Can you really get free leads for affiliate marketing? There’s two main ways to get leads as an affiliate. You can either pay for leads or earn them! To get a lead you need an email autoresponder which allows you to collect email subscribers from a website or web page. You can get one for free here.
If you don’t have a website, it’s well worth building a website which you own. If you want free leads, it’s worth looking at my article on how to build a niche website. A niche website can help you attract traffic for free. Traffic is the most important element of attracting free leads. Without traffic you won’t attract any leads.
Free Website/Landing Page
If you want a free website to use for leads, you can use Weebly.com. Weebly lets you build a simple website for free and place a lead capture form on it. However, a Weebly website address looks less professional than your own domain name, so it’s worth getting your own domain and hosting if you’re serious about free leads.
If you’re using Weebly, for a free site, I would suggest to at least buy a domain name which you can point to your Weebly website. That way, as you use the methods described in this article, you’ll look more attractive to your prospective visitors. Still, many people use Weebly to great effect and you don’t have to spend anything!
You can also use Aweber to create a landing page too, although your link will often look long and messy so it’s worth purchasing a domain name to forward to it to make it look more professional.
Free Leads For Affiliate Marketing: Capture Form
Your lead capture form is an important part of this process and that’s the page visitors will see when they come to your page to enter their details. Your page should communicate your most important message in simple terms and focus on the benefits rather than the features of whatever you’re offering. Here’s a lead capture form I have used to collect emails:
The features of your offering might be interesting for you (the affiliate) but mostly won’t be of interest to your would-be subscribers! If they are going to hand over their email address and give you their trust, you need to focus on WIIFM: What’s In It For Me – or for them, (your visitors)! Therefore your landing page should have a clear benefit driven call to action. It’s worth doing some research on this topic because a good landing page will convert many more visitors into subscribers than a bad one! See also why use landing pages.
The best way to find your best performing landing page is to run paid marketing to one and test it for yourself. Cross test different landing pages using differing images, titles, colours and forms etc. But of course this involves spending money and this article is about free leads for affiliate marketing. There’s also software you can purchase which will help you determine the best performing landing page for your target audience.
Free Leads For Affiliate Marketing: Blogging
You can get free leads for affiliate marketing through blogging. However, don’t expect much too quickly. It can take months of blogging before you “break through” and start seeing organic traffic coming to your blog. Even then, much of your traffic won’t convert into subscribers. A very small percentage of your traffic will likely convert into leads. For more about blogging checkout my article niche blogging for profit.
To convert traffic from a blog into leads you can use lead capture forms and pop ups, which you can find on Aweber. Pop ups are good for collecting leads because they ensure everyone who lands on your website sees your offer. You have probably been annoyed by the popup on this website already!? Even though I hate popups too, they are a great way to collect leads for free from a website.
Pop Ups, drop downs and standard opt in forms are all useful to collect leads and the more options you have on your site, the more chances a visitor will opt in. Another good plugin I use for opt ins is called Icegram (By Icegram). It’s a free plugin for WordPress and offers multiple op in offers for websites. I use Icegram opt ins on this website and you’ve probably seen the drop down webinar offer I use for free opt ins?
Free Leads For Affiliate Marketing: Ebooks & Pdf’s
Ebooks are a great lead magnet for affiliates. Your ebook should lead the right kind of people into your email list. Ideally create an ebook which matches your affiliate products in some way. Once you have created your ebook, set up your landing page or website to showcase it to all visitors. I have used multiple ebooks to get many leads. Once you have created an ebook, you can also build content around your landing page to attract traffic organically. Pdf’s are also a great thing to offer on your website because they typically have much lower competition on the search engines.
Here’s an ebook I offer which has helped me get thousands of leads for free just by putting it on my blog:
Free Leads For Affiliate Marketing: Traffic
So we have so far mentioned landing pages, popups and just touched on blogging. The key ingredient in getting free leads for affiliate marketing is getting your offer in front of people who are interested in it! Firstly you should get to know your customer avatar. This is an important step and can save you heaps of time and frustration if you do this. Do yourself a favour and checkout the article on target audience for affiliate marketing and the customer avatar worksheet pdf. Understanding who it is who will want what you have got will save you a lot of time and wasted effort.
