5 Creative Ways to Advertise Your Online Store & Affiliate Links

Hello, my friend. Welcome back to the Modern Hair Stylist Podcast. Today is a juicy episode, dude. Like, juicy, okay?

Now, I know that you are starting to get maybe a little skeptical about selling retail in your space. I know that there's been a whole lot of chat about whether retail is profitable or not. I know that people feel like it's really difficult to compete against Amazon, and, like, the grocery stores and all the things, and I have a whole other rant for both of those conversations, and it's a whole other episode, honey. But today, we're gonna be talking about how you can very effectively compete with those things in this digital space that we live in nowadays.

So I'm gonna be teaching you today five different creative ways to advertise your online store or your affiliate links, and these are ways that you may have never even thought about capitalizing upon before, and that are so underutilized, with so much potential for you to literally... This could be passive income for you. Like, you set this up once and you're good to go for some of these. And so, um, I'm really, really excited to share them with you.

Me and Kaylyn were saying before we started this episode that we feel bad for anybody who doesn't listen to this, 'cause it's going to be next level. So buckle in, my friend. Get ready to sell all the retail. Let's go.

Let me guess. You are a hustling, bustling hairstylist behind the chair, working so hard to build a beautiful career for yourself, one that gives you time, freedom, and energy to spend with yourself, your family, and your friends. But you feel like you're always working in your business, even when you're not behind the chair. My name's Hunter Donia, and I help you automate your systems and implement really beautiful strategies so you can grow your business without the overwhelm.

And this is the Modern Hair Stylist podcast. Kaylyn, who are you? What's the tea? Hello, friend.

My name is Kaylyn. I am a hairstylist. I currently work for Hunter because I am living in England and no longer working behind the chair. My, uh, job here is I just kind of help keep Hunter on track, and I help him with outlines, and we kind of just have a little, little conversation about, uh, whatever the topic is for the week.

I love it. Kaylyn, thank you so much for being here. So first off, I wanna make it super clear. I, I am not teaching you how to set up an online store or an affiliate link here today.

I'm so sorry, friends. This is something that is just a never-ending difficult conversation for all of me and my students, and it looks so different for everybody depending on what brand you carry. So number one, I've heard Salon Interactive is a pretty cool situation. I have no partnership with them.

Have... I think I've had conversations with the founders before, actually, but I, I, I've never used it personally, um, and, and I'm not vouching for it personally. I'm just saying it is an option for you, so look into Salon Interactive, um, as an online store. And then you should be pushing your brands heavily, and your distributors heavily, to be giving you some sort of affiliate link store setup situation.

And the reason why I'm saying, like, lean into these different, uh, softwares and these different existing platforms and companies is because you are already so freaking busy with all of the things that you're doing right now. The last thing that I want you to have to worry about is taking orders online and shipping them, packaging them, coordinating the pick-up and the drop-off. It's too much, in my opinion. If you wanna go about that, pop off, I really hope that you're making a bi- big-ass profit off of that, because the, the time and energy that goes into those things is...

You really have to take into consideration how worth it it is for you to be spending all that time working and doing all that stuff, right? Especially if you are buying that product on, on wholesale and you're marking it up 100, and you're making basically a 50% profit, because that is not gonna be crazy profitable for you in the end, based upon how much extra time you are spending to sell it. It's a different case when we're talking about when you're just selling retail in the chair, but if you're gonna be selling retail and, like, coordinating and doing all this extra labor when you're not working behind the chair, that is, like, really precious time. And I just believe that you should be leaning into every way, shape, or form to make sure that this is a hands-off process, where it's taken care of by some- somebody or something else.

And those... That technology exists out there. Um, not sure if it exists for the brand that you use currently. However, w- I, like I said, if your brand does not do something like this for you, fucking pressure them.

And they're not gonna change anything if nobody speaks up, so put pressure on them. Say, "Every other brand is doing this right now. Why am I still with you when I could go be making money passively with the- with these other people?" I just wanted to be clear on that.

I wanted to give you a pep talk on that, tell you where my stance is on that. Um, my- I am very grateful that my distributor, Ethos Beauty, on the East Coast, uh, they actually have a sy- a system called MySalonToMe, and I have my very own store with my products on there, where, uh, any of my clients can go on and purchase from me, and I'll get 25% of the, um, the commission, and I don't do anything. I ve- I have literally, I do nothing. The only time that I have to do any labor for it is if somebody doesn't get a shipment or a shipment's taking a really long time, and then I just reach out to the, the company and I'm like, "Hey, what's the tea with this?

What's going on?" And then they normally take care of it for, for me from there. So I'm, I have a really grateful, awesome situation, and that might exist for you too, wherever you live or whatever brand that you use. But if you haven't looked into it yet, make sure that you do, or that you're pressuring your brands to have something like that, okay?

