Instagram provides you a great deal of hashtag allowance per post. You still require to put in the work and do proper research.

One Instagram tool that can help is a totally free tool called All-Hashtag.

It assists you to create hashtags related to your specific niche based upon keywords you put in. You can likewise utilize it to see which hashtag is ranking at the top of your specific niche.

4. Consistency

If you are not able to keep posting consistently, you would lose your audience rapidly.

Make sure that you develop a calendar for yourself and stick to it. This can be a bit frustrating since you're no longer utilizing Instagram for enjoyment alone.

PromoRepublic is a tool that provides you with content ideas in your niche, helps create a content calendar, and schedules your posts to go live at the best time possible.

Step 5: Obey the Four Don'ts of Instagram Affiliate Marketing

1. Make sure you're not spamming your audience. In the best-case scenario, many of them will leave your page and avoid engaging with you. They can report you to Instagram and have your account suspended or blocked in the worst-case scenario.

2. Do not purchase phony likes or followers.

3. Don't bore your audience by just publishing promotions all day, every day.

4. Do not post something that could be used against you in the future.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Do I Become an Instagram Affiliate?

You can become an affiliate marketer on Instagram by choosing an affiliate marketing niche to work with on Instagram, sign up for affiliate programs within your niche and promote your affiliate links on Instagram.

Can I do Amazon Affiliate Marketing on Instagram?

You can promote products on Instagram as an Amazon associate. You need to sign up for the Amazon associate program, create affiliate links for the products you intend to promote and, promote them via your Instagram account bio.

How Many Instagram Followers is Needed for Affiliate Marketing?

There is no minimum or maximum number of followers required for affiliate marketing. With Instagram ads, you can basically promote affiliate products on Instagram with no followers. However, if you opt for organic growth, the general rule is that the more ENGAGED followers you have, the better.

Does Instagram Block Affiliate Links?

Instagram has no issues with affiliate links but they can block your link if it's too long or leads to a prohibited website. To avoid this, you need a link shortener that works on Instagram. Moreso, you can only promote one affiliate link with your bio, to promote multiple offers, you need a bio link service.

How Do Instagram Affiliates Make Money?

Instagram affiliates make money by receiving commissions from sales made through the affiliate links they promote on Instagram. That is, when someone clicks on their link and makes a purchase with it, they get credited with a commission for such a sale.

Final Note on Affiliate Links on Instagram

Affiliate marketing on Instagram needs strategic planning, but this action plan isn't difficult to wrap your head around. In this piece, I've assisted you to break down the whole procedure into bite-sized bits. All that's left now is for you to take massive action in order to see massive results!