There’s a few ways to generate traffic to your website or landing page for free. Blogging, YouTube videos, social media websites etc are all platforms where you can find your target audience from. To get free leads you need to trade time focusing on activities which bring people to your landing page/website. Unfortunately this takes time and effort, but your efforts will compound if you stick with it for long enough! Here’s a few basic free strategies you can use to drive traffic to your website or landing page:
- Blogging
- Quora.com
- YouTube
- SEO – Search engine optimisation
Blogging
Blogging, as mentioned is a long term and slow strategy. But you can get some great results with it if you get clear on who you’re targeting with your posts. I love blogging and have made it a focus on my free lead generation strategy. But it did take some time before results started to come in regularly, so you need a long term approach. the best way to stick at it for long enough to matter is to choose a topic you’re interested in, or passionate about. Ideally both! If you can’t imagine writing blog posts about your topic for at least a few months, it’s probably not the topic for you!
To find suitable blog posts for my potential leads I use Google’s keyword planner to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. By typing in your main keywords you can find the “low hanging fruit” of keywords which offer much less competition on the search engines. If you do your homework, these little “gems’ can give you free rankings on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. When you get free listings you get free traffic. Checkout my article on this strategy here. Blogging is a huge topic and you can do a lot with the content you have created too:
- Link building
- Sharing on social media sites
- SEO – search engine optimisation
- Posting on question and answer websites
Quora.com
Quora.com is a question and answer website that allows anyone to answer questions in their field of expertise. For affiliates this means you can attract free traffic and send that traffic to your landing page or website. You can set up you bio on Quora in such a way as to draw people to your landing page, where you can collect their email address. Here’s what my bio looks like on Quora.com:
Again, as previously mentioned, your CTA (call to action) needs to be focused on the benefits of your offer.
Once you have set up your bio, you need to attract traffic to it! You can do this by getting active on the platform and answering questions which are associated with problems your customer avatar might be having.
As you answer questions, you can also link your answers to relevant content you have created on a website. This gives you two possible opportunities of attracting leads: from your website and from your bio. The more questions you answer in your niche, the more people will see your bio and links. You can’t however directly link to affiliate products in your answers. If you do, you’ll likely have your answers deleted. See also affiliate marketing on Quora for more on this strategy.
Facebook is another platform which can be used to attract traffic to your landing page/website. You can set up your Facebook profile to showcase your offer. Here’s what mine looks like:
Once you have set up your bio, you need to attract the kind of people who will be likely to have an interest in your offer. Again, check back to your customer avatar worksheet pdf to learn about who your “perfect customers” are! Where do they hang out on Facebook? Facebook has a number of groups you can join where you can find new people and interact with them around specific topics. So for example if you’re promoting some kind of fitness product, you might start looking for weight loss groups, or fitness groups of some kind.
Ask to join the groups by filling out any questions and agreeing to the spam terms etc. Once you join a group you can interact with other group members around certain topics of interest. Don’t spam groups with your affiliate links or websites! This will likely get you banned! Instead, interact with people naturally and get involved in the conversation. Make a habit of this and spend some time every day in the groups. Over time, people will naturally look at your profile and see your offer. See also unpaid social media marketing.
YouTube: Organic Marketing
You can also use YouTube for marketing your content organically. This is done in much the same way as blogging, only with video. research your keywords first and find longer tail keywords for your video titles which have less competition. YouTube is pretty competitive too and you’ll need to upload videos regularly for some considerable time to generate free traffic from the platform. But once you do you can send traffic to your landing page or website by linking to it on each of your videos.
Again the best topic to choose is one in which you have an interest or passion and one which you can maintain your enthusiasm in over the longer term.
Summary
Obviously there’s a few strategies you can use here and you can’t do them all at once in any great depth. You will probably gravitate towards a particular strategy and if so that’s where you should aim to focus your time. These strategies won’t give you tonnes of leads overnight.
They only work over time and you’ll likely see sporadic results at first, which should compound over time. Pick a strategy you like and stick to it for several weeks, working on it every day. Depending on your affiliate niche, the time it takes will vary. Make sure you do the work on your landing page and make your offer desirable, otherwise you’ll find it more difficult getting leads.
Spend some time learning about your customer avatar and the type of person you want to attract. I’ve had some great results using these techniques but if you don’t put in the work you can’t expect to get the results! Paid marketing is of course much faster and more scaleable. So if you don’t have the patience for these kinds of strategies you should look at some cheap methods using paid marketing. Retargeting organic traffic is quite cheap and you can also use Google’s dynamic ads which works well in combination with blogging and organic marketing.