These days, it seems like everyone’s either talking about how social media is the next big thing in affiliate marketing, or they’re talking about how social media just doesn’t work for traditional affiliate promotions. As a result, most of us have probably given it a try at some point. Maybe we throw together a couple of Squidoo lenses, maybe we dabble at Yahoo! Answers, or maybe we submit a few things to Digg and see if anything sticks. Regardless, most of us don’t have a clear plan and we’re not giving much thought to how social media might be different from normal ad-driven traffic.

First off, let me say this – you definitely can get affiliate sales by brute force on social media. If you blindly spam enough people and get them to your landing page, someone is bound to buy. To succeed without getting yourself banned on a daily basis, though, you’ll need a different strategy.

Frequently, you’ll hear guys like Gary Vaynerchuk and Chris Brogan talking about how the key to social media success is building relationships and fostering trust. That’s great for them, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that strategy.

The problem with relationship building is that it’s very time consuming. Those guys are heavily invested in a single area of expertise, so it makes a lot of sense for them to go all out with relationship building. What if you want to drive leads to a health insurance offer, though? Do you really want to spend months or years getting to know people and convincing them that you’re an expert? Do people even want to build relationships with an “insurance shopping expert”?

Luckily, there is another way to do things. Let’s take a moment to think about the typical mindset of someone visiting a social media site. Most of the time, they’re focused on either entertainment or getting some kind of specific information. Although people know that ads are a “necessary evil”, they generally don’t take kindly to blatantly commercial messages intruding on the areas of sites that are perceived as being ad-free (namely, in the user-generated portions of the content).

If someone is looking for tips on losing weight, they don’t want to see an shallow answer that refers them to a landing page for acai berry supplements. If they see a link labeled “The Best Way to Lower Your Auto Insurance”, they don’t want to be directed to a page for insurance quotes. If you take that approach, your accounts are going to get flagged, your content will get thumbed down or buried, and you’re probably going to spend more time trying to make sure your contributions stay up than doing anything else.

None of that means that it’s impossible to submit advertisements to social media and get the support of the community, though. What you need to do is find a way to make your message valuable to the user while still maintaining the commercial thrust. A couple of examples that you can run with or build on today:

Auto Insurance - Instead of sending users to an auto insurance landing page, make a list of auto insurance companies you work with and then do a little research about each one. Which states do they work with? What kinds of discounts do they offer? Who offers online bill-pay? Write it up as a one-page guide and then insert your affiliate link beside each company.

If you use promote insurance quote services, do the same kind of thing. Call them up and find out who they offer quotes for, what kind of privacy protection is in place, how long they’ve been in business, etc. You’re delivering real value and you’re going to be much more likely to gain the trust of your users this way.

Weight Loss Supplements – Yes, there are honest ways to promote them. Skip the flogs and instead try piecing together a brief 3 or 4 week action plan that your visitors could use. Make sure it combines exercise and healthy meals along with the supplement you hope to promote, and be sure to make it clear that you’re just a fitness enthusiast – not a doctor, trainer, or nutritionist. Sure, not many people are likely to follow through with your plan – but that doesn’t mean they won’t like the idea of taking the supplement to boost their usual regimen of Diet Coke, Doritos, and couch-warming.

Dating – Pick your niche and then thoroughly investigate the alternatives. Instead of pretending to be a real girl or just pushing users to the landing page, try creating a page that talks seriously about the benefits. I’m not saying you should make a review page – in fact, it’s best not to pass judgment unless it’s to say which ones are best for different types of people. Talk about privacy options, the number of people in different age groups, and the overall feel of the site. Is one better for older daters while another caters to the college and early 20-something crowd?

You could also take the approach of making a quiz that determines which dating site is best for you based on your personality. That way, it’s not only fun but it has some viral potential when people post the results to their profiles, too.

Basically, the idea here is to create the kind of page you’d want to browse. You don’t have to fill a site with 80 articles to add value when it comes to social media – a single page that fills someone’s need will do the trick.