There are many ways you can get traffic to your affiliate site. Below are strategies you can start using today.
Remember that slow and steady wins the race. You’re going to be publishing and promoting forever. And in the beginning, you’ll hear crickets. That’s normal.
Keep at it. It’s an investment.
Imagine if you bought one share of Apple every month from the beginning. You’d be set for life. This is the same thing.
There are many ways of driving traffic to your site, but the one that matters most is:
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic via search engine optimization (SEO) is what I use the most and recommend. It’s free and costs nothing. You only need to create high-quality content that people are happy to share.
Eventually, your posts start appearing in search engines to specific queries. Every click to your site is a vote in its favor. The more people cast votes for your article, the higher it ranks.
Leverage Online Forums
Leverage online forums by answering questions relevant to your industry. You’ll build authority as people start seeing you as the expert.
The more consistently you answer questions, the more your authority grows.
Quora and Reddit are two of the largest platforms for executing this strategy.
Reddit has 430 million monthly visitors. Go to Reddit and look for terms related to your affiliate site, and view the comments.
Look for comments with lots of engagement for the most amount of traffic. You can post your comments with links to your website as long as you do it ethically.
If you’re helping them solve a problem, you’re in good shape.
Use Reddit’s keyword research tool, Keyworddit, to find keywords related to your niche.
Enter the name of a subreddit, and Keyworddit finds all related keywords in that subreddit with monthly search volume and context.
When you click ‘Context,’ you’re taken to the SERP page with all corresponding results for that keyword.
Or, if you’re using Quora, (the site gets 300 million monthly visitors), enter the domain into a tool like Ahrefs Site Explorer, and use its ‘Top Pages’ report with your keyword as a filter.
In the below example, I used the keyword filter “affiliate marketing.” It displays all of the related questions featuring that keyword.
Guest blogging and answering comments in niche-specific forums are two more examples of ways you can generate traffic to your website.
When looking for industry-specific groups or forums to answer questions in, try using a search term like, “marketing questions for [keyword]” or “business questions for [keyword]”
For example:
Marketing questions for pet store owners.
You can also search for any industry for groups on Linkedin or Facebook.
Social Media
Leveraging social media is excellent for engaging your target audience, raising your brand’s awareness, and increasing sales.
Social Media Marketing [Free]
Like building an audience organically with search engines, it takes time to create a substantial following on social media.
It requires active engagement with your readers, but when done correctly, it can yield massive results.
Sharing content can be as simple as promoting a blog post or a video.
You’ll want to pay attention to what your audience talks about, post comments to maintain active engagement, and measure what’s working.
Social networks also serve as:
Customer support to address concerns and answer questions
Community-building
For example, one of our brands uses its Facebook community to answer questions, promote new content, and ask for ideas.
If needed, you can run hyper-targeted social media ads to specific demographics (more on that below).
Using social media management tools like Buffer or Hootsuite can help automate this process. You can plan and choose the date and time you want to publish content.
Social Media Advertising
Social media ad campaigns let you connect with your target audience at scale. The process is also quicker.
Before putting money on the table to get targeted traffic, determine which networks your audience hangs out on before running your campaign.
Facebook is one of the most commonly used, so, many start there because of its diversity.
You can leverage video ads (like the above example), photo ads, story ads, carousel ads, and collection ads.
And Facebook is only one example.
You can run ad campaigns to display on feeds like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Email Marketing
Email marketing lets you foster relationships with your audience, promote content, and boost sales by sending them information straight to their inbox.
When someone visits your website, have them sign up for your newsletter, product review template, checklist, or another lead magnet.
Once you have their email address, you can use it to build a deeper relationship with your readers.
And similar to using social media management tools, you can automate your email marketing campaigns.
There are a variety of ways you can use automation, including:
Welcome emails: Thank your customer for signing up, welcome them, and give them a preview of what to expect over the coming days. You can also tease them with upcoming offers.
Lead Nurturing: Send targeted info to select groups of your email list based on previous actions they’ve taken.
Newsletters: Keep your audience updated with events happening on your blog, promotions, or upcoming sales.
These are ways to maintain engagement without worrying when to send emails because you’ve prepared.
When social media sites crash, you’ll always have your email list.
Building an email list is one of the most crucial aspects of your job as an affiliate marketer.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
PPC ads appear on search results pages. You’ll post one on a platform (e.g., Google) and pay that platform whenever someone clicks your ad.
These ads typically target specific keywords meant to attract website visitors to your offer.
For example, Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) uses real-time bidding and auctions off keywords to the highest bidder.
You can divide your campaigns into different categories, including:
Location
Product type
Keyword
PPC and cost-per-click (CPC) are one and the same as both refer to the same thing.
For example, you might say you’re running a PPC campaign, and you’d like your CPC not to exceed $1.00.
PPC ads appear at the tops and bottoms of organic search results. Other search engines also feature ad placement, including:
Bing ads
Yahoo Gemini
Baidu
Paying for search traffic is costly because you’re paying for visibility.
While holding the top place in a Google search is amazing, once your money disappears, so does your spot.
A similar paid advertising model is Pay-Per-View (PPV), which employs a landing page designed to drive clicks to your website.
These are some ways you can start to get traffic to your affiliate site. It’ll take some time, but it’s worth it in the end.
Hope this helps and good luck!