Wondering how to get traffic for affiliate marketing? Without traffic affiliates can’t refer customers to products. Without customers, they don’t make any money! So, traffic for affiliates is like fuel for a vehicle! Without it it just won’t work! There’s lots of ways to get traffic if you’re an affiliate and depending on your marketing budget, or lack of it, this can take some considerable time and effort.
With a large marketing budget, affiliates can build huge email lists very quickly. Email marketing is definitely something you should do if you’re an affiliate marketer. It lets you control your traffic and build relationships with your subscribers. When your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they’re much more likely to buy from you. If you give them lots of useful information through your emails, they’re much more likely to open them too!
Grab free access to an email autoresponder here.
How To Get Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – Email Marketing
From a website a visitor only has a small time slot to make a buying decision. Most customers will need several touch points with a certain product or seller before they make a buying decision. That’s why email marketing works for affiliate marketers.
It lets them connect with potential customers many more times than a website can. You can also build a large database of subscribers with an email list and this allows you to build relationships with many people through automated emails and broadcasts which you send out regularly.
To build an email list you need traffic though! You can offer something on your website to encourage your website visitors to join your list. No website traffic? More on building website traffic later in this article. An ebook is a great tool to use on your website to get your website visitors to jump on your email list. See ebook lead magnet for more on this.
How To Get Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – Blogging
Yes blogging is a great way to get more visitors to your website. Blogging is tough though and it takes some serious dedication to get enough content on your website to draw in consistent traffic. Depending on the topic of your blog, this can take months or years of work to do. There’s lots of ways to write content on your blog but a simple strategy I use is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
Shorter keyword terms will be much more competitive and so it’s very difficult to get your content ranked on Google using them. So instead you can aim to rank your content for the “low hanging fruit”. See how to rank your blog post on Google.
Depending on your topic, this strategy may be more or less successful! The key is to keep going for the long term, building an endless array of content for your website visitors. To do this takes time and commitment so you’ll need to choose a topic which you can happily blog about for the longer term.
Choosing a topic you’re unfamiliar with will mean you’ll need to research your topic more carefully for each piece you write. This can get tiresome, especially if you have no interest in your topic. So it’s wise to choose a topic you at least have an interest in. See also best micro niche for blogging.
How To Get Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – Dynamic Adverts (for existing content)
If you already have some content on a website you can use paid marketing in order to increase your traffic quite quickly. Set up a “dynamic” advert with Google Adwords and simply paste in your domain name to the platform. Dynamic adverts automatically create keywords relative to your content and show adverts which are suitable for your audience. You can even set up an advertising campaign with a tiny daily budget to suit your needs.
You’ll find the dynamic search feature in Google Adwords dashboard when you set up a paid advertising campaign.
Or you can use Google Adwords to send traffic directly to any website by choosing your own keywords. Bing (now Microsoft) also offers a similar service and tends to be slightly cheaper.
How To Get Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – Quora
Here’s a cheap alternative too which compliments a blogging strategy. You can use Quora to directly answer questions which relate to your blog content. Then, post your blog links in with your answer. Providing you offer some genuine value on Quora.com, you should be allowed to post your links if they aren’t affiliate links and they relate to your answer.
I’ve used this strategy successfully for some time now and over time your “pool” of Quora content will grow and bring you a nice stream of traffic to your blog content.
Again this is another slow strategy and you should spend some time each day doing this. Over a few months of doing this you’ll start to see traffic coming from Quora. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.
Landing Page & Paid Marketing
One of the best ways to get traffic for affiliate marketing is to send paid traffic to a landing page and collect your subscriber’s information. Then follow up with email marketing campaign promoting your products.
Many affiliates don’t do this because they use products which pay too little. If you’re promoting products from Amazon for example, you can only make single “one off” commissions. Plus the commission rate is very low on Amazon (between 1% and 20%). See Amazon affiliate marketing commission.
If you only make tiny commissions it becomes unviable to run paid marketing campaigns and still turn a profit. So you need better products which pay better commissions. Using high ticket affiliate products and subscription products is an answer.
With a high ticket sales funnel which contains subscription products, you have a much larger return on investment when using paid marketing. So profiting with a paid marketing becomes much more attainable.
Paid marketing platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Google Adwords are used by some marketers. They tend to be more expensive that some social media platforms and Bing (Microsoft) advertising platforms, for example.
Unpaid Social Media Strategies
There’s also a heap of unpaid social media strategies you can use to get traffic for affiliate marketing. One such strategy is to use Facebook groups. Set up your profile so as to showcase your offer and include an easy to see link to your website. Then join multiple Facebook groups where your target audience will hang out. See how to know your target market for more on this.
Once you get into the groups you can communicate with other members and help them. Answer questions and join the chat. Just don’t spam because you’ll probably get removed from the group!
Over time as you connect with more users you should see people visiting your Facebook profile and some will ask to add you as a friend. Keep this up for some time and you’ll start to see people clicking on your link and visiting your website/landing page. See unpaid social media marketing for more on this.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
SEO is another option for content creators. If you’re a regular video or blog post creator, you’ll want to learn some SEO skills. SEO is important if you’re going after free traffic from the search engines. If you’re a blogger, there’s a variety of SEO tools which can help grow your traffic:
- SEO plugins
- Social media share buttons
- Old post Syndicating tools
- Push notification plugins
- etc.
See best free blog plugins for WordPress.
Summary
There’s a tonne of different tactics for generating traffic for affiliate marketing. Ideally focus on one until you get good at it before moving on to another. Slower strategies which are free may take months to generate the kind of traffic you can get in a day with a large marketing budget. But choose something sustainable for you according to your budget and available time.
See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.