Or your distributors. All right. So, let's talk about five cool, creative ways to actually advertise your online store and your affiliate links to make some extra income, um, from your retail sales, where you may have not before, because you haven't been leaning into these strategies.So my very first, um, and obvious, this is gonna be the most obvious one out of any of them, I think, um, is social media posts.

Okay, let's talk about social media. You can 100% make a shit ton of retail sales j- just using social media, um, and call-to-actioning your affiliate links, or your online store, or whatever it may be. Um, establishing yourself as an expert and bridging your, um, your clients' pain points to the solutions that your products may offer them is so powerful. And the beautiful thing about using social media for affiliate links and e-commerce of any sort, is that you're not relying on only speaking to a regional, um, ex- audience.

You, you can reach the entire fricking world, right? And you can sell your products to anybody with social media, where you're, where when you're trying to get money from, uh, services in your chair, right, you are only limited to speaking to a regional audience. And it's really hard to connect with a regional audience, versus reach a bunch of different people, right? Now, you wanna take into consideration your algorithm and, like, the people that are following you.

You may wanna keep it clean and have two different accounts if you really wanna lean into these strategies. Um, but I have, um, a student in my program, their name is Anna, and they're in New Orleans. And over the pandemic they went ham on TikTok, educating all about their, um, about their, their product line, and it's a product line that me and Caitlin absolutely love. And they killed it in retail sales.

And I think they have, like, I might, I might be totally butchering this, I think they have like 200K followers or something crazy on TikTok. I might be totally wrong. But they, they, they blew up their, their affiliate link sales with TikTok, and continuously do so to this day, just by educating and busting myths, and hitting pain points, and talking about, um, how, like, these box store brands, like, uh, are really bad for you, and just educating and, like, entertaining and all of these things. And they do a really freaking, they've done a very great job of, of doing all that.

We actually had them come into our, uh, our program and do a guest speaker class about how to use TikTok, um, to grow your salon business, and it was absolutely excellent. And so if you lean into, like, your stories, have a Linktree situation, have your retail affiliate link in there, um, and if you're, in your captions and in your reels, like, calling to action, like, the product, right? And, and telling somebody to go get it, and they can very conveniently get it through you with the link in your bio, they'll be much more likely to go directly to the link in your bio and support you because you were the expert who showed them, um, where to go and what to do, right? And what you're gonna wanna make sure that you do, uh, and, and I, and I already brought it up a little bit, but the way that you do this is you give people a reason to give a shit first.

And you hit them exactly where they are going to actually wanna pay attention and listen, and actually gonna w- uh, be asking you for a solution at the end, right? So you could talk about, "Let me talk to you about why heat protection is so important." Or, or you can start off by saying, "Do you feel like your, your ends are, like, are dry and split as hell?" Or, "Do you feel like your hair never holds a curl?

Here is why this is happening," right? Or, "Here's what you need to do. You need to use a heat protectant and here's why." Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

And then if you left it at that, guess what your comments are gonna be? "What heat protectant do you recommend? What heat protector for ... protectant do you recommend?"

It's just gonna be like, "What brands of heat p-" Like, everybody, "What do you think about this brand of heat protectant?" That's what the comments are gonna be, right? You could either leave it at that and then answer your comments. But what I would rather you do is, I'd rather you just say, "And this is the heat protectant that I recommend, and my, and my ca-" and, at the end of your caption, "And you can go check that out, um, at the link in my bio," right?

And then that is how you get somebody to actually be interested in one of your products, right? So in your social media, in your stories, however you're nurturing people through social, you j- making posts like this every now and then can really help you in advertising your affiliate link and establishing you as an expert and solving people's problems, which I think is so beautiful and amazing. And I love the fact that we are able to do that, especially with affiliate links nowadays, where we can do it with more than just our clients. Caitlin, do you have anything to share?

Um, not really, to be honest. But, uh, I will just, like, echo what you've said. Like, there really is, like, a lot that you can ... I mean, you can do so much just with, like, posting in your stories, or, uh, CTAing something in, like, one of your posts, to your link in your bio.

Uh, there really is just, like, limitless potential. And I really personally enjoy doing it in stories because you can be so much less polished and it can just be, like, very, like, off-the-cuff, like, conversational, and just super easy. Um, and you can make a couple extra quick bucks that way. I love that.

Thank you. So here's the next part, or here's the next suggestion or creative way that you can do this. So you can do a quiz. So here's the tea.

Here's where I'm gonna start with this. It's, it's really difficult to find a quiz software, like an online quiz software that isn't expensive as hell, okay? They are all pricey. Um, the one that we use is extremely overpriced, and I, and I hate that I pay that much money, but it's worth it for us.

