Getting organic traffic for affiliate marketing is much more difficult than simply paying for traffic. With paid traffic, you can turn your visitors on, almost immediately. It’s like turning on a tap! But with organic marketing you will need to do a lot more work. If you want organic traffic from the search engines, such as Google, or on YouTube, you’re going to need to create a lot of content.
With a lot of content on a blog, for example, you should start seeing some of your content getting indexed on the SERPS – search engine results pages. You will than appear on the searches and people will start visiting your website. But, this is often after a lot of work. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet, and around 51 million YouTube channels. So you’re up against it – especially if you’re starting out. Before Google will index your content, you will need to have proved yourself. Unless you are regularly publishing high quality content on a blog, or YouTube channel, (and sharing it) it’s going to be difficult to get found.
How To Get Organic Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – Getting Found
One strategy to help you get found more easily is to create content for which there is less competition. Since the highly competitive terms are going to have a tonne of competing websites, it makes sense to find low competition long tail keywords. You can do this by using Google’s keyword planner which is a free tool.
Type your main “seed” keyword into the planner and look for long tail derivatives which have less competition on the SERPS.
The keywords which have large search volumes are typically much more competitive. To find those with less competition, look for lower search volume keywords. You can do this by clicking on the Avg. monthly searches tab until the search volume changes:
Next, head over to the Google search bar using a laptop and look for the numbers under your search query. Do a normal search for your keyword and a phrase match search too. You should see a number under your search:
Once you find a suitable keyword which isn’t too competitive, you can create some content for it and publish it on your blog.
Using SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
To optimise your content, you can use an SEO plugin. I use one called Yoast SEO which helps me write search engine friendly content. You can also build back links to your content and publish your posts on social media. The more you do this, the more likely people are to visit your blog.
Keep posting content and over time Google will notice and reward you with a ranking. This can take some time, but it’s worth the effort because you can ultimately bring free traffic to your blog. Once you’ve got a large volume of free traffic you should start to see affiliate sales happen if you’ve set up your website correctly.
Targeting The Right Audience
Keep in mind before you set off creating a tonne of content that not everyone is going to be interested in your affiliate products. Most of the online marketplace is totally uninterested in what you’re selling. So if you’re going to make a bit effort in attracting a free audience to your site, make sure it’s the right audience for your affiliate products.
This all starts by knowing who you’re attempting to target with your content. The right content will have buying customers coming in in their drives. The wrong content will attract people who aren’t going to buy. An example might be a product review.
With a review you attract someone who is actively looking at a specific product. So they are much more likely to buy. Conversely, “how to” guides are less effective when you’re selling from content. People are looking for free information with how to guides, so they’re less likely to buy than from a product review. See also how to know your target audience and customer avatar worksheet pdf.
Turning Organic Traffic Into Affiliate Sales
To turn your organic traffic into sales, you need to build an email list. Email marketing is super effective from a blog. On a blog, most of your visitors are going to leave within a few minutes. But once on your email list, you can build a longer term relationship with them.
To build a list, offer something for free to your blog visitors, such as an ebook. Once people start opting in to your list, you can offer them free information and lead them to your affiliate products. Built trust by offering value.
You can sign up to my email list on this website. Just find the form or popup and enter your details.
Organic Traffic From YouTube & Social Media
YouTube is another option to get organic traffic for affiliate marketing. You can use a similar strategy and upload multiple videos to build a channel. Again, you’ll need to upload a lot of videos to start getting organic views. By finding the keywords which have less competition, you’ll likely make faster progress.
Facebook is another option for organic traffic and there’s plenty of other platforms you can use for this too. With Facebook, you can create a group or a page and target specific keywords with your content. When people look for something specific which relates to your affiliate product, your page can show up.
Here’s an example of a page I created on Facebook which attracts traffic organically (check out my page here).
