There’s many ways to approach affiliate marketing traffic generation. You can use paid marketing or look at the cheaper options such as blogging. Whatever you do, you’ll need to match your strategy with the time and money you have available. Your choice of products also matters in your strategy for generating traffic. See affiliate marketing business models for the different affiliate models available and affiliate marketing commission rates for types of products and what they pay.
Physical products, for example, typically pay much less than digital products. But product cost also has a bearing. A submarine, for example, although a physical product, carries a large commission if you can sell one!
Affiliate Marketing Traffic Generation – Paid Or Free?
According to your finances, available time and your product choices, you’ll need to choose an affiliate marketing strategy. All affiliates need traffic in order to get their affiliate products in front of potential customers. Without traffic, you won’t be in business for very long!
If you’re working long hours and making regular income, it might be worth using a high ticket affiliate program and concentrating on paid advertising. But if you have less money and more time, it’s probably worth looking at the cheaper marketing strategies which are more time intensive.
- Affiliate marketing through blogging
- Unpaid social media marketing
- Finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty
- Marketing on YouTube, or any other social media platform
- Niche website building
- See also get traffic to your website FREE
Paid traffic can be bought in a few ways too including:
- Adwords – find search traffic through keywords typed into Google
- YouTube – pay to have your YouTube video put in front of a targeted audience
- Facebook – use video advertising or standard ads with images
- Bing/Microsoft – offers a similar platform to Adwords
- Solo ads – Solo ads are advertisements on other people’s email lists
- Banners – advertise on someone else’s website through banners
Affiliate Marketing Traffic Generation – The Difference Between Paid & Free
So what’s the difference between paid advertising and free advertising. Well quite a lot actually! The free marketing strategies you can implement will likely take a lot longer in order to gain traction with an affiliate business. Content marketing means building a lot of content and getting that content to work for you building your affiliate sales. In the beginning, it will seem like a lot of work for little reward. But over time, content marketing can have a dramatic impact on your commissions, if you stick at it long enough.
One blog post, for example, isn’t going to make your business. But one post a day for several years will have a much larger impact.
Paid marketing is much faster. You can run a paid campaign and immediately see whether it works or not. This means you can find a winning advert much quicker than using a content marketing strategy. With paid marketing too, you can scale up once this happens simply by increasing your daily budget. This is much harder to do with content marketing.
So if you’re starting out with an affiliate business, it’s a good idea to get clear on how much time you can give, what your expectations are and your marketing budget, if any. With free and cheap marketing, you can expect a longer journey. With paid marketing you can get there more quickly, but you’ll need help to get there. A good business model is important too. With low value products, you won’t be able to learn paid marketing and still make profit, or at least it will be harder.
An Email Marketing List
Pretty much all affiliate marketers use an email list of subscribers. A list is key to success with affiliate marketing, whatever your marketing strategy is. With an email list you control your traffic. Paid marketing is expensive and organic marketing takes time and effort. But with a list, you can leverage both methods to get the most out of them.
An email list of subscribers is a list of people who opt in to whatever you are offering on a website, or landing page. Most affiliates have some offer to entice visitors to opt in to their email list. This is often called a lead magnet. I use an ebook lead magnet as one of my offerings to give to my subscribers. Ideally choose something of value which is aligned with your affiliate products.
Building a list takes time, but over time it will compound. At first, affiliate marketing seems tough because a small email list doesn’t produce much in the way of sales. But as your list grows, more people will follow you and buy products and services you recommend.
Affiliate Marketing Traffic Generation – Summary
So according to your affiliate marketing business model, and your affiliate commission rates, you should choose wisely depending on what works for you! You’ll also want to consider your available time and your finances. If you are time poor, but money rich, you should look into high ticket affiliate programs and using paid marketing. This will let you put in the least amount of time and build a business more quickly through scaling.
If you’re more time rich, but money is more scarce, you’re much better off choosing a cheap or free marketing strategy in which you can use your available time to grow content in your chosen area. See get traffic to your website free, and 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
Either way you should get an autoresponder and build an email list. This will help you leverage your efforts by compounding it over time through collecting interested subscribers. You can also choose subscription based affiliate products to maximise your efforts. With subscription affiliate programs you can earn ongoing income from each sale you make. This compounds over time and so your efforts are multiplied.
Access a free video series to learn more about the various options for affiliates.
