Affiliate Marketing needs traffic
Even if you’re a complete newbie, it is certainly clear to you that without traffic, there is no money in affiliate marketing for you. And traffic can be obtained in different ways – so what are the best traffic sources for you to consider?
If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, let’s put it this way.
If you had a store somewhere on a busy corner, you’d fill it with great stuff – stuff that everybody wants to buy. But since your entry is hidden behind a big billboard, noone sees it. Noone enters your store. Hence, nobody buys your stuff.
As soon as you make some steps, like moving the billboard or setting up a sign that shows where your entry is, people come in the store. And some of them buy your stuff. And you make money. Easy.
How is that related to my affiliate marketing?
On order to do affiliate marketing, you’ll need a website, a social account, or something similar. Some place where you want to show your products – that is, affiliate products in this case, which you will append your affiliate links to. That’s the store.
Then, in order for people to come by and click your affiliate links, you’ll first need people to find your website of Facebook page. Only then will they come and read what you have to say. That’s traffic.
So in any case, a little planning is needed in order to get that traffic. And even before that, you’ll need to decide on the best traffic sources for the products you are promoting.
One big mistake
One huge mistake people make is that they pick a product to promote, then start to search for traffic to their review or post. It’s hard work, I can tell you that much.
You should actually do it the in the opposite way, because this way you’re searching for an audience for your product.
You should first take care about your audience, grouping lots of people interested in a certain field.
For instance, let’s say you’re interested in yoga and you want to promote yoga products as an affiliate. The right way of doing this would be to establish a Facebook (and other social networks, of course) page about yoga. Then, you post daily on that page about yoga – styles, equipment, whatever. This way, you’ll gather followers that are also interested in yoga. Once you have a decent following, you can post about the products you’re promoting and people will gladly check them out.
You can promote all sorts of yoga products to them later on, becase they are all interested in yoga.
You see the difference here? If you go this way, you have one of the best traffic sources right there.
The philosophy is simple – it’s much much simple to find a product for the audience than the audience for the product.
The process that makes this possible is niche selection. You simply have to pick a niche for aour marketing and then follow the drill. If you want to read more about how to choose a niche, see THIS POST.
Best traffic sources for affiliate marketing
You’ve probably heard of two main types of traffic – free and paid.
I my opinion, they’re both paid; the difference is that one is paid with money and the other one with your time. Whichever you charish less, us it to pay for traffic. Personally, I’m using both ways, but I don’t see any problems paying for traffic.
Let me just put one thing in your mind: you can always get your money back, but you can never get your time back.
That being said, let’s just quickly check on what means paid traffic versus free traffic.
Paid traffic
Paid traffic means you’re paying someone to bring you visitors. This can be anything, like advertising on Facebook, Twitter (X) or Google. It can also be a mailing that someone does to their list with your links, it’s called solo ads via portals like Udimi.
The common thing all these traffic sources have in common is you’re paying it with money.
Free traffic
Free traffic, on the other hand, is any traffic you’re not paying for. Again, missleading a bit – because all the free traffic methods will take lots of your time, so you’re actually paying it dearly.
This sources can be the posts on your blog, social profiles and pages, and similar things.
Paid traffic Vs Free traffic
We have already mentioned one difference which is clear – paying either with money or time. The other on, I believe, is equally important.
Paid sources will bring traffic to your chosen destination much faster.
For a simple comparison, an ad on Facebook will start bringing traffic to your landing page almost immediately after the approval process is finished. By using solo ads, you can see the traffic coming is almost immediately after you complete your payment. The second clear benefit is that using paid sources the amount of traffic you’ll get is predictable.
Free traffic, however, will take time. Especially if you’re using blog posts, it could take Google months before you notice any real traffic coming in, even if you’ve done your SEO (Search Engines Optimization) in a perfect way. And, you’ll never know how much traffic you will actually get from your work – if the trend you were targeting with SEO tactics goes down, so will your traffic.
One specific type of free traffic is email marketing. Of course it’s not completely free, not only because you have to do your part, but also because you’ve probably paid our share to build an email list you can mail to. This is out of scope here, but you’re welcome to check it in other posts like this one. When you have a list, you can email your subscribers whenever you want, and it’s essentially free, except for the possible charges from your autoresponder.