But what my students have done, which I think is so cool, is they've used Jotform. And they've used the advanced automations that we teach them in the program to be able to make it so somebody gets a curated result and list of, like, what they would recommend for their hair, um, based upon the answers that they give them in the form.So this is something that would be extremely passive for you. I mean, you don't have to do shit, right?

Like, you literally could set this up once and your clients could go to it all the time, and just go through this quiz and then get the results. And then you can call to action the, the link to your store right then and there with all of their curated, specific results. This is the, this is the kicker and the reason why quizzes are so effective, is because number one, people want to know more about themselves. It's like this, it's, it's this instinctual, um, uh, feeling or desire that we want.

Like, we're so curious about finding things out about ourselves that we may have not known before, um, from other people's perspectives, you know, or from an expert's perspective, right? And so when you have this quiz, you can have somebody give you all that information, or they can give the quiz all their information about their hair or about whatever it may be, and then they can get very specific personalized results and recommendations. And those personalized recommendations are so much more powerful than just generally, like, telling everybody that they need w- like, something, right? It's the same thing that goes to, like, be your niche, right?

And knowing who your ideal client target market profile is, right? You're able to really connect with somebody so deeply because they feel like you're speaking specifically to them, right? And it's, that's what a quiz can do completely passively if you know how to use the technology. So I've seen cool ass, um, things done in my programs and my students where they take Jotform and they create it into this, like, really awesome quiz.

And they can just make some retail sales pretty passively off of it, and in your social media and your marketing you can always call to action the quiz as well, instead of just, like, the direct affiliate link, which I think is really awesome. Okay, so then we have a product guide. So a product guide, it could be something like, um, it would be, you would want to make sure it'd be really niche-specific. So if it's a low maintenance, uh, low maintenance something or other, right, or curly something or other, or, um, uh, whatever your niche is, right, you'd want to make this extremely specific because you're not gonna get downloads if it's a really general topic.

It, it has to be super specific to the person you're serving and the solutions that you're offering. And you could create, like, the, the perfect five product guide for curly girls, or something like that. Like, that could be the title of your PDF guide, and then you could have that as a downloadable, um, a downloadable PDF on your website. And what you would do with this is you'd ask for somebody's email and you would deliver it to their email, so you're building your email list.

Go back to last week's episode if you haven't listened to, um, Email Marketing for Hairstylists yet. And you're building your email list, so then you're able to more potentially, um, convert new potential clients into butts in your chair. You're establishing yourself as an expert because you're sharing with them a lot of great information in this product guide. And I would break down in the product guide, like, the what, the why, and then call to action the product.

You still have to give them a reason to give a shit as to why they would want that certain product, and then link your affiliate links in that PDF guide, like, over and over and over and over. Even in the delivery email that you give, in the copy of it, like, have that, that affiliate link right then and there. So that way they can go through the product li- guide, they can see what the products that you have to offer are and why they're great and why they're amazing and why they're relevant to that person, and then they can go right to you for that sale, right? So I think like a, a pro- a product guide really specific to your niche could be really effective for you as well, in multiple ways, not just for more retail sales.

Also establishing authority and, um, building your email list, which I think is really cool. Then the next idea, and this is something that I... This was insane. This was, this was something that so randomly and crazily happened to me, and it just kind of blew my mind, and it actually probably is the reason why it made me want to do this podcast episode, because I was like, holy crap, there are so many different ways that you can go about this.

So I had, um, somebody reach out to me. It was, like, somebody in a similar community to me who, um, who helped people with their personal image, I guess, like with their, like, fashion and, like, how they dress and all these things. I think, like, helping, like, professional women who, like, weren't, who were kind of, like, not great at styling themselves, like, helping them, like, come up with a style And this woman reached out to me and she was like, "Hey, this is what I do, and I have this client and she's really curious about what she should do with her hair, um, and I have no idea what to tell her 'cause I'm not a hairdresser, and I think that you do really cool things i- in your content. Would you want to talk to her?"

And I was like, "Yeah, um, I'll talk to her for like 100 bucks for, like, a, an hour call. Like, I'm down for that." And, you know, that might sound a little ridiculous, but I could be doing so many better things with my time, you know? Like, I, like, I, I'm not...

And I'm, I'm quite honestly, I'm not a hairdresser who's like, "I'm gonna tell you exactly what's gonna look good on you." Like, I need you to come to the table with something and then I'll build off of that, right, and I'll give suggestions. So I just was like, if, if I'm gonna be spending an hour of my time talking to this person, you know, I better be charging for it. So, and I honestly, I don't even know if it was an hour, it might have been even 30 minutes, I forget.

But anyways, I was like, yeah, I'll do it for 100 bucks. Like, we'll see if this person says yes or no. I have nothing to lose if they say yes or no, so let's see what happens. She, so, so she said yes.

