Affiliate Marketing and Tribes

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Affiliate marketing can be lonely when you are a solo business owner spending most of your days on the computer. Social media can complicate matters when it feels like a “chicken/egg” scenario of trying to get followers by showing that you already have followers. The one thing that can help solve both of these problems is building up a “tribe” around yourself.

What is a tribe? Most people would agree that at its core a tribe is a social group that exists on the basis of shared interests to help support each other. Since Seth Godin wrote about tribes in business, the terminology has evolved from primarily anthropological terms to more colloquial.  I was reading an article today entitled “How to Build Your Tribe – Finding ‘Your People'” and it really struck me how much we use tribes as affiliate marketers and how we should use them even more.

Building tribes in affiliate marketing can happen both informally or formally. You may start to notice a core group of people who retweet your posts and +1 your sites for you without you even asking. In return, you are naturally doing the same for them without even thinking about it. Conversely, you may set out intentionally to create a group of people who chat via private forum or secret Facebook group about a specific issue such as SEO or blogging best practices.

What sets a tribe apart from a plain old group of people is that they support each other based on common interests and help propel each other forward. There aren’t any rules about how to create your tribe or how many people should be in it. You don’t have to set up meeting times or regular accountability check-ins. Instead, the tribe members are passionate enough about what they are doing to participate to their own ability levels or eventually be ignored out of the tribe. People who don’t participate as fully won’t be given as much exposure or information by the other tribe members. People who give a lot to the tribe will likely get more back out of it.

How can you use the tribe mentality in your affiliate marketing business? Do you need a group of people to help you in your social media efforts? To help you test software or plugins in return for you testing theirs? Can you build a group of followers of your brand that will work with you to grow your business? What are you passionate about that you would love to share with others and have them share back with you?

Take the lead and start building your own tribe based on what you love as well as what you need. You don’t need to create deeply personal relationships with the other tribe members. You just need a mutual respect for the purpose of the group and an eagerness to help everyone in it achieve that purpose.