Anyway – that’s why I’m using both types of traffic, as I mentioned above. I’m writing posts (like this one, LOL), but I also use paid traffic when it’s important to me that the traffic comes as soon as possible. So let’s mention a few of the best traffic sources for both categories.
Best traffic sources for paid traffic
Advertising
The obvious way to pay for traffic is advertising. You have a number of options here.
- Facebook Ads: a powerful engine that lets you create ads with a number of options to choose from.
- Google Ads: we all know Google, and it’s clear it can get everywhere, so it’s an obvious choise for advertising.
- Bing Ads: Microsoft also has a great platform which you should consider if you plan to advertise.
- Paid ad space: there’s a number of websites that will rent you the needed space for your ad. You have to find the ones that fit your chosen niche, of course.
The cost of these ads is hard to guess, but you can count roughly $0.50 – $2 per click, depending on your choice of parameters and how trendy your ad is to the public.
Solo ads
The second choice is usually paid promotions or solo ads.
Solo ads providers are marketers that have huge email lists and what they let you do is actually use their lists for your own intent. Essentially, you give them your links (like an optin page, for instance) and they will send you a certain number of visitors (clicks).
This way of getting traffic is actually pretty great, unfortunately, many people use it the wrong way.
You should never pay for clicks to your salespages. You can of course do it, but statistics will tell you that you’ll most probably make no sales at all. The reason is simple – this is called cold traffic, because the visitors you get this way will come to your salespage completely unprepared. People are built in a way that they have to see the offer a few ties before they decide, very seldom you’ll find someone who’s willing to pay on first sight. You and me are the same, aren’t we?
This is why your best bet with any paid traffic is to direct it to your optin page. This is where you give something away, like an ebook, in exchange for people’s contact data (name and email, usually). With that data, you can build an email list and then talk about the products you’re promoting in the emails. You’ll see a much better conversion rates, not to mention you can also promote other things besides the main products.
Personally, I’m mostly using a site called Udimi. There’s a number of sellers there, and you can pick the ones you find interesting. Usually they will send you 10-20% more visitors than what you paid for as a bonus. The prices are roughly the same as with advertising and start at some $0.45 per click. So, for a hindred clicks (visitors) you’d pay $45, but then you’d get another 10-20 visitors as a bonus.
Back to the email list – if your landing page converts at 25%, you’d have around 30 people on your email list with one such session.
By the way, if you join Udimi via this link, you’ll get a bonus from them. Go try it. Yes, it’s my affiliate link, so I’ll get a little bonus too.
Best traffic sources for free traffic
One of the best traffic sources you can ever build is SEO traffic. This is traffic Google, Bing and other search engines send you when people search phrases you’ve posted about. The downside of this – you’ll guess – is a terrible amount of work you have to put in it. And, it takes time. It takes an awful lot of time. Besides choosing the right keywords, you also have to put some real effort in writing interesting posts.
Let’s see the best traffic sources for free traffic shortly.
Blogging
Having a blog is one of the best traffic sources for affiliate marketing. With a well-optimized blog, you can leverage the power of search engine optimization (SEO) to attract targeted visitors. By creating valuable content around relevant keywords, you’ll increase your visibility in search engine results, which will bring you hordes of visitors.
Rather than just having an affiliate site, it’s about building a personal brand that resonates with your audience – that is, if you want to grow your business in the long run. As the affiliate marketing space becomes more competitive, standing out becomes crucial.
A well-established personal brand allows you to differentiate yourself from the crowd. It allows you to showcase your unique personality, expertise, and authentic voice.
As new products and trends emerge, your personal brand can adapt and evolve alongside them, positioning you as a trusted authority in your niche. This can all be done by building a great blog, and monetizing a website is easy this way.
Keywords
If you want your blog to rank high in search engines, there’s a number of factors you must consider. The most important one is to choose relevant keywords.
These can be short, like “hairdresser”, which are ver broad and you will stand little chance to rank, or long, like “best hairdresser in New York”, which is far more specific. The later will possibly bring you less traffic, but this traffic will be much more targeted, hence you will have a better chance of selling something related.
