Targeted web traffic is massively important for affiliate marketing. Without good targeting, your visitors can arrive on your site with no great interest in what you’re selling. Un-targeted website traffic is a little like having random visitors arrive on your website.
But if your content is drawing in the right visitors to your site, you can expect to do much better with your leads and sales. The right visitors are massively interested in what you’re selling. Your content therefore should be a good match for the kind of people you want to attract to your products. Affiliates should get to know their customer avatar to help them create the right content for their chosen affiliate products.
Targeted Web Traffic – Customer Avatar
It sounds fairly logical that your content should reflect your product/s in some way and vice versa. But it can be easy to make this mistake, especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing. When I started out online I assumed everyone would want to buy what I was selling. I had websites cross promoting products which had nothing in common with the website content. This is a big mistake; someone visiting a website to purchase flower delivery, won’t be interested in an online business, for example.
So if you have an online business affiliate banner on an unrelated website, it’s going to be much more difficult to sell from. Remember the internet is an information gathering tool and most people don’t buy from websites anyway. A small percentage of your website visitors will take some action on your site such as sign up to your email list, or purchase a product. The rest are looking for information and will likely leave without taking any action.
Knowing your customer “avatar” is a good first step towards creating the right content to attract the perfect customer. See also how to know your target market.
Targeted Web Traffic – Knowing Your Audience
According to your product or service, you’ll want to attract the kind of person who will be a loyal customer for decades! This means knowing them really well. A DIY shop, for example, might have many customers. But most of those customers will likely fall into a more specific category.
For example, DIY’er are more likely to be older. So perhaps they are over 30 years old. With a local store, there will also be a geographical radius where shoppers will come from. Online businesses are different of course but location can still be a factor. With an online business, certain countries are more likely to better than others for your perfect customer.
Knowing your perfect customer will help you understand how to get more out of your website. To create targeted web traffic, you need to know your customers. Otherwise you can spend a fortune on wasted advertising or years on the wrong kind of content. Ideally find out as much as possible about your customer avatar:
- Age
- Location
- Interests
- Income
- Family
- Where they hang out online
- Etc.
Targeted Web Traffic – Marketing
The fastest way to attract targeted web traffic is through using a paid marketing platform. There are many of these but Google Adwords offers a good place to start. There’s also Bing and Yahoo but Google is the main one. Head over to Google’s keyword planner and type in your main seed keyword. This will be the main focus or topic of your website and product/service. So if you’re selling car exhausts, your keyword will be “car exhaust”.
You can create an advert on Google Adwords in a few simple steps which the platform will talk you through. You can also set your marketing budget at a price point you can easily afford.
Use Google’s keyword planner to find those keywords which are most suitable for your business. You don’t want your advert to show oon those keywords which attract the wrong kind of person. For example, any keyword which contains the word “free” might indicate the searcher isn’t likely to become a customer.
So you can add the term “free” to your list of keywords you don’t want your advert to show for. This can save you heaps of cash! Again, the more you know about your perfect customer, the more you can target them with the right kind of advertising. Wasting money on bad performing keywords and locations can be more easily avoided when you know your customer!
There’s many platforms you can use with paid marketing to attract more people to your website. Here’s a few others:
- YouTube
- Bing
- Adwords
- Yahoo
Ideally choose one platform and learn how to use it profitably before moving on to another.
Organic or Free Traffic
Organic traffic is much more difficult to obtain. You can build a website around your main keywords to give you a helping hand. But ultimately Google has the final say on whether your website ranks for your main keywords. Creating content on your site can lead to more free traffic and sales. Again, use Google’s keyword planner to find keywords which are suitable for attracting the right kind of person to your website.
Short keyword phrases on the planner will have many more searches than their longer term derivatives. However, these keywords are generally much more difficult to rank for in the organic search results. So it’s a good idea to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. (SEO = search engine optimisation).
By finding the long tail keywords which have less competition, and creating content for them, you can more easily find free traffic from the search engines. This isn’t guaranteed however and you’ll need to create a lot of content in order to make this strategy work for you. Download my ebook “Niche Blogging For Profit” for more on this strategy.
