How To Do Affiliate Marketing On LinkedIn (& Make $$$!)

Affiliate marketing is a great way for people to earn an income online without having to build a whole company from scratch. It gives people a way to explore their own potential without much risk or cost.

I find this to be the most beautiful thing about this industry. Businesses get to outsource their salesmanship, and people get to test themselves of their own free will.

But how do you endorse a product or service without any bias if you are earning commissions on each sale? Why should people trust your recommendations when they don’t even know you?

Most of the time, people don’t think about these issues when doing affiliate marketing, but these are legitimate concerns on a platform like LinkedIn. Let me tell you why.

How To Use LinkedIn

To understand why legitimacy and trust matter so much on LinkedIn, you need to understand the platform first. LinkedIn is a place where dedicated professionals come together to do one of three major things:

• Generate Leads for their businesses.
• Recruit, hire, and manage their own teams.
• And finally, sell their own products and advertise their services.

Those three things are the main goals behind every major activity done on LinkedIn. That’s why most people use this primarily B2B platform. 

Unlike other platforms that are mostly B2C, like Facebook, the people here are a lot more practical, productivity-focused, and solution-oriented.

While platforms like Instagram focus on You (the user that consumes) or I/Me (the one doing the posting), LinkedIn has a communal energy that focuses on We, Us, The Team, and what we can do together. 

Since a lot of regular users are busy, the general consensus is that only about 40% of the total LinkedIn audience uses the platform daily and only for about 8 minutes a day. So, the rate of engagement is lesser ta other platforms.

Let’s take a closer look at the audience to put things in perspective.

Why Choose LinkedIn For Affiliate Marketing?

LinkedIn currently has about 930 million unique users across over 200 different countries. Most of these people are also key decision-makers in various global industries.

That massive and powerful group is growing every day. While the average rate of engagement might be lower than other platforms, LinkedIn has a comparatively mindful and conscious type of engagement.

Here is why LinkedIn might be great for affiliate marketing:

• The audience has a much higher spending power. About 60% of American people with an annual income of $100,000 and more are regular LinkedIn users.
• Professionals are always searching for opportunities to optimize and grow, most often viewing it as an investment that brings them results.
• The platform is severely underutilized, which means less competition for you as a publisher.

The platform’s culture creates a great space for having discussions and starting conversations. Engagement might be harder to generate, but it can be way more rewarding and meaningful.

In terms of promotion, while you can generate a considerable organic reach, running ads can be up to four times as expensive compared to doing it on Facebook. 

How To Do Affiliate Marketing On LinkedIn: Step-by-Step

I’ve done thorough and comprehensive research on LinkedIn for this article. I’ve gathered the most useful guidelines from experts who make their living off this platform. 

By combining the best practices with my experience in the affiliate marketing industry, I’ve come up with an ideal sequential process that will help you cover all your bases and multiply your chances of success.

If you are prospecting the idea of doing affiliate marketing on LinkedIn, don’t skip any of these essential ten parts of the process.

1. Define Your Personal Brand

Before you start doing anything tangible, like signing up for an account, you should consider a few things that will help you develop an effective strategy. If you go without it, you might end up wasting some time and energy.

The audience on LinkedIn is demanding, sophisticated, and intellectual. This comes with a healthy level of skepticism and leads to harder conversions. So this is the first question you need to ask: How do I gain people’s trust on LinkedIn?

Simply put, there are two aspects of your online presence that can give you an edge when it comes to gaining the trust of your audience and establishing your authority:

• What is your personal brand? This includes your values and philosophy but also comes down to how you do what you do. Collectively, your brand is who you claim to be.
• How much integrity do you have? This basically means how much your actions are in line with your words. Do you actually stick to the things you claim to believe in?

How well you can portray both of these aspects to your audience will dictate how trustworthy other people will find you to be. 

In this way, you should develop a personal brand that will attract the right kind of people who you want to do business with and is still something that you can actually stay true to.

Keep the following in mind when doing this:

• It’s all about storytelling and values. You can connect with people using powerful emotions and relatable experiences. Bring your values down to the real world, and it should be easy enough.
• What will you be doing? What are the products or services that you will be providing to your audience? What problems will you solve for them?
• If you are a hardcore affiliate marketer, brand yourself as someone who connects different people to solve problems. If you are a content creator, sell yourself as an entertainer or an educator.
• Bring your face to the spotlight. A picture is worth a thousand words, and nothing is more trustworthy than a real name with a human face.

2. Select The Compatible Niche(s)

You should have a general idea about who you are and what you really want to do before you select a niche because you can’t just run ads and have faceless campaigns on LinkedIn.

The best way to utilize LinkedIn’s potential for affiliate marketing means adapting to the platform’s unique culture and engaging with it to the best of your abilities. You can run ads eventually, but you can’t change the audience.

