Here’s a post on turning simple daily habits into a tonne of website traffic. If you want to make affiliate sales you need traffic. There’s no way around it. You either pay for traffic with your time or with your money! Since most ad campaigns don’t give a positive return, you can easily spend a lot of time (and money) testing and measuring advertising that simply burns through your marketing budget like a hot knife through butter!
It’s great once you have a profitable campaign, granted. But are you prepared to put yourself through the multiple ad creations and expense of that for the outcome? How long are you prepared to stick at it and how much money are you prepared to throw at it?
If you’ve had enough of paying for traffic, or you simply don’t have the funds for a marketing budget, organic marketing is probably the answer. If you still want to build an affiliate business those are your choices: paid marketing, or some free traffic strategy.
Turning Simple Daily Habits Into A Tonne Of Website Traffic – Identify A Habit You Can Create
The first step of this journey is to identify a simple habit you can repeat on a daily basis. There’s multiple ways you can generate traffic to your website/affiliate offer:
- Blogging
- Video blogging
- Social media – joining groups and interacting
- SEO – optimising website content for the search engines
- Email marketing – sending out content to your email list
- See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products for more ideas
Blogging, for example is a simple strategy you can use on a daily basis to build traffic to your website over time. If you stick with it, and post regularly, it can have a dramatic effect on your traffic. However, if you dabble, and only post content once in a blue moon, your results will reflect that. You need to be consistent with an organic strategy for the results to compound.
Turning Simple Daily Habits Into A Tonne Of Website Traffic – Inconsistency
Due to the nature of my film work (I worked as a stunt performer), I would get jobs out of the blue and be working away for a week or two. So my income was sporadic. I started learning affiliate marketing so I could build an income around the stunt work, for when it went quiet. So when I started I got into blogging. The problem was I wasn’t consistent. Once I got into the flow of writing every day, a job would come in.
By the time I got home again, it would take me a week to get back into my blogging routine. Initially, I would also lose interest in blogging every day because I didn’t trust that it would bring in sales. So, after a week or so of blogging, I would give up! Within a week or two, a sale would drop in from my blog and I would kick myself for not keeping up the habit!
The sale would give me confidence again (and belief) and I’d be back at the blogging every day! So here’s the thing, you must trust the process, but without evidence your belief will wane. That leads to inaction and you’re back procrastinating again. To help get around this problem, choose a topic you love writing content around and a product which is aligned to it which provides massive value to your audience.
Turning Simple Daily Habits Into A Tonne Of Website Traffic – Consistency
To start with you must develop a habit out of your traffic strategy. So whether that is blogging or uploading videos to YouTube, you must do it every day, or at least several times a week. Consistency is the key to organic traffic. Here’s an example of my daily habit strategy:
- Create a blog post
- Send it to my email list
- Post it on my social media accounts
At first, nothing much happens. You might get a few hits on your website as your email list and social media presence attracts a few bites. This will also depend on the size of your email list and your social media presence. You might get nothing! But don’t be disheartened. At this stage you’re only developing a habit out of these basic daily steps.
On day 2, you do the same, and on day 3 and on day 4 and so on! Within a week or so something magical will happen. You’ll start to see growth in your traffic! It might be sooner or later, but if you keep going you’ll get more and more traffic over time. You’ll also get better at your strategy over time too, so don’t let the habit slip.
Why Results Compound
On day 1, you have only created a single blog post, for example. You share it with your list and your social media following (which may be very small). However, on day 2, some of your day 1 emails and social media posts will just be getting found. Often it can take a little time for the social media “feed” to trickle down. Plus, not everyone is on social media when you post your links.
On day 3, you’ve now got a little more comfortable in your habit pattern. Plus, you’ve got 3 days worth of social media shares and emails that’s you’ve sent out. Not everyone will click on your link or even open your email message. But as you continue with your daily habit, momentum will kick in.
Each day, you not only have your new blog post that some people will be finding, but you’ve also got the previous day’s messages and posts that certain people will still be finding. Added to which by building regular content on a blog or video channel, you’re finding people organically as your SEO (Search engine optimisation) improves as you build authority with the search engines.
The Success, Failure Curve
It’s useful to understand the “success, failure” curve at this point because you’ll want to quit before you can appreciate the power that consistency has in your affiliate business. Here’s an image from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits:
When we achieve a certain level of “success”, we lose interest/motivation at pursuing our goals. If our early motivation is, (for example) to escape poverty and get “comfortable” financially, when we achieve that we put our feet up a little.
With blogging, I’ve definitely found this to be true. When I’m comfortable, I slacken off with my habits. When I’m in a desperate financial state, I ramp up my motivation and get busy.
To stay consistent it’s useful to recognise this pattern so you don’t fall back towards the “failure” part of the image above.
Habits Are Your Friend
At the beginning of your affiliate marketing “journey” you are filled with excitement and enthusiasm. This can quickly disappear when you’ve been working away for several weeks or months without having any kind of positive results. Remember to focus on your action steps and avoid looking for results in the beginning. Reward yourself for your actions; the results will follow if you stay consistent.
Motivation doesn’t last so you need to turn motivation into a habit pattern which can serve you and your affiliate business. Make this habit so strong that even on your worst days you can still do it! Some weeks you won’t make sales, but stay consistent. Some months will be good and you’ll start to see sales dropping in, stay consistent!
If you’re procrastinating, just look for the next step. Don’t overwhelm yourself with too many options. See my post on how to overcome procrastination in your affiliate business.
Make Sure You Build Your Email List
As you send more and more people to your blog posts, or YouTube channel through your new content, you will want to use this traffic to help you build your email list. An email list is super valuable to affiliates because it puts you in control of your traffic.
You can see the work that’s going into this traffic generation as you continue to create content on a regular basis. So it’s worth offering your visitors a cool opt-in offer to help you build your email list.
Content promotion is just as important as its creation too, so don’t skimp on promoting your blog posts or videos.
For a long time I created blog posts and simply hoped that Google would rank them! It’s a flawed strategy because this might never happen. You simply must promote your content every time you publish something!
Promotion Methods
To promote your content there’s various methods and strategies you can use. Make sure you use at least one of two of these as your daily routine after creating your content:
- Post on social media
- Email your list
- Backlink from other websites in your niche (good for SEO)
- Blog comment on other blogs in your niche
- Use Q&A websites to post links back to your content (See using Quora for traffic generation)
Make a daily habit you can stick to for the long term and cut out some space in your day to make it a priority. If you’re just getting started, don’t try and make it perfect, just establish the habit first and you’ll improve as time goes on. See also my post on how to build momentum with organic marketing and this post if you’re feeling stuck.
