Affiliate Program – Ad Graphics & Instructions
Dear Affiliate,
On this page we are giving you access to our growing collection of ad graphics that you can use to advertise for us, and we compile some step-by-step instructions for promoting us on Facebook or Instagram to help you get started. If you have any questions, suggestions, or special requests, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at business@pianofanshop.com. We will do our best to help you succeed.
Ad Graphic Archives
Click on the following links to download our archives of ad graphics. Please read the section below for detailed usage instructions, which in particular explain which graphics to use for what purpose. Don't forget to check back periodically for updates.- Facebook/Instagram posts (portrait mode):
- Instagram stories:
Usage Instructions
In the following subsections we will explain in detail the three different ways in which you can promote us on Facebook and Instagram.1. Sharing Facebook/Instagram Posts From The Piano Fan Shop Accounts
Probably the simplest way to start promoting us is by sharing our own posts on the Piano Fan Shop's official Facebook account with your followers. You can also share the posts of our Instagram account, but this requires a few more technical steps.To do it, start by logging into your Facebook/Instagram account, then go to our official Facebook/Instagram page at www.facebook.com/pianofanshop or www.instagram.com/pianofanshop, and scroll through our newsfeed until you find a post that you would like to share with your followers. To share a post, then do the following:
- Facebook: Click on the "Share" icon on the bottom right of the post, and select from the dropdown menu how and with whom you want to share it (select "share…" to share it on your own newsfeed). Then in the field "Say something about this…" enter a personal message and paste your affiliate link below it. Make sure that in your message you encourage your followers to click on your link, since otherwise your referral will not count. Finally, click on "Post" on the bottom right.
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Instagram: You can either share a post as part of your story, or on your regular feed.
- Sharing a post on your story: Please see the instructions here on how to do this. Be aware, however, that sharing graphics that were not originally intended to be used as Instagram stories may get cropped; we therefore urge you to either check your reposted story on various mobile devices, or to instead create new stories from similar ad graphics that we provided to you in the archives (see Section 3 on how to do this).
- Sharing a post on your feed: This is not officially supported by Instagram. However, there are apps for your phone that will help you work around it, by essentially copying our post and posting it on your feed from scratch (see the detailed instructions here). As an affiliate, you are allowed to do this, as long as it is done for the purposes of our affiliate program. As an alternative, consider looking for the post's graphic in our ad graphic archives above, or contacting us at business@pianofanshop.com with a request to make the graphic available to you.
We also advise you to "like" our Facebook page (by clicking on the "Like" button on the bottom left of the page's cover image) and/or to follow us on Instagram (by clicking on the "Follow" button next to our account name "pianofanshop"). In this way, you will get notified whenever we make a new post, which you can then decide to share with your followers if you want.
2. Creating New Instagram/Facebook Posts
To create your own Instagram or Facebook posts on your account from scratch, there are two types of graphics that you can use:- Ad graphics from our archives: These well-designed portrait-mode graphics include our logo and some text. Advantages: They occupy more screen space, they have proper branding, and they display information in a visually pleasing way. You can find them in the archives 1(a) and 1(b) on the top of this page.
- Square images from the product description pages: Alternatively, you can use the plain square images of only the product itself that you find on the product descriptions on our website. Advantages: The square format is more compatible with Instagram, the image does not look like advertising (thus blending in seamlessly with your other posts), your followers are given a specific idea what to buy (making it more likely for them to take immediate action once they are on our site), and the images are available immediately for all our products. You can download these images directly from the product's product description page on our website, by right-clicking on the large product image and then selecting "Save image as…".
As both types of ads have their advantages, it is not immediately clear which type of post will be more effective – decide for yourself what you think your followers will like best.
3. Creating New Instagram Stories
Instagram stories have the advantage that they will be pinned to the top of your followers' screens; on the downside, they will only stay visible for 24 hours, and so you will have to repost them as you see fit.
As Instagram stories are viewed in full screen mode on mobile devices, which come in a variety of sizes, their graphics need to obeye specific formatting rules to avoid unfortunate cropping. We have therefore created graphics for this specific purpose, which you find in the archives 2(a) and 2(b) on the top of this page.
Creating Your Affiliate Link
Remember that we can only count those customers towards your referral bonus who visited our website by clicking on the affiliate link that was given to you when you signed up to our program. Here we describe how to create this link
1. Affiliate Link To The Main Page
You can find your main affiliate link by logging into your affiliate account here. Following this link will route the visitor to our main page www.pianofanshop.com. It is of the form https://www.pianofanshop.com?(…), where (…) contains a couple of parameters that are unique to you, and that we will use to associate the visitor to you. You can remove the initial "https://" if you want and start right with the "www".
2. Affiliate Link To Subpages
If you want to route your followers to a specific product or product collection, navigate to the desired page on our website, copy the address from your browser's address bar, and then simply append the part "?(…)" from your affiliate link from the first step. For example, your link to our jewelry collection would look like https://www.pianofanshop.com/collections/jewelry?(…), where (…) should be replaced by the parameters that you find at the end of your affiliate link from the first step. Again, you may leave out the "https://".
Including Your Affiliate Link
In the following we describe where you should paste your link in your promotions:
- For Facebook posts: Simply paste your affiliate link to the end of the message that you added to the post.
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For Instagram posts: Unfortunately, Instagram does not allow for clickable links in the messages associated with a post. This leaves you with two options:
- Paste your affiliate link into the message, and ask your followers to copy-paste it into the address bar of their browsers. Or:
- Change the website associated with your Instagram account to your affiliate link (by clicking on "Edit Profile," pasting your link into the field labeled "Website," and clicking "Submit"). Then in your post's message ask your followers to "click on the link in my [i.e., your] Instagram bio." We believe that this option is the more effective one of the two.
- For Instagram stories: Add a "call for action" link to the story graphic, which will allow your followers to swipe up on the graphic to "see more" (i.e., to jump to our store's website using your affiliate link). To do so, click on the anchor symbol on the top of your screen after you uploaded the graphic. Note that this option is currently only available to Instagram accounts with at least 10,000 followers. If you do not have so many followers, you can work around it as described in the preceding bullet point for Instagram posts.
Creating Instagram Posts & Stories On Your Computer (Instead Of Your Phone)
Instagram was originally designed to post photos that users snap with their phone's camera. Unfortunately, this design principle goes so far that – as is – the web version of Instagram for computers (not for mobile phones) does not provide any way of posting anything (neither regular posts nor stories). To bypass this issue and to post our graphic files from your laptop or desktop computer (which we assume you use to download our graphics), one therefore needs to apply a smart workaround: The trick is to change a simple setting that was originally intended for web developers to display the mobile version of a website, and it is described in detail in the first section of the article here.
Note that when you follow these instructions in this article, you will need to make the browser window narrow to simulate holding your phone "in portrait mode," since only then will Instagram give you access to the camera icon on the top left for creating stories. Also note that if you select a graphic file in portrait mode to create a post, by default it will be cropped into a square; to avoid this, after selecting the image file you must scroll down to the bottom of the image and click on the double arrow symbol on the bottom left.