Now that you’ve done that, here are some of the best niches for affiliate marketing on LinkedIn:

• SaaS (software as a service) solutions for businesspeople. These services allow people to scale their operations and outsource some of the most time-consuming challenges of their businesses.
• Educational & training. People here are always looking to upskill and develop themselves.
• Industry-specific tools for professionals like project management and graphic design software.
• Books, self-help, personal development, and corporate programs. Targeted conventions and events are another way to catch the eyes of this professional audience.

Basically, have a lot of empathy for your business-minded audience and look for the niches where you can actually provide the best value for them. If you don’t, they will know. It’s not easy to fool people here.

3. Choose The Best Affiliate Program

The program you join might be the single biggest determinant of your success or failure. Not only will the program dictate what you offer to your audience, but it is also the sole source of your income.

The bottom line is simple: find a good balance between how much you can earn and what value your audience will get out of it. It is also very important to be creative and think outside the box.

Here are my tips:

• Find programs in the relevant niches on affiliate networks like FlexOffers, ShareASale, and Impact Radius.
• Try to find newer programs by trustworthy companies with a track record of good results. It can be hard to find, but it’s always a goldmine for affiliates. Worth keeping an eye out on affiliate networks.
• Sign up for In Learning’s affiliate program. It is LinedIn’s very own learning and educational program, so there is a lot of legitimacy, and it offers you $10 or up to 35% commissions for each signup.

4. Set Up Your Profile

Until now, I’ve talked about the research that will fortify your strategy. Now, we start to execute the work. Your profile should be the first thing you set up.

• Have a good and presentable image that fits the vibe of the platform and your personal brand. A studio image would do, for the most part, just show the world that you are committed to your LinkedIn.
• Keep things short and sweet. Limitations breed optimization, and less is always more. Don’t be very high-minded, and just try to be authentic.
• Add in all your professional and educational experience with smart titles, descriptions, and skills. Really sell yourself here.

There are two types of profiles you can run: A personal and a business one. The first is called a Member Profile, which is for people, and the latter is called a LinkedIn Page, which is for a company.

You can easily find the differences between the two online, but in a nutshell, you just need to know two points:

• You need a page if you want to run ads at some point.
• Personal profiles have a lot more freedom, flexibility, and functionality in terms of engagement with your audience.

Start off with a member profile, as it is ideal for affiliate marketing as an individual, but have the branding in place to start a company page one day if you want to run ads on this platform eventually.

5. Utilize Creator Mode

There is another really cool feature on LinkedIn that’s helpful for affiliate marketing. That is the Creator Mode. Remember that as a publisher, content really is your best friend.

They say that Content is King for a good reason. It allows you to gain trust with your audience by showing them that you know what you’re talking about. You can provide value, gain trust, and grow your community.

Without all this, you can’t get many results. That’s why you should actually be a content creator when doing affiliate marketing, especially on a professional platform like LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s creator mode offers you the following benefits:

• A Follow button that lets your audience view your content on their feeds. This bypasses the justification that some people have when adding others to their network of connections.
• A more prominent “Featured” section that you can edit, as well as the likes, comments, and reactions of your posts, is displayed in your “Activity” section. This shows how popular you really are.
• Add up to 5 hashtags to your profile that gives your posts a higher priority to rank for those. These featured hashtags can give you an extra edge when chosen properly.
• Finally, you can add a 30-second video to where your profile picture is to engage with the people who visit your profile.

Those are some pretty good features if you ask me.

6. Grow Your Reach

There is a cool saying that fits very well for LinkedIn: “Your network is your Net Worth.” Understand that people here want to do networking in the truest sense of the word.

They are searching for various opportunities and useful information and are otherwise deeply engaged in having conversations and discussions. As such, that is where you will find the best opportunities to grow your reach.

My suggestions:

• Have an opinion on the latest news in your industry and follow all the most popular pages. Join the discussions in the comments.
• Find people who are searching for opportunities and connect with them to recommend various courses through personal messages.
• Try your best to utilize your own real-world connections to the best of your abilities.
• Mention people and actively tag them in your content with questions to give personalized attention and incentive to start and encourage conversations and discussions.

Do all this to establish your authority and grow your number of followers. Since LinkedIn showcases all your activity right on your profile, no matter what you do, it can bring you publicity.

There is a palpable shortage of influencers who do this stuff on LinkedIn because the sense of professionalism and seriousness act as berries to entry. 

This means there is a great need for articulate and dependable people in that space that can represent various user interests. As such, you can gain followers through each of your actions.

7. Create Outstanding Content 

This step goes hand-in-hand with the last one. If you are building a certain type of network, you need to post the appropriate content. Similarly, as you post content, you should grow your reach to promote it.

