How much traffic do you need for affiliate marketing? There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing and you will definitely need some traffic to sell affiliate products. How much traffic you need will depend on a number of variables. Generally you should be able to convert 1% of traffic from a website into sales. But how you do this can have an effect on your numbers.
There’s a few variables which will determine your success as an affiliate. Traffic is a major factor and you’ll need traffic to get anywhere with affiliate marketing. Generally the more traffic you get, the more sales you get too! But you also need to consider the type of traffic you’re getting. Whether your traffic has been pre-sold on your product, how you communicate with your visitors and whether you capture your visitor’s emails, all factor in to your conversion rates.
How Much Traffic Do You Need For Affiliate Marketing? – Types Of Traffic
Without traffic you won’t make any sales. So you’ll definitely need to prioritise getting traffic if you want to make any money as an affiliate. However, some traffic is better than others. Targeted traffic is really what you want as an affiliate. A good example of targeted traffic is through using a review website. With reviews your traffic is very targeted. A review website is often the last piece of information someone looks at before making a buying decision. So if you can create a review which gets traffic, you’re in a good position to make sales online.
The flip side of this equation is that you can create a lot of content which gets traffic but doesn’t convert into sales. If you create content which is vaguely related to your product, your conversion rate is likely to be much lower than with a very targeted piece of content like a product review. So for affiliate marketing specifically you’ll want your visitors (traffic) to be very targeted. See how to know your target market.
You can also generate targeted traffic by using what is known as the pre-sell. The pre-sell is an advertising campaign which gears traffic up to be very targeted. It pre-sells the product you want to sell on your website or through your email list. With a good video advert, for example, you get very targeted visitors coming to your website ready to sign up and purchase. With a piece of content which only vaguely relates to your product or service, it is going to be a lot more difficult to sell something.
Customer Journey
The customer journey is an important factor too. Even with targeted traffic, if the path for your visitor to the product they want is unclear, they might leave your site to continue their search. If your link is broken, they’ll look elsewhere. Even if your website is too slow to load, they can easily click away to look for their answers.
A good customer experience is congruent with your visitors needs. So if they are looking at a review website, they want to get the answers they need to make a purchasing decision. If your site doesn’t answer their questions, they’ll click away.
A sales funnel involves an advert, a landing page and a follow up series of emails. If anywhere along this journey there’s a disconnect from the initial message to the final product,(or the message is incongruent), the visitor is less likely to convert into a customer. But if there is a congruent message which continues throughout the customer journey, the visitor is more likely to become a customer.
For example, if someone signs up for a free ebook on affiliate marketing, they should expect to receive emails on this same topic.
Choice Of Product
A high ticket digital product pays far more than a low value physical product. Physical products pay from 1%-10% commission, on average, to their affiliates. Whereas, digital products pay more like 40%-50% commissions. Compare a low value physical product at $20 to a high value digital product at $2500 and you see a massive discrepancy in your earning potential: 0.60 cents (at 3% of $20) compared to $1000 (at 40% of $2500).
With the same amount of traffic, you can make $0.60 or $1000! When you also consider the use of recurring commission affiliate products, you can see it pays to work smart, not just hard. Recurring commission products are software products and memberships. You can earn ongoing commissions potentially for life with these kinds of products. (See lifetime commissions affiliate products). With physical products you need to continually sell more and more of them to keep your income coming in.
So, with even a smaller amount of traffic, you can make affiliate marketing work harder for you with the right kinds of products. You’ll still need traffic, but a smaller volume of sales can give you a larger income with the right kinds of products.
Email Marketing – Converting Traffic Into Leads
With a website your traffic can evaporate as quickly as it came. If you don’t have the right kind of traffic, or your content is only slightly connected with your products, it’ll be harder converting that traffic into sales. Most people don’t browse the internet with the intention of purchasing something. The internet is an information gathering too. So unless you specifically build a website to review products, for example, chances are good that your content won’t necessarily lead people to the checkout!
Some affiliate products are more obtuse than others, too. With a toy from Amazon, you know what you’re getting. But if you’re choosing to sell digital products as an affiliate, it can be harder to get customers to understand the value in those products.
Most website traffic won’t convert into sales. Usually around 1% or less of website traffic will actually make a purchase. But you can substantially improve those odds if you build an email list from your website. A website visitor usually only hangs around for 10 minutes or less.
So you’ve only got that amount of time to turn them into a buyer! With an email list, you get to capture your visitors email address, in exchange for giving them something of value. This dramatically extends the time period with which they can make a purchasing decision. You can build a relationship with your subscribers, and offer them products for months, years and even decades!
You can also use your emails to better help your subscribers understand your products and how they can help them.
Summary
So, how much traffic do you need for affiliate marketing? With the right kind of traffic, a good lead magnet, email mail follow up series and range of products, you need far less traffic than you would using low value products, badly targeted traffic and no email list. Of course you still need traffic and lots of it. But with a good strategy, products and proper targeting, you won’t need as much traffic to make the same income.
If you’re selling single products which only pay once, you’ll need a continuous flow of traffic to keep those sales coming in. But with subscription products you can make ongoing income from the same customers. So you’ll need fewer clients to make your business pay.
Traffic is massively important of course to make an affiliate business work. But it’s also part of a larger whole. To make an affiliate business work, it’s worth knowing which pieces to get right first, before starting out. Otherwise you can waste a lot of time chasing traffic only to make peanuts when you actually make a sale!
If you’re serious about building a realistic long term income from affiliate marketing, you can join a training and mentorship program here.
