Affiliate Marketing Traffic Tips
There are many articles on this site that will get you started with affiliate marketing.
If you click on Categories in the main menu above and then on:
- Affiliate Marketing
- Beginners Affiliate Marketing or
- Affiliate Marketing Training
you will find a lot of useful information.
And to get all your questions about affiliate marketing answered, please go to Affiliate Marketing: Your Questions Answered (opens in a new tab).
But one of the things you'll realize after building your website and signing up with affiliate vendors is that your business is dead in the water without traffic, that is, visitors to your site.
And not just any visitors. They need to be visitors who are interested in the products you are promoting.
You have to create trust, so they are confident that your vendor's product will fulfill their desire or fix their pain and that your vendor will deliver it as promised.
To help you to achieve this, here are your affiliate marketing traffic tips.
Tip #1: SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
This is the first of your affiliate marketing traffic tips.
It's essential to perform search engine optimization on your website.
This is so that the search engines (mainly Google and Bing) learn to regard you as an expert in your niche and reward you with high rankings for your chosen keywords and search terms.
(If you don't understand what that means, I suggest you investigate Wealthy Affiliate as its training courses cover all this in simple, easy to watch videos that will lead you through the whole process. You can join for free and work through the first 10 lessons in each of two streams without being required to upgrade.)
Your aim here is to find keywords in your chosen niche that attract reasonable traffic but without too much competition. These are usually what are called long-tail keywords.
For example, if your online business was in the (highly competitive) weight loss niche or the broader but still competitive health and fitness niche, you would have zero chance of getting a high rank in Google or Bing for the search term "weight loss".
This is because you would be competing against sites that have been around for years, have a ton of high-quality backlinks (more on that later) and hundreds or even thousands of high quality articles targeting the keyword/search term "weight loss".
However...
The long-tail keyword "spirulina weight loss" still has reasonable traffic and far less competition. It's much more likely that a blog post targeting that long-tail keyword can rank highly in the search engines.
You can post it on your website either as an informative article to improve your positioning as an expert or you can find a vendor whose product range includes a spirulina supplement and who has an affiliate program. Join it and use your affiliate link in the blog post.
Incidentally, I got this information from a keyword research tool called Jaaxy. For any keyword you enter into Jaaxy, it will show you relevant long tail keywords and, for each of them, the number of monthly searches, the number of competing websites and the percentage probability of getting an article targeting that keyword onto page 1 of Google. It's an extraordinarily powerful research tool and is available free from Wealthy Affiliate.
Tip #2: Create a Landing Page for Each Product
This is the second of your affiliate marketing traffic tips.
Once you've got your affiliate link for a vendor product in your niche, it can be tempting to use it directly in your blog posts, social media and paid ads. This isn't the best way to use it.
What you should do is create a landing page for the product.
A landing page is simply a page on your website that pre-sells the product (sometimes by showcasing a personal story describing your experience with the product and how it changed your life/solved your problem/opened up a new opportunity etc.
Sometimes the landing page doesn't include your website's menu, so that your visitor has only two options - click on your affiliate link or close the page. Of course, if you make the page open in a new tab, closing the page doesn't also mean leaving your site.
You can create the landing page as a regular page or you can use a template specifically designed for landing pages.
If you have the Thrive Suite, you have 14 beautiful landing page set templates to choose from.
Each landing page set includes several related pages, all using a common theme. These include a home page, an upsell, a confirmation, a thank you and download page, as well as many others. You can use as many or as few as you wish. The time savings are immense and the results spectacular.
The idea of the landing page for each affiliate vendor product is that it's the only place on your website that contains the affiliate link to the product.
All other promotions, whether blog post, paid ad or social media post, link to the landing page, which is an internal link on your own website.
This has positive implications for your SEO, will increase your visitor's trust factor and can even protect you from being banned from some advertising platforms!
It also means you have a single area (the landing page itself) where you can make ongoing improvements and experiment with different headings etc. over a period of time.
Tip #3: Write Keyword-Rich Blog Posts
This is the third of your affiliate marketing traffic tips.
In order to get free traffic from the search engines, you have to appear on page 1 of Google or Bing when someone searches for the keyword you're targeting.
The way you achieve this is to write blog posts containing:
- Valuable content focused on the keyword, so that visitors are likely to click on it and then stay on it because the content is valuable
- The keyword itself, blended into the content in such a way that tells the search engine that it's what the post is all about and
- A link to the landing page for the associated affiliate product, so that the visitor is offered the opportunity to purchase the keyword-related product.
It's been frequently shown that a link to the landing page with text such as "find out more..." or similar gets more clicks from visitors than "Buy Here". No surprise, really. You're trying to lead your visitor into a funnel, not beat them over the head with a sales message.
For a template you can follow to write engaging blog posts, please have a look at A Formula for Writing Blog Posts.
Tip #4: Use PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising
This is the fourth of your affiliate marketing traffic tips.
