Earlier this month, we launched a new blog segment called Ask an Affiliate Manager, offering free tips and advice for affiliates. We prompted affiliates to ask our team of affiliate managers anything they wanted about the industry—and you answered!
M. Puente was the first affiliate to get on board with this blog segment, asking:
What are the best sources of traffic in affiliate marketing?
I am officially the first person to tackle this question, and in our goal to make information more accessible to our own network of affiliates, and others across the industry, my answer is shared below.
First, thanks for your question, M. Puente. This is a bit challenging to answer because the reality is, there is no one magic formula for driving traffic in affiliate marketing.
If you want to make money with affiliate marketing, traffic is obviously essential. The more traffic (visitors) your site receives, the higher your chance to convert those visitors to customers. However, driving traffic to your website is only half the challenge. It’s getting targeted traffic that should really be your focus. This takes patience and hard work, and there are different ways to generate that traffic. You essentially need to determine what works best for you. Here are a few ideas:
Search Engine Optimization
Getting your website listed on search engines is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website. However, depending on the keywords you choose, it can sometimes be difficult to get ranked high. This takes time and patience, but is a sustainable way of getting long-term traffic. There are different techniques to increase your presence on search engines. Some of these are referred to as on and off page SEO.
On page optimization: There are many ways you can drive organic traffic to your website:
-Remove flash images and frames (crawlers can’t read flash )
-Carefully choose your keywords and implement them accordingly into your content, alt, H1 and meta tags of your pages
-Strong URL parameters with structured keywords
Off page optimization:
-Link building with targeted keywords
-Submitting your website to directories and article submission
-Blog postings
While there is no real cost in incorporating SEO practices on your website, the effort will require time and dedication, and knowing what you’re doing is key to getting it right. The benefit can be long-term however, and can result in an increase in traffic coming to your website with little financial investment.
PPC Advertising
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is definitely one of the fastest ways to get traffic to your site. However, most affiliates we have worked with go through a lot of trial and error before they yield great results. It is important to conduct a thorough keyword research to understand which keywords will benefit your campaign, bring in the most traffic be the most competitive. You can use Google’s keyword tool for this sort of research.
While some other affiliate marketing traffic sources are free to use, PPC requires investment of your own money. We have seen some top affiliates use PPC, but once they stop investing money in their PPC campaigns, the advertisements stop and so does their traffic. It is very possible to lose a lot of money this way without seeing results. Tread carefully when you embark on a PPC campaign. You may want to consider PPC once you are more experienced in affiliate marketing and have more knowledge about how it works.
Social Media
There is some debate about whether or not social media can really drive traffic. We have used social media in our own marketing strategy and have found great results. However, your own success is really dependant on how active you are on social media sites and how much time you would like to spend building those relationships. The positive side of this is that it is free, fun to use and you can have a far reach.
These are just a few top affiliate marketing channels for driving traffic to your site. While in the beginning you may want to keep things simple and stick to one source, you’ll eventually want to use a combination of the above and other means not mentioned here to get more traffic. Regardless of the method you choose, always remember that you need to be targeted in your efforts.
Do you have a question that you’d like to ask one of our affiliate managers? Ask away! You can send your question via email to info@shareresults.com or get on board with us via Twitter or Facebook using @shareresults with hashtag #AskanAM.
- Ask An Affiliate Manager: How Can My Website Rank Higher in Google?
- Meet Kristina, Share Results’ Newest Affiliate Manager
- Jingle all the Way to the Bank Part 2 – Generate Seasonal Traffic
- Blending Social Media and SEO is a Must for Affiliates
- 6 Things That Affect Your Traffic
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Thank you for your answer.
I will start with PPC and move on down to social media.
Good luck and do keep us posted on what you discover about the different avenues for driving traffic. We will be curious to know your take on it as everyone has their personal preferences.