I won’t lie, it’s a lot of work. And after that, what comes next is
Internal topic structure
This is where you have to structure your blog in such a way that Google will learn as much as possible about your content and determine whether you have content interesting for visitors or not.
These two alone will make or break your SEO results if you do them wrong or in a misleading way.
Leveraging Social Media
Social media has evolved into a monster that billions of people consume daily. As such, they are one of the best traffic sources for anyone. They have their specifics, of course, and you should follow the rules of specific networks you’re active on.
Let’s mention just a few of the most important ones.
TikTok
TikTok has developed into one of the best traffic sources among social networks. Its reach is already in billions, and it’s tremendously powerful because of the audience it targets.
Creating content is however hard work, again. But there are some tools you can use to make things easier, one being a software called TokMate. I have no intent of going deep on it right here, but there’s a lot about TokMate posted here. Check it out and see if it fits your plans, it includes TikTok information also, so you can see what makes it so special.
Pinterest is a visual discovery platform with over 450 million active users and it offers a unique opportunity to showcase your affiliate products and services through visually appealing images – pins. Stats say that 85% of Pinterest weekly users have made a purchase from Pinterest pins.
By optimizing your pins with relevant keywords and engaging descriptions, you can effectively attract the attention of Pinterest users who are actively searching for inspiration and ideas. With such a large and engaged user base, leveraging Pinterest as part of your social media strategy can significantly boost your affiliate marketing efforts.
LinkedIn is a professional networking platform. It allows you to connect with like-minded individuals and tap into specific niche communities. You can share valuable LinkedIn posts to gain audience or join relevant Linkedin groups. Actively participating in discussions can help you build valuable connections, establish yourself as an authority in your field, and ultimately drive free traffic to your affiliate links.
Instagram, like Pinterest, is a visual-centric platform and provides an ideal space to showcase your affiliate products or services through captivating images and engaging captions. It is part of Meta (Facebook) and shares the rules and advertising costs.
But you can do most of the job for free, by leveraging relevant hashtags and engaging with your target audience that is interested in your niche.
Facebook, with its vast user base and diverse groups, offers numerous opportunities to connect with potential customers.
Joining and actively participating in relevant Facebook groups allows you to engage with highly targeted audiences, share valuable insights, and promote your affiliate links in a meaningful way.
Facebook does not allow posting direct affiliate links, you’ll learn that soon. Instead, promote your blog or landing pages (bridge pages) that direct visitors further.
Twitter or X is known for its real-time conversations and can also be a powerful tool for reaching a wide audience.
By leveraging relevant hashtags, engaging with Twitter users, and sharing valuable tweets, this platform can help generate lots of traffic to your affiliate links and expand your reach with time.
Email marketing
Email marketing is easily among best traffic sources you can use, but comes with some price.
For start, you’ll sure need an autoresponder – software that will allow you to collect contacts into lists and send emails. I’m using Aweber and Sendiio, both have their pros and cons, but there’s a number of other autoresponders online.
Then, you’ll need a strategy, both for building a list and mailing to it.
These are all rather complex topics I’m not going into here. But you can read more about email marketing and building a list HERE.
Joining an Affiliate eco-system
Lately, there are some sites that promote themselves as affiliate eco-systems. They usually include trainings, tools (software) and tips about affiliate marketing.
One that caught my eye is called Master Affiliate Profits.
Its speciality is that it offers you a single affiliate link to promote, while its built-in mechanism does the rest, and this includes free traffic to this link. The system promotes lots of internal offers to your subscribers, but you always get paid a commission for any sale.
Considering that, it can easily be added to best traffic sources for affiliate marketing, in spite of not being free. For Platinum Membership that brings you 75% commissions, traffic and top-level training and tools, you’ll have to pay $797 during Phase2 (present phase in the time of writing) and possibly more later when Phase3 starts.
It’s worth every penny in my opinion, and I strongly suggest you take a look at full presentation here:
Conclusion
Choosing the best traffic sources for your specific needs is a process that you’ll simply have to do in order to monetize a website properly. Depending on the offers you want to promote, you must take into consideration different limitations and specifics of traffic sources listed herein. It might take some time, but when you pair your offers with the best traffic sources for it, you have a winning combination.
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