The food culture has always been strong and an evergreen trend, especially in Asia culture.
With people constantly looking for new things to do and places to visit, Good Foodie decided to ride on this bandwagon and monetise from it.
How do they do it? With affiliate marketing, of course.
If you have not heard about them before, Good Foodie is a platform that provides recommendations on eateries, places to go and activities for locals and tourists.
By promoting these on their platform, they have generated a good sum of income through affiliate marketing with Involve.
We spoke to Good Foodie to get some tips and tricks on how they started!
Taste & Experience with Good Foodie
Good Foodie has over 17 brands focusing on food, the marketplace, travel, and lifestyle.
Our core brand is Foodie — where we offer recipes, reviews of new cafes opening in Malaysia (such as Penang Foodie, Halal Foodie and KL Foodie), and product recommendations curated by Pickie MY & Malaysia Homie.
Good Foodie is not limited to the Malaysian market. We’ve expanded our operations to neighbouring countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore and more.
How Good Foodie Discover Involve Asia
Not long after the COVID-19 pandemic hit the nation, the first few months were testing us because people could not eat out. So how do we pivot?
We know that people who are staying at home are often on their phones and buy most products through e-commerce.
We first heard about Involve from one of their e-newsletters. The idea that you can earn money by being creative with your content impressed us.
Then, we realised that we could get commissions from every purchase made by our customers, which is a great way to monetise our website.
But also, when we look at e-commerce trends, many people are doing things online, such as e-booking, so we decided to try affiliate marketing and become an Involve Partner.
Creating Video Content on Social Media
Good Foodie is enthusiastic about creating video content. We are experimenting with different niches to know what our audiences like the most.
Technology has been a plus point for food bloggers. We can now easily share their food recommendations or recipes with millions of people worldwide.
Our content works best on Facebook and Instagram. However, TikTok is an emerging platform that we gotta adapt to and start exploring more with affiliate links.
Question: How do you differ from your competitors when creating travel content relevant to what your audiences want to see?
Answer:
Our content strategy is slightly different, focusing more on video form because videos are much more engaging and can be posted more frequently than text posts.
Being niche-focused, this information gives us an advantage over our competitors. So when we talk about food, we will go all in talking about food while trying to balance between organic and paid content.
We focus a lot on organic content and want to be the trendsetter. Our audience loves discovering new food, and when there’s a new opening, we’ll be there, regardless of whether it’s paid or not.
Not only that, we help our audience capture the essence of a story by creating content that covers what they need to know. We also recommend places and cafes, such as telling our people the five new things they can try this week.
How Involve Asia Helped Us Monetise Our Business
When we started, we were just a small business looking to share our foodie finds with the world. But as we grew, it became clear that monetising our business would be a challenge.
When we first started working with Involve, we only saw a few dollars in our conversion report, and it took a lot of work to stay afloat when we only had a few followers.
Now that we’ve grown our following and have more content to share with our followers, we’ve achieved significant milestones in getting commissions from Involve.
We love that Involve is so convenient. You can easily promote your favourite brands and get help from your account manager if you have any questions about the brands you want to promote.
Overcoming Challenges in the Media Industry
Our biggest challenge as a company is expanding into a new market.
Once we’re in a new market, the next challenge is to convince local advertisers to work with us. Partnering with them and establishing good relationships are key factors in our success.
Currently, we have audiences in Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore. However, we plan to expand into other countries and find local people to help us reach those markets.
We’re constantly learning new things about how to run our business.
The following challenge is finding local partners to help us expand into different regions. We need someone who can do research and provide recommendations for new places in a local area to keep more viewers coming back to our channel.
For example, we learned in Bangkok that we have 1.8 million followers, but only 40% are local. So we’re looking for local partners and content creators who are Thai, speak Thai and understand Thai culture to help us expand into another region.
Using Social Media for Affiliate Marketing
We have a unique way of handling our content. We first identify the right niche for the product and then focus on that niche.
If it’s a product for the home, we will talk about kitchen appliances and TVs. If there are any new items only for the home, then we will recommend them.
Foodie KL focuses on restaurant and cafe recommendations in Klang Valley. We explore and recommend the best places to visit on our channel, and we include an Involve link so they can purchase the available deals online.
For example, if we create a video about making milo ice at home, we will include links to the ingredients used in the video (Call-to-Action (CTA): You Can Buy This Item Here).
As a marketing strategy for our business, we mainly use Instagram and Facebook to promote Involve affiliate links. We put our affiliate link on Instagram Story and the link in the bio for Instagram. For Facebook, we will put our affiliate link in our caption.
We are very fortunate because we were very niche centric when we built our platform. So we can leverage this opportunity to grab more followers to purchase our recommendations through our Involve affiliate links.
Monetising Your Business With Affiliate Marketing
Good Foodie definitely encourages other content creators to use Involve Asia’s Affiliate Marketing Program. It’s a great way to get paid for doing what you love.
It takes time to build up your followers and brand awareness. So while it may seem like your conversions are low initially, keep going!
Eventually, they will increase as you build your audience and create more content they love.
If you love doing travel content and have experience in the field, why not start making reviews of 5-star hotels or budget hotels?
You could also experiment with different types of accommodation to help your audiences decide where they want to stay while travelling!
Make Your Dream Come True with Involve Asia!
Are you interested in earning commissions through affiliate marketing?
Involve Asia is the perfect place to start! As an affiliate marketer, you can promote your favourite brands and earn high commissions when customers purchase through our seamless platform.
Are you ready to start making a difference? Click below to become an Involve Partner today!
