Generally speaking the free traffic methods for affiliate marketing take much longer than the paid ones. Paid traffic is fast and you can turn it on almost instantly. You can also quickly see whether a campaign is working quickly with paid traffic, and scale it up when it is!
But you can also burn through a lot of cash very quickly too and if you don’t hit upon a winning campaign, you can’t scale anyway! If you don’t have money to test and measure marketing campaigns with, what options are there as an affiliate? There are various free traffic methods for affiliate marketing, so if you’re not up to using paid marketing this one’s for you!
Most of the free affiliate strategies I know take a little time and patience. By a little I mean a lot! But when they start working you’re making 100% profit on your sales. Plus if you strike upon a free marketing strategy which works, you can get focused in on it and rinse and repeat.
Here’s a few of my faves!
Free Traffic Methods For Affiliate Marketing – Blogging
Yes blogging. Despite blogging taking a lot of time and effort, it does work if you stick with it for long enough. If you’ve only just started blogging it can be a little frustrating not seeing much for your efforts. But over time your efforts can compound to create a nice regular income.
When I started blogging I was super enthusiastic. A little time after that, I was disappointed, then depressed! After throwing in the towel after several months of blogging, a sale would pop into my inbox. “Aha” I thought, it worked! So I would start blogging again after having dropped it for a good several months. If only I had have kept up my blogging habit consistently, I would be swimming in sales!
If you’re consistent with blogging, not much happens for a while, and then everything happens! So although blogging can be tough, if you stick with it for long enough, it pays out. But you need to find a topic you enjoy writing about otherwise you’ll probably burn out long before you start seeing those sales drop in!
It’s best to have your own website if you’re a blogger but the cost of this is tiny. There’s also free blog platforms such as Hubpages.com, Blogger.com and WordPress.com. But your own site is much better for SEO – search engine optimisation. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress.
There’s many things to do once you have an established blog to promote your content. See writing blog posts for SEO.
Free Traffic Methods For Affiliate Marketing: A Niche Website
A niche website is one of the best super cheap ways to get traffic to affiliate products. Although you will need your own domain name and hosting, the cost is pretty negligible. You can purchase a domain name for less than $5 and a hosting is less than $5 a month with this hosting provider. One of the benefits of a niche website is traffic. A niche website is built specifically around your keywords so as to rank on the search engines for a certain term.
By choosing carefully, you can potentially rank a specific term if you find one which is relatively uncompetitive and you’re able to purchase a keyword domain name. This site, for example has been built around the keywords affiliate marketing mentors to give it a better chance of ranking for that particular term.
You can also build more and more content once you have built a niche website, but initially it can help you find traffic quickly. See also how to build a niche website.
There’s lots of strategies and tactics which can help you rank your site, gain more visitors and promote your content with a niche website. One of them is to find long tail keywords with less competition than others and write keyword focused articles on your site.
Free Traffic Methods For Affiliate Marketing: Social Media (Quora.com)
Quora.com is a question and answer website where members post questions which can be answered by experts in their field. With affiliate marketing, you’re not allowed to directly post affiliate links on Quora.com but you can post relevant links in your answers if they are helpful and appropriate to the questions.
By using your own content which you build a website/blog, you can link back to it leading people to your site. As you do this regularly over time, you’ll build up a backlog of answered questions. This becomes a sort of “digital asset”, leading people to your website. Over time traffic numbers increase as your content grows in size.
It’s a great strategy which you can use for free to build up traffic to your own website, while helping people with a problem at the same time.
Free Traffic Methods For Affiliate Marketing: Facebook
On Facebook you can find people who are suitable for your affiliate products through joining groups. There’s thousand of groups on Facebook so initially you should define who your target audience is by getting to understand your customer avatar.
Once you know who to target, you can find appropriate groups where they hang out and join them. Interact with people in those groups and build connections over time. Don’t spam the groups with affiliate links though. You’ll likely get banned! Instead, just genuinely offer to help with questions and queries. Over time, other group members will see you and naturally browse through your Facebook profile.
This is where you can promote your affiliate products – on your Profile. You need to set up your profile so that a visitor can quickly see what you’re offering. You’re allowed to post links to websites and images which relate to your affiliate offering on your profile. Here’s what’s at the top of my Facebook profile:
Again this strategy takes a little time and effort and you need to stay consistent and interact on a regular basis with your target audience. Make a point out of spending an hour or two a day over several weeks if you want to see some results from it. Make sure your profile is nice and easy to read and clearly shows your affiliate offer immediately when people check on it.
You can also add your affiliate links on many other social media platforms too and find similar strategies to target your audience through messaging and posting. See also unpaid social media marketing.
YouTube
YouTube offers another great way of building connections with users of the platform. To use YouTube for free successfully will take some time and it’s a similar strategy to blogging. By uploading videos in your niche on a regular basis, and targeting specific keywords, you can build an organic following through YouTube.
YouTube is the second most used platform on the internet and has a huge amount of potential traffic you can tap into. There’s slightly less competition on YouTube than Google too which potentially means it’s a better/easier strategy than blogging. However to get traffic organically is a tough nut to crack. You need to be uploading videos on a daily basis for a good, long while. It might be weeks, months or years depending on the relative competition in your niche.
Summary
There’s just a few of the main free traffic methods for affiliate marketing. There’s many other I mention in this article too: 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
With most of the free strategies you’re going to need to stick with them for some time before you see the results. This can be tough, especially if you’re unsure whether you’re doing it right or not!
It’s a good idea if you’re a beginner affiliate to join some kind of training program which gives you some one on one coaching, which you can do by starting here and accessing a free video series.
