You’ve definitely come across advertisements from bloggers before. They can advertise anything: from small goods to cars and residential complexes. The most active affiliate marketers have long adopted this method of getting traffic and successfully promote offers through influencers.

How to choose the right bloggers for cooperation, what important points need to be taken into account and does influencer traffic always equal scam? Let’s talk about all this in a new article. Enjoy!

What is influencer traffic?

Influencer traffic refers to the promotion of an offer through advertising or native promotion from an online influencer. The trick is that an audience with similar interests follows the blogger’s life, gains trust and listens to their advice. They don’t necessarily need to be a superstar or a major blogger – now, good results can be obtained from a microblog with up to 5,000 subscribers. A blog can be on any social network, the most popular ones are Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Telegram, TikTok and Twitch.

 (Influencer marketing market volume according to Influencer Marketing Hub)

Is influencer marketing a scheme?

Influencer traffic in the classical sense refers to white, safe-to-advertise verticals. But even experienced affiliate experts confuse it with schemes, because their marketing funnels are often similar. In fact, the two concepts are very different. Scheme traffic is deception of the user, it is misleading, aggressive and illegal. Therefore, we remind you that we do not accept any types of motivated and scheme traffic from our affiliates.

Influencer traffic can be the same source option as targeting or push notifications. It’s one thing when a blogger shows off their beautiful figure and says that dietary supplements helped them speed up the process of losing weight, and a whole other thing when they guarantee that one pill will cure all diseases. If an affiliate correctly promotes a product through advertising from a blogger, they will not be a scammer.

Legal work with influencer traffic is based on honesty and transparency. Advertising should be interesting, useful and consistent with the topic of the blog. At the same time, you cannot deceive or mislead subscribers.

Work formats

There are several main approaches:

1. Classic influencer marketing

An absolutely ordinary safe scheme, which is actively used in the product niche. The blogger is sent a product, about which they then tell their audience. They can also become a brand ambassador and talk about your product on an ongoing basis.

2. Affiliate marketing blog of the marketer themselves

If an affiliate is willing to reveal their identity, it can attract traffic to their page. But there is a caveat here: users will not buy from a profile filled only with advertising. You will have to work hard, spend time and effort to become a blogger and attract targeted traffic.

3. Creating a fake influencer

This system is more often used in the niches of gambling and sweepstakes. Advertisers create an account, gain subscribers, and involve an actor in creating the content or take someone else’s content. Subscribers are shown success and sold schemes for making money. There is a fine line here between an outright scam and an artificially created blogger who essentially becomes the face of a brand.

4. Stolen content

This is scheme traffic. People simply steal content from a user’s page (usually a major media personality) and start selling whatever they want to inattentive users. The method is profitable, but such an account will quickly get shut down. Fortunately, on most resources, you can send a complaint about the account itself or the content.

How to work influencer marketing

The main task of an affiliate who wants to start working with this source is to choose the right offer, GEO and find suitable blogs. Progressive countries where social networks are popular and opinion leaders have weight, usually Tier-2 countries, do best.

How to choose the right bloggers

You can find a suitable blogger in several ways: by monitoring social networks yourself, by contacting a special agency, or by going to blogger chats, where many advertise their profiles and look for partnerships.

Before you start, make sure that the blogger has an active, solvent target audience and is suitable for the format of whatever it is you’re selling. Do not focus on the number of subscribers; it is better to request statistics and use analytics services.

The larger the blogger, the more expensive advertising will be and the more difficult it will be to interest them with your product. Be prepared for rejection and be patient. Don’t be afraid to work with small blogs with 5-10 or 50 thousand subscribers; they often have a more loyal audience and higher interest in advertising. Micro-influencers are a real trend, and up to 90% of advertisers promote their goods and services via such blogs with up to 100 thousand subscribers.

 (Blog advertising statistics according to Hype Auditor for 2021)

Sites

Study where your target audience tends to hang out online. Analyze gender, age, interests, financial situation. For example, on Facebook, you can find an audience of 45+, but for young people, you are more likely to succeed on TikTok or Instagram. It happens that a particular country has its own popular platform where your target leads live.

Funnels

Now decide how you will handle the lead to purchase. There are a lot of ways to do this, the approach will depend on the mentality, offer and the blogger themselves. The general system for nutra is usually this: a blogger posts information about a product on their profile and provides a link to the brand’s account or directly to a third-party resource where it can be purchased.

Let’s give an example for Instagram advertising. You have agreed with the blogger that they will advertise the product and write down the technical specifications. It is necessary for the blogger to create the right impression about the offer among their followers. It might look like this:

1. They post stories about how the blogger has gained weight and plans to lose weight by the summer.

2. Then they say that they decided to try our product, offer their audience to follow the results together, and show how they take the supplement for several days after.

3. Then they share the results and give subscribers a link to the product and your promotional code.

4. Next, you can warm up users, show reviews and before/after photos from “followers”.

(an example of an Instagram reel advertising dietary supplements)

This is just one of the options; the more creative and interesting you make the funnel, the better the result will be. Users get used to the same type of content quite quickly.

Important caveats

When preparing content for nutra offers, follow the rules of the country in which you plan to advertise. The most common rules are:

— Prove benefits only through studies that are not required for drug registration;

— Remind people to consult a doctor;

— For dietary supplements, indicate that the supplement is not a drug;

— Do not contact minors;

— Inform people about the presence of contraindications, the importance of the dosage regimen/compliance;

— Do not guarantee safety or effectiveness.

To sum it up

There is a very fine line between motivated and influencer traffic. Be careful when building your funnel and make sure your advertiser will accept that kind of traffic.

To make good money, you will need strong content marketing skills, with which you can make users fall in love with your product. Get ready to play the long game and build trusting relationships, and the results will not be long in coming!