While there's no doubt that you should seek free traffic, especially as the process of setting up your site to attract free traffic enhances its authority, it can be a mistake to rely on it exclusively. This is because:
- You become totally dependent on the search engine algorithms. You may have put a lot of work into getting your blog posts onto page 1 for desirable keywords, only to find them gone following a change to the way Google or Bing assign their rankings. And though you can undoubtedly work your way back, you may have lost substantial income in the meantime. The way to minimize this risk is not to try to "trick" the search engines into giving your article a good ranking, but to provide them with what they want: good content that provides real value. Every algorithm change is oriented towards making the search engine smarter and more able to determine what is good content and what isn't.
- Traffic that comes from paid advertising is much more predictable. After some experimentation and the elapse of time, you'll know for a particular ad:
- How many impressions it will receive
- What its CTR (Click Through Rate) is (the number of clicks per 100 impressions)
- What its conversion rate is. In other words, what proportion of those clicks convert into sales
- How much it costs per click and therefore
- What its ROI (Return on Investment) is.
Now if you have a decently positive ROI, you have a genuinely profitable business.
All you have to do to increase your income is to spend more on advertising and this is the way to scale up your business fast.
The two most popular advertising platforms are Facebook and Google ads.
You do have to be very careful to adhere to their rules. Your ad can be disapproved if you don't and your account can even be banned from further advertising.
And, of course, the other danger is a negative ROI, where you end up spending more on advertising than you return in revenue.
It's beyond the scope of this article to cover the intricacies of Facebook and Google advertising, but if you'd like to know more, please scroll down and let me know with a comment below.
FAQs
How Do I Get More Traffic for Affiliate Marketing?
The surest way to get more affiliate marketing traffic is to use PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising.
I mentioned Facebook and Google Ads above but starters should probably focus on getting their affiliate marketing traffic from Google and Bing ads.
There are a couple of reasons for this.
A Facebook ad interrupts people while they are doing something else (when was the last time you went onto Facebook hoping to see an ad? Never, right). You are hoping that because you may have managed to target the right group of people, your ad will intrigue them, you'll get the click and maybe the sale. As someone starting out with affiliate marketing, your chances of achieving this are minimal and your odds of a negative ROI are high.
On the other hand, someone who sees your ad on Google or Bing was actively searching for the keyword that triggered the impression, so as long as your keywords are relevant, and lead to a landing page promoting a relevant offer, your chances of converting are much higher.
Here's another affiliate marketing traffic tip: Both Google and Bing frequently offer free advertising, such as spend $300 and get an additional $600 in free advertising. As long as you have an advertising budget, this can be a real boost. Just search "Google ads offer" and "Bing ads offer".
How Do I Get Free Traffic for Affiliate Marketing?
The only way to get free traffic for affiliate marketing is to follow the four tips given above and then continue to write keyword-rich blog posts. It can be a long, hard grind, but in the end, it's all about delivering valuable content that creates enough trust among your visitors that they will buy what you recommend.
The other thing you should be looking at is getting backlinks from other quality sites to yours.
Generally speaking, backlinks don't get you much in the way of free traffic, but they do help increase your site's domain authority, which will in turn help your blog posts' rankings,
Higher blog post rankings turn into free traffic for affiliate marketing.
Does Affiliate Marketing Still Work in 2022?
Affiliate marketing has now been around for so long that it can be regarded as a mature industry.
And a highly regarded and totally safe one.
Vendors use bulletproof affiliate marketing software that ensures that sales get credited to the affiliate marketer and that commissions get paid in a timely manner and at the agreed rate.
Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, more and more people started shopping from home and became addicted to it when they found out how easy it was to research products, find the best candidate from product reviews by real customers and order safely online.
So an increasingly large customer base.
How many of those customers were putting an affiliate commission in somebody's pocket?
The answer would have to be more and more, as vendors came to understand that paying an affiliate marketer a commission was more effective and gave a higher return on investment than all other forms of promotion. Especially as once set up, they didn't have to do any additional work except the standard ones of order fulfillment and customer support.
As a bonus, they had to up their game in order to attract the best affiliates. So a win-win all round.
So not only does affiliate marketing work in 2022, but it is only going to get better and better going forward.
What Are Traffic Sources in Affiliate Marketing?
Broadly, there are two sources for your affiliate marketing traffic.
The first is organic traffic. This is the free traffic that you attract by creating high-quality content that gets you ranked for selected keywords/search terms on the front page of the search engines (primarily Google and Bing).
The advantage of organic traffic is obvious. It's free. At least in terms of money. In terms of your time, in can of course be quite expensive. However, this is not normally a major concern when you're starting out.
The other advantage is simply that the fact you are producing valuable content for your site is increasing its authority and trust factor.
The major disadvantage is that it's dependent on someone else's rules. A change to Google's ranking algorithm can see your site disappear from page 1 overnight.
The second traffic source in affiliate marketing is paid advertising.
The advantage of paid advertising is that it's (reasonably) predictable and scalable.
If you have an ad that's giving you a positive ROI (Return on Investment) so that, for example, you are making $25 in profit for every $10 spent on advertising, then spending $1,000 on advertising will almost certainly make you $2,500 and this will continue until something else changes. And, of course, you will continue to monitor all your ads' performance so you have early warning and can take action accordingly.
The most popular advertising platforms are Facebook, Google Ads, Bing Ads and YouTube. You can research specialists for each of these platforms.
