Using Facebook for affiliate marketing is one of the more popular marketing methods out there but not the easiest one though. Affiliates, and online gambling affiliates especially, have to face various restrictions and difficulties in reaching the best target audiences.
Having your site syndicated to Facebook is one of the possible solutions. Even though it won’t give you any magic-bullet-type results on its own, it can very well be one of your Facebook promotion elements.
The Procedure
As it turns out, you can get your site syndicated (hosted through an external solution) on Facebook in just minutes and completely free of charge.
But first, you have to start by creating a Facebook page for your brand. This can be done at: https://www.facebook.com/pages/create/. If you want to have a look at a handy how-to guide, you can go to: https://www.facebook.com/business/build. This part is very simple and you can end up with a shiny page in minutes.
Next, go to https://apps.facebook.com/iframehost/ to get started with the main thing we’re talking about here – site syndication:
Clicking the big green button will redirect you to the following screen. Here, you have to use the dropdown menu to select the Facebook page you want to work with:
On the next screen, you have to authorize the tab application, and after doing so, you’ll be redirected to the main setup page:
We advise you to follow the exact settings displayed in the screenshot above. They are:
- Select URL under Page Source (highlighted in the screenshot).
- Input your homepage’s main address (URL), or any other subpage’s address (highlighted in the screenshot). You can also provide a direct RSS feed here.
- Set the Tab Name to whatever makes sense to you (highlighted in the screenshot).
- Leave the other fields to their defaults. More specifically: Fan-Gate – Off, Friend-Gate – Off, Form-Gate – Off.
When you’re done, click Save Settings. Before your new settings will go live, you’ll have to grant some extra permissions to the application. Do it by clicking yet another big green button:
At this stage, your custom syndication is set up and working. When you navigate to your page’s main address, you’ll see something like this (example page for a guitar blog):
The arrow points to the new syndication page. Here’s what it looks like:
As you can see, it looks exactly the same as the original site at http://learnguitar2.com/ (check it out).
This syndication feature presents a direct real-time feed. This means that the minute something gets published on the connected site, it will also be published on Facebook. The best thing about it is that your audience doesn’t have to leave Facebook to consume your content. This is a very desirable situation in today’s web.
Basically, that’s the end of the setup process. All you have to do now is promote your site and get some new fans as usual.
Integrating The Other Way Around
You shouldn’t forget about integrating your affiliate website with Facebook the other way around. What this means is enabling some Facebook functionality directly on your WordPress site.
You can get this done with the official Facebook plugin, for example. It’s easy to install and equally easy to use. Or you can go the alternative path and use a plugin like Jetpack, for slightly softer integration with Facebook itself. But what you get in return is a great social media module capable of connecting with a number of networks at the same time.
So, what’s your current level of Facebook integration? Is Facebook an important part of your marketing efforts?