How In Writing is revolutionizing Web3 marketing
Influencer partnerships and affiliate codes are one of the biggest new trends in the marketing industry, and although we’ve seen influencer marketing skyrocket NFT projects like with Snoop Dogg and Eminems’ Bored Ape collaboration, In Writing, a text based NFT marketplace, has come up with a more elegant solution: affiliate code smart contracts that guarantee transparency, equity, and efficiency.
What is In Writing?
In Writing is the first text-based NFT marketplace for users to mint, buy, and sell text NFTs. They’re coming onto the NFT scene years after visual artists started using NFTs to launch and support their careers, and they are a long-awaited solution for authors, poets, and other writers to support their own careers with Web3 and blockchain technology. As with any new NFT project, they’ve invested heavily into marketing, and part of their marketing campaign involves affiliate sponsorships and influencer partnerships. They’re taking an unconventional approach, however, and utilizing blockchain technology to implement affiliate smart contracts: a revolutionary innovation that is bridging Web2 and Web3 marketing and guaranteeing equity not only for In Writing affiliates but for the future Web3 influencer sphere as a whole.
What’s wrong with traditional affiliate marketing?
Influencer marketing has grown from $1.7 billion to $13.8 billion in the past 5 years, and affiliate marketing is a big component of that. However, the Web2 implementation of affiliate marketing has several drawbacks: it’s annoying for organizations to set up affiliate codes and incorporate them into their own backend; it’s annoying for influencers to have to ask for and set up specific affiliate codes; and most worryingly, influencers aren’t guaranteed to receive all their deserved commissions, and at times aren’t compensated at all. Even if they are compensated, businesses rarely share the specific analytics (how many times an affiliate code was used or what channels were most successful for the affiliate, for example) surrounding an affiliate marketing campaign with the affiliate themself, leaving them in the dark about whether they were fairly compensated and how they can improve future affiliate partnerships.
How is In Writing revolutionizing affiliate marketing?
Web3 is a new space, but two of the biggest perks of Web3 are decentralization and the promotion of open access to information. By writing ‘smart contracts’ to handle affiliate marketing, In Writing has delegated the creation and handling of affiliate codes and affiliate-generated purchases to a decentralized ‘virtual machine’ that guarantees equity for all parties involved. Every transaction on the blockchain is public, which means all affiliates can see (and therefore ensure) the fairness and conditions of affiliate contracts, as well as the exact analytics for their affiliate code usage. Because the affiliate smart contracts are decentralized, payments are also handled automatically — on In Writing, for example, affiliates sign up and immediately receive a custom affiliate code. When the affiliate code is used, the smart contract handling the purchase automatically takes 10% of the purchase amount and transfers it to the affiliates’ cryptocurrency wallet — no action is required by the affiliate or In Writing, and equity and transparency are guaranteed to both parties. Because all information is public, users can also see exactly who they’re supporting when they use an affiliate code.
What do affiliates do, and how do they make money?
In Writing affiliates are very similar to the traditional affiliate model — they have an affiliate code, and whenever a user uses that code, the user gets a discount and the affiliate gets a percentage of the purchase (a ‘commission’). Where In Writing’s affiliate program differs from traditional affiliate marketing models, however, is that the commission and overall analytics are handled automatically by the blockchain and handled in a transparent way. The blockchain is essentially a super-secure third party server that handles transactions with no bias and no potential for intervention, which means that commissions must be paid to the affiliate. Additionally, every transaction on the blockchain is logged and publicly available, which means affiliates and corporations can see the precise analytics of their affiliate campaigns.
Furthermore, anyone can become an In Writing affiliate — they submit their desired unique affiliate code, it gets linked with their wallet address, and from there on out anyone who uses that code will get a discount and the affiliate will get their commission. This means it’s easy to make money online, and with very little startup costs (it costs less than a dollar to become an In Writing affiliate), by becoming an In Writing affiliate. Even if you’re not a social media influencer and have only five hundred followers on Instagram, getting even 10% of those followers to mint an NFT using your creator code could land you 50 MATIC (at the time of writing)— not bad for a single Instagram post!
Finishing thoughts
In Writing’s affiliate-partnership smart contract source code can be viewed here. By delegating the creation and managing of affiliate codes and related payments to a trustless, decentralized third party, In Writing has bridged the gap between Web2 and Web3 influencer marketing and used blockchain technology to solve issues in equity, fairness and transparency within the marketing industry. You can view their ‘become an affiliate’ form here as well as their own official explanation for how it works, and you can follow me for more updates on marketing in the NFT and Web3 spaces.