My suggestions for creating great and effective content:

• Long-Form Videos and Polls are extremely popular on LinkedIn right now in terms of engagement and organic reach. If you can produce original, useful videos, there is nothing else like it.
• The numbers suggest that posting once a day, five times per week for each working day, and doing it in the morning time seem to give you the best results in terms of impressions and engagement.
• You should also plan your content in terms of buckets: Informational, Storytelling (branding), Relatable, and Commercial. 
• The commercial is product and service related; these are your affiliate link-containing posts. You should keep this less than 25% of your content.
• Writing insightful articles on LinkedIn’s blogging platform and covering news and current affairs are good options for informational content.
• Each thing you post should have your audience in mind (relatable) while also being on-brand (storytelling) for you as a person. 

There are tons of things to consider when creating amazing posts on LinkedIn, and they probably deserve their own article. Staying on the topic of affiliate marketing, nobody likes spammy content.

Unlike other platforms, LinkedIn’s algorithm doesn’t really penalize you for sharing links, but you can lose legitimacy with your audience.

8. Measure Your Progress

To normal people, likes, comments, and shares might be vanity metrics, but for marketers, they are crucial pieces of information. Keep an eye on all your numbers and measure your performance.

Keeping in mind that it takes some time to start seeing results, have a system in place where you measure the performance of your content on a bi-weekly or monthly basis.

Keep an eye on the following:

• Impressions and engagement metrics. How many people saw your posts? How many of them engaged with it? Likes, Reactions, Shares, Comments, etc., are in this category.
• Tracking functionalities. How many people are actually clicking on your ads, and how many conversions are you actually making? Affiliate programs and networks have tracking options for this.

9. Optimise Your Process

Now that you have your monthly metrics on the performance of each of your individual pieces of content, you can do a little brainstorming to determine what you want to do less, what to double down on, and what you want to try out.

By implementing your learnings from each month into the next month’s plan, you can expect to grow a lot as time goes on. 

This is the best blueprint I can give you for doing affiliate marketing on LinkedIn successfully.

10. Extra Tips and Tricks

Before you jump in, here are a few unique ideas I came across that should get your creative juices flowing:

• Take ClickFunnels as an example of a SaaS. It is fairly popular in the marketing world, but a little bit expensive. Well, you can do an article on affordable ClickFunnels alternatives!
• By putting affiliate links throughout. You can monetize the new crowd that isn’t familiar with ClickFunnels, and potentially earn 50% from ClickFunnel’s affiliate program.
• For the other marketers that know about it, they can give their opinions, weigh in on the conversation, or even sign up for one of the alternatives.
• Another great idea I loved was signing up for In Learning’s affiliate program, searching for people looking for opportunities, and then messaging them with affiliate links.
• This way, you can grow your network as an affiliate marketer, provide value to people, and potentially earn quite well doing it.

Other than that, there are so many people on LinkedIn doing things in their own way.

Examples Of LinkedIn Affiliate Marketing

A quick search on people who talk about affiliate marketing will show me influencers like Evan Weber, who has his own website with blogs that contain affiliate links and 35k followers on LinkedIn.

Then there are groups dedicated to affiliate marketing communities. You can join one, or start your own, if you have a following on other platforms.

There are tons of people already doing affiliate marketing as influencers and content creators out there.

Some of them earn commissions for simple advertising, while others are full-on affiliates. There is little to no reason why you can’t join their ranks as well.

Should You Do Affiliate Marketing On LinkedIn?

When Gary Vaynerchuk said time and time again that LinkedIn was underutilized and that the platform has massive potential, I didn’t really understand what he meant.

Now that I’ve seen everything for myself, I totally see what he was referring to. I think we can all agree that GaryVee is more often correct than he is wrong.

Just in case you aren’t convinced, let me do some quick pros and cons for you.

Pros

• Massively underutilized platform with less competition.
• No regulations or limits for affiliate links.
• High Earning and decision-making clientele.
• Great organic traffic with a highly engaged audience.
• Solution-oriented culture. If you have value to offer in terms of insights or solutions, people will listen to you.

Cons

• Expensive to run ads.
• The audience is harder to convert.
• Overall usage is less compared to users on other platforms.
• Primarily a B2B audience. Less than ideal for most kinds of products.

Conclusion

All in all, Linkedin is a great place for all kinds of people, and while it is primarily work-oriented, it is becoming more casual.

As more people start to take self-employment more seriously and old careers start becoming archaic, platforms like LinkedIn will be crucial to people’s livelihoods.

In our present-day bickering and cancel culture, it is refreshing to have a space where people just want to have fruitful discussions. If you don’t see the value in that, I’d say forget about LinkedIn and go back to Twitter.

Anirudh Gitai

Writer from the heart – whether it is affiliate marketing or fiction – and a proud member of Shivansh’s team! Big fan of combat sports, reading non-fiction, and watching the best of everything from anime and movies to TV and video games.