What are the best free traffic sources for affiliate marketing? There’s many free marketing strategies affiliates can use to get people to visit their websites or landing pages:
- Blogging
- SEO – search engine optimisation
- Niche website building
- YouTube organic marketing
- Social media sites
It’s a good idea for affiliate marketers to build email list so that they can keep in touch with their subscribers and build a relationship. On a website a visitor only has a few minutes to make a buying decision. But once on your email list, you can extend this time frame to weeks, months and even years.
Once you know this you can make traffic work harder for you, as an affiliate. But getting that traffic in the first place is one of the biggest challenges for affiliate marketers.
Best Free Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing
Free traffic is slow traffic which is an unfortunate side effect of it being free. With paid traffic, you can see results very quickly. What can take days or weeks with a paid marketing strategy can take months and years with a free one. But not everyone wants to use paid marketing. Many of the cheaper affiliate products only offer small levels of commissions and so don’t allow the option of using paid marketing.
With a high ticket product range and recurring commissions, paid marketing platforms can be more within reach. But if you don’t have this luxury within your affiliate products, you’ll need to use free marketing.
One of my favourite free traffic sources is Google, through blogging and building niche websites. I’ll come back to the niche websites later on and talk about blogging first.
Best Free Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing – Blogging
Blogging can work wonders for your affiliate marketing business. However, it’s most definitely a long term strategy. Expect to work building content for several months or even years before you start to see any kind of regular traffic or sales.
If you’re in a less competitive industry it can be much quicker but it’s hard to put a definitive time frame on blogging sine it depends on so many variables. Affiliate marketing is a hugely competitive industry, so it’s a long road if you’re building a blog in the affiliate marketing niche.
One blogging strategy I use is explained in my ebook (above) Niche Blogging For Profit. Basically it involves finding long tail keywords which get monthly searches using Google’s keyword planner. Then, I check to see what the competition looks like on Google. If the content looks like I have a chance of ranking it, based on the competition, I’ll go ahead and create some content around that keyword.
Best Free Sources For Traffic – SEO
Once you have some content up on a website, you can build out more content, linking back to your older content. As you continue to do this over time, Google should recognise your link profile is gaining more backlinks; and hopefully reward you with a higher ranking (if appropriate).
You can also use a plugin to help you build content when you create it. I use Yoast SEO and it helps me to write SEO friendly content and get better traction from the search engines.
You can also link to your content from other sites such as:
- Ezinearticles.com – write content and link in your bio back to your website
- Hubpages.com – another article writing space to build backlinks
- Quora – I use Quora to answer questions in my niche and leave links back to my content. Although these are no-follow links, this can still help people find your content and you’ll gain traffic if you do this enough. But it doesn’t help your SEO because of the no-follow.
- Forum posting – answer questions on forums which relate to your niche. Most allow you to link to your bio which you can link to your website
- Blog commenting – blog commenting is a simple way to build backlinks to your website and can increase your SEO score over time. Ideally post useful comments which add to the discussion. That way your comments are more likely to be allowed and other readers will often click through to see more of your content.
Best Free Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing – Niche Websites
I’ve built a few niche websites which I use to “feed” traffic back to my main website. A niche website can be used to target specific keywords which relate to your niche in some way. Often, by choosing a seed keyword and using it in your domain name, it can give you some extra weight with the search engines for that particular keyword.
As you can see, this website has affiliate marketing in the domain name. This can sometimes give it extra credibility with Google for certain long tail keyword phrases I’ve used in some of the articles on this site.
Of course you still have to create some useful content and you can’t rely on a keyword domain name doing all the work for you! But it can help you if you put in the work. Building a website for free traffic can work wonders if you do it right and choose the right keywords.
Again, check for the relative competition using the niche blogging strategy I mentioned above.
YouTube Organic Marketing
Another excellent free strategy to get free traffic is YouTube organic marketing. With YouTube, you upload videos in the same way as you would build a blog. With thousands of videos you’ll start to see more and more people seeing your content, subscribing to your channel and of course visiting your affiliate products through either a website or an email list you’ve built.
Some YouTuber’s create many videos for their channel every day and build huge followings just from organic traffic alone. But again, this is a slow process and you need to stick at it for the long haul before you’ll see regular traffic and sales of your affiliate products.
Your content has to be super relevant for your products too. If your visitors don’t convert into customers, it can be because you haven’t got enough visitors or that you’re not using the right kind of content.
Social Media Sites
There’s no more social media sites than you can possibly need and each one offers an opportunity to get free traffic if you’re an affiliate marketer. Ideally, stick to one platforms and master a specific strategy before moving on to another one.
One strategy I found is to use Facebook to build an audience through groups. Join multiple groups in your particular niche. Then, interact with people in those groups on a regular basis, forming friendships and helping people with genuine problems.
Use your affiliate products to further help them when appropriate and set up your Facebook profile to showcase your product/website. When people look at your profile from your interactions, they’ll see what your offer is and potentially click through to sign up to your email list.
Again this is a long term “slow burner” so it’s worth sticking at. Create a spreadsheet of time spent in the groups every day and look at your daily routine in terms of building connections. After a few weeks or months of consistent activity, you should see some traffic if you’ve picked the right groups and approach it in the right way. Of course it goes without saying that you shouldn’t spam groups with your affiliate links! You’ll get banned most likely if you do this.
But if you do it right, and offer to genuinely help and connect with people, you’re more likely to make this into a long term traffic generating strategy.
Get Support
One of the best things you can do for your affiliate business is get help and support from others who are further ahead than you with affiliate marketing. Access an online community of mentors and coaches and get the support you need to take your affiliate business to the next level.