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5 Tools to Optimize Your Instagram for Affiliate Marketing
If you’re making money using Instagram as a traffic source to promote MaxBounty offers, (or you want to be) finding new ways to grow your page’s presence needs to be a priority. If they help you become more efficient at creating and publishing content in the process, then you know you’ve truly found something of value.
Instead of having to dig for these ‘new ways’ yourself, we went ahead and compiled some choices for you.
Although posting relevant, quality content will always be necessary to develop any social media page, there are supplementary methods that can accelerate that development.
The following are a combination of apps and online tools that can help grow your page by optimizing necessary actions such as hashtag selection, insight analysis, influencer outreach, and content posting.
We’ve included both free and paid services and a link to where you can download or use each one.
1. Stories-Ads
Free or Paid: Free
Instagram stories allow you to showcase specific content to your followers by posting it in a highly visible space – at the top of your followers’ timeline.
Although this is valuable, their true benefit is unlocked once your account has been verified, or when your page has reached 10,000 followers. This will give you the ability to include links within your stories, which is extremely useful if you’re an affiliate using Instagram as a traffic source.
Your stories essentially become mini landing pages that link out to the offers you’re promoting, and Stories-Ads becomes the landing page builder.
The app simplifies the creation and posting process by providing you with a library of attractive templates and raw photo/video content you can use to create your stories. The intuitive interface then allows you to easily combine media and text to create aesthetically pleasing content for your page without ever having to touch a mouse.
Now that Instagram allows you to pin stories to the top of your page, an app like this has become even more valuable for affiliate marketers.
2. WhenToPost
Free or Paid: Free
Mastering the art of social timing isn’t easy. Even if you think you’re posting content to your Instagram page at the optimal time of day, it’s difficult to know for sure if that’s truly the case.
WhenToPost is an Instagram app that can eliminate that guessing game by telling you when the exact best times are to post your content.
The app tracks your followers and then provides you with heat maps that tell you when you have the most amount of followers browsing their Instagram feeds. The information is broken down into each day of the week, and will provide you with the three best times to post on every day.
This type of data allows you to optimize the posting of your content to ensure the highest percentage of your followers possible are seeing your content, and hopefully finding any offers you’re trying to promote.
3. Later
Free or Paid: Both
Once you’ve discovered what times of day your followers are most likely to engage with your content, you can use a service like Later to schedule content to be posted at those optimal times. By doing this, you’re automating the actions that help grow and sustain followers, giving you more time to think of strategies, communicate with influencers, and create quality content.
This app has a few additional features beyond scheduling tools that are also useful, like a content sync-up media library that allows you to organize videos and photos from your desktop, DropBox, or other locations to use for content, as well as some basic analytics.
Later puts more of a focus on the marketing behind your page, which his why we recommend it over other social scheduling platforms.
4. Iconosquare
Free or Paid: Free Trial/Paid
This app may have the most value out of the 5 as it contains tools for both content creation and some in-depth analytics.
There’s three main features that make this one worth going beyond the free trial.
1. Ample Analytics: Iconosquare has a robust analytics section that will provide you with a wide range of useful data, including:
- Information on the impact your post frequency has on the number of followers you gain or lose
- Follower growth tracking
- A world map that shows geographical locations of your followers
- Individual hashtag performance metrics
2. Media Library: If you need to post content but you’re strapped for time, you can access the app’s expansive media library to quickly find a high-res photo related to your niche.
3. Influencer Search: This is perhaps the best feature of this app, as it allows you to search for influencers on Instagram that can help extend your account to new users. It will also provide you with additional influencer data, for instance, engagement metric rankings. This can help you when you’re deciding who to work with and eventually contact.
The number of affiliates we see using social influencers to grow their Instagram accounts keeps increasing, making this feature a great supplementary tool for simplifying those outreach initiatives.
5. Display Purposes
Free or Paid: Free
Hashtags on Instagram operate as a network of paths between content allowing users to find the photos and videos that THEY want to see.
Display Purpose is a simple online tool that can automatically improve the effectiveness of the hashtags you use in your posts.
Simply input a single hashtag (likely your niche, ie. #travel) in the search bar to receive a list of its most relevant/connective hashtags on Instagram.
Not only does this save you time on each post, but it ensures the tags you are using have a high potential of attracting users to your page. You’re ensuring that each hashtag used directly relates to your content or niche.
In addition to the search feature, there’s a world map that allows you to see what hashtags are popular in any part of the world, and a graph section that groups relevant ones together. This information is presented in a way that can help develop your understanding of hashtag relevancy
Display Purpose also automatically filters out banned or spammy hashtags, meaning you’ll only be using ones that will be effective at directing users to your content.