Online communities are all about interaction and building relationships. In order to engage members of communities, it’s important to first become a trusted member of that community. There are essentially two ways that you can go about participating in existing communities: direct engagement and indirect engagement.

Direct engagement may sound straightforward, but where it can get tricky is in the practical application. This is a kind of longtail strategy, because it is so imperative to build trust within that community. The best practice is to have someone acting as a brand ambassador who is a trusted member of the community, and to ensure that your products or services have some relevance to the community’s interests.

With indirect engagement, you’ll be working with third-parties who can help to increase your brand’s awareness in the community without arising suspicion. If you can get together with members of specific communities who wield a certain amount of influence, then you may be able to offer them opportunities to announce “sneak peeks” into products or promotions.

It is essential to maintain good relationships with these third-parties. With this in mind, never ask them to exploit their status or deceive them into doing so. A bad relationship with a third party can serve to hamper your efforts, instead of help.

The rewards are palpable for those who make the effort to create interest in their brands in specific communities. Let’s take a look at some stats (source):

• Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users
(AT&T, 2002)
• Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006)
• Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users
(McKinsey, 2000)

As with every aspect of every successful business enterprise, trust is a key aspect, and relationships are what help to build that trust. Consumers don’t purchase products until a trust has been established, and social media can be a great way to establish relationships as a means of establishing that trust.

Using social media to accomplish this might take some time, but is worthwhile for anyone attempting to build brand awareness in these exciting new markets.

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Essentially, these community hosts have built content communities. They’ve (1) generated content, (2) put that content its context by building community around it, and (3) generated conversation around that content. Well, if these community hosts do decide to monetize, they face many of the same ethical constraints that brands who want to engage their communities do. The only difference is that these community hosts are all too well aware of what those ethics are. Their challenge, rather, is in finding revenue model that can offer them the control and flexibility to monetize their communities without compromising them. After all, if the community dissolves, they have no source of revenue left.

Well, I believe that affiliate marketing can offer both that control and flexibility.

1. It’s performance-based model means that community hosts are in complete control of how much they want to push monetization — i.e. there is no pressure from sponsors push certain kinds of content.
2. By finding an affiliate program whose products are relevant to community interests, affiliate promotions can actually add value to the community experience.
3. Affiliate marketing offers more flexibility because community hosts can choose from a variety of channels to feature promotions — i.e. email, banners, sponsorships, text links, coupon codes, etc.
4. Community hosts retain complete control over what their members are exposed to — i.e. they don’t have to promote all of a brand’s products, just those they endorse or are comfortable with.
5. Affiliate tracking codes mean that community hosts can even integrate promotions with multi-media content (such as podcasts) by offering a coupon code.
6. And more custom support means that community hosts can get creatives that complement their community’s spirit, rather than just pushing the brand and its promotions.

Just over a week ago, I attended  Podcamp Toronto and delivered a session (presentation below) on just this topic. Relationships are becoming an increasingly more important factor in the sales process, but some of best online relationship brokers and brands are still struggling to find viable and sustainable ways of working together.I think that affiliate marketing may just be part of the answer.

For community hosts, finding the right affiliate program that features products that are relevant to the community can be an effective way to both monetize and add value to that community. For brands, setting up an affiliate program that offers dedicated support can offer a stepping stone to establishing long-term relationships with communities and their hosts.