There’s a few ways to get organic traffic for affiliate marketing. As the cost of paid marketing rises, it’s more apparent to many affiliates that they need an organic marketing strategy. Without a good high ticket affiliate product in your funnel, and/or subscription products, paid marketing can be out of reach. This makes organic traffic for affiliate marketing all the more attractive and even necessary.
You can find traffic organically through blogging, a YouTube channel and using the many social media platforms to connect with and market to potential customers. You can also build a niche website and get your content ranking on Google, and the other search engines.
Niche websites are targeted towards a specific audience and often use specific keywords in them. This site (Affiliate Marketing Mentors) has targeted specific keywords in order to attract an audience for free from the SERPS (- search engine results pages).
Organic Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – A Niche Website
A niche website is one of the simplest ways to attract free traffic from the search engines. Start with doing some keyword research around your chosen topic. A good keyword based domain name can make a massive difference to your ability to attract free traffic from the search engines.
To decide on your domain name, you should spend some time researching the keywords you want to choose. The right keyword should have a good amount of monthly searches, but not be too competitive. Medium tail keywords are those with 3-4 keywords in them. They are often the best because they have a good amount of monthly search traffic, while not being as competitive as short tail keywords.
Once you find a good keyword phrase to build your site around, purchase a domain and start building content. It can take some time before Google recognises you site and gives you a ranking. You’ll also need to provide some useful content in order to be in with a chance. This content can also attract the attention of the search engines too. You can use Google’s keyword planner to find other related phrases for your main keyword. Then write content for the keyword suggestions which come up on the keyword planner.
Organic Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – Blogging
Blogging is a good strategy if you have chosen a topic which you’re interested in and if you can keep up the necessary motivation to keep blogging over the longer term. Blogging is definitely a slow strategy but over time, if you stick with it, you should see a compounding effect of your content. Initially there won’t be much to show for your niche website. Over time, after Google and other search engines index your site, you should see traffic being drawn to your content.
With blogging, it can be months or even years before you have the desired amount of website visitors. Depending on your topic, and the relative competition in your chosen area/niche, the time will vary. So expect to work hard on your blog, creating useful content which offers value for your visitors. Over time, people will like and share your content, and this in itself is a good way to grow your traffic organically.
Of course if your content isn’t good, this won’t happen; or at least it will happen less. Content is king, so make sure you focus on providing good quality content from the outset. You can also manually build links from other websites using strategies such as guess blogging or blog/forum commenting etc. You can also outsource this work to link building companies and SEO experts. I use this company to do link building for me.
Organic Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – SEO
SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is an important part of organic traffic generation. When you build your site, and start writing blog posts, it’s important to optimise your content for the maximum possible impact from the search engines.
This means using the keywords within your content, in the image alt tags, headings and so on. Good SEO can go a long way when your site starts ranking on the search engines. To neglect it is to leave traffic off the table.
Ranking Factors
The SEO ranking factors which Google (and others) use include things such as:
- Your domain authority – which will take some time to build if you have a new site
- Back links from other sites – how many and where they are from are both factors, plus how spread out and natural your link profile looks to Google
- Quality of your content – is observed by viewer interaction on your website. So if your content is bad, Google will know because people will click away very quickly, and people won’t link to it.
- Domain age – the age of your domain has an affect on your ability to rank a site. Older domains which have built authority over time will carry more weight than a brand new website.
- Amount of content on your site – a thin site will seldom rank as well as a site with lots of content on it.
- Social media presence – the prevalence of your shared content on social media
- Plus many other ranking factors.
To give yourself a good head start with organic traffic, you should aim to create some awesome content which will be shared naturally over time. You can also use a free SEO plugin to help you with your optimisation. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.
Plugins can make your content more easily shared, help with SEO and also syndicate your content throughout your social media presence automatically. See autopost to social media from WordPress.
Organic Traffic Trough YouTube Channel
Many social media platforms can be used to promote affiliate products. YouTube is just one of them. YouTube is good in that it is a video sharing platform and you can upload countless videos to build your presence for free. The algorithm used by YouTube will restrict your views initially and give more views to those who have built up a huge library of videos over time. As your viewers and subscribers grow, you should see an uptick in your traffic.
Again, much like blogging this can take some time and effort before you see the traction from it. As with blogging, it can be slow at the beginning. There’s millions of websites and YouTube channels so it’s a competitive field. To draw attention, you need to keep at it for a long time, continuing to upload content on a daily basis for several months and years.
As your video or blogging library grows, you’ll see visits to new and older content which you have created weeks and months before. This compounds and eventually there is an uptick in traffic which is the result of your previous efforts.
For more strategies to find organic traffic for affiliate marketing checkout my article 22 ways to promote affiliate products.