She booked this call with me, and she lived in California, I'm in Pennsylvania, and I went through, like, all of her concerns with her hair, and, like, wh- um, how she would normally wear it, like her maintenance, all the things. And then I recommended to her all the products that I would recommend for her, right? Not only did I do that, but I also recommended a local stylist in her area that would be able to help her, and she bought all my products off of my affiliate link, and she paid me the $100 for the consultationWhich was insane, right? So, you know, this takes a little bit of your time.

But the thing is, with something like this, you can reach so many other people than just your regional people in your area. So it's really easy. You have a much of a wider net of people to be talking to. And it's really effective because you're, you're on live with them, right?

And so it's just like if you were in person and you were, um, selling retail in person. You have that same, um, personal connection instead of just somebody reading a screen, right? And you're able to make the sale, like, right then and there. So I thought that was really freaking cool.

So I'm pretty sure Ana actually also did this as well with their TikTok. They would have, like, these video consultations that people could sign up for, and then they would, like, go through their concerns with their hair and the diagnosis. And then they would give them a curated pro- uh, product, uh, list and recommendations, and they would get it from the affiliates. So video consultations, I think, is something that could be really cool to tap into, if you wanted to.

Okay, and then a post-visit email. So a specific personalized post-visit email with the re- retail recommendations that you would recommend for your client. I shared this, um, this story/testimonial, uh, in the last episode, but I'm gonna share it again. Um, this person said, "Your digital health made my business so strong, despite not having a focus on getting more clients in my chair this year.

I've done over $30,000 in retail in the last year, and over 30% of that, of those sales, were sold digitally from the personalized post-visit email that you teach in your programs." Passively, right? Because this is a personalized email. Yes, you have to do a little bit of work to get it started.

However, it's super systematized and easy to send these personalized emails after somebody's visit and give them a curated plan or list of all the things that you'd recommend that they be using in between the appointments, and then direct link, directing right to your affiliate link so they can purchase it right then and there. Whether they're in your chair, it's the day after their appointment, or whether it's, like, three months from their appointment and they're not even coming back to see you, they have that list of recommendations in their email now, right? With that affiliate link. Which I think is really powerful.

So doing a post-visit email, talking about, um, the maintenance plan that you have for them, all the things, and making it personalized and feel really personalized, and then giving them a person- those personalized recommendations, I mean, can obviously make you a whole lot of money, 'cause it's working for my students. So those are my five creative ways. Caitlin, what are your thoughts? I, I love them all so much.

Like, honestly, it's, it all seems so simple, but a lot of it is stuff that I have never even really thought about. Like, I lean really hard into just using social media for affiliate links and stuff like that. Like, yeah, I never really even thought about doing a quiz. Like, I fucking love the idea of doing a quiz.

I think that that is genius and it's super curated. Like, so smart. I love it. We, you know, these are things that we wouldn't, we wouldn't be normally thinking about.

I actually had a ... Shout out to the person who sent me that, that, uh, that story about you doing $30,000 in retail. Congratulations to you and all your hard work. And then a shout out to this person who I'm about to talk about as well too.

Um, I had somebody, uh, do a one-on-one coaching call with me because she's in my, um, she's in my membership, and that's the only place that I do one-on-one coaching as, as of right now. And, um, she is in this m- in this crazy transition phase where she's barely doing hair right now, um, because she's moving and it's, like, this whole entire weird situation. And so she's not having money come in unexpectedly. She's, like, losing out on a lot of income that she would normally have.

And we were just talking about, like, like, the, what her next steps were and how to strategize and all the things. And I was like, "Why aren't we selling retail?" Like, why aren't we selling retail? Like, why aren't we going ham in our email marketing?

Like, why aren't we, like, why aren't we leaning into this other way of you making ... You can make money without doing hair. Like, you ha- you, you are the expert in this product line and in somebody's hair and how this stuff works and how to solve those problems with product. Why are we not leaning into that a little bit more, right?

And just think about, think about all of those beautiful tools that you have in your toolbox, which is all the knowledge that you have from your experience, from the education that you've taken, and think about how you can use that to make beautiful things happen for yourself. And once you start thinking out of the box like that, as a hairstylist, I think that you can make really fricking cool shit happen. So thank you, Caitlin. Thank you, my friend, for listening to the Modern Hairstylist podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode, I would really appreciate if you left a five-star review wherever you're listening to this. It helps us reach more hairstylists just like you who are looking to revolutionize this industry, and we can't do it without you. So thank you so much for leaving that testimonial in advance. And, uh, uh, we are looking forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Modern Hairstylist podcast.

Peace out, girl scout. Bye-bye.

End of transcript. © 2022 Hunter Donia LLC.