Your marketing strategy is dependent on the sources of your traffic. It’s important to optimize your strategy for high-quality traffic. Before you implement traffic driving tactics, though, it’s crucial to understand traffic sources.
Every affiliate marketing business & affiliate across the world, needs good traffic in order to grow their business. Traffic and leads are responsible for bringing in customers and sales for every affiliate offer that has ever existed. The question is, what are the best affiliate marketing traffic sources? And, what makes them the best?
We’re going to not just answer these questions, but also give you a full list of affiliate marketing traffic sources that have been tested and proven to convert. (We’ve spent a lot of money testing all of these traffic sources in our affiliate marketing career over the years)
Table of Contents
WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING
Affiliate marketing is a business agreement generally established between two or three parties:
- Advertiser or merchant: the company that provides goods or services and has its products promoted by affiliates in exchange for a sales commission;
- Affiliate or publisher: the online seller who publishes banners and content on their site with the aim of recommending third-party products or services, being paid a commission as a percentage of sales;
- Affiliate network (in some cases): the portal that unites these two figures and deals with all technical and economic aspects.
How Affiliate Marketing works
This agreement provides for payment as a percentage of each sale from the affiliate platform, i.e. the affiliate’s website that creates the content and promotes the advertiser’s products through web marketing techniques (Seo, Advertising Campaigns, Social networks).
Between advertiser and publisher there is often the affiliate network, which regulates every transaction and acts as guarantor between the two parties.
On the other hand, there are cases in which the advertiser has its own affiliate program and manages its own fleet of affiliates (e.g. Amazon).
The techniques used by the affiliate are different and multiple but identical to all those used in web marketing, the only difference is that instead of promoting its own products, it promotes those of merchants.
What is a Traffic Source?
A traffic source can be any platform that takes potential customers to the affiliate site, blog, or social media page. While it is recommended to have a website to send your traffic to, many affiliates and bloggers do work via their social media accounts.
It takes time and money to develop traffic from any traffic source, and to ensure the incoming traffic is high-quality. Doing so, though, is what will lead to business success.
Types of Traffic Source
Traffic sources can be divided into two broad categories: Paid and organic.
Paid
Any traffic you get from direct marketing is paid traffic. It’s a result of a paid ad campaign or pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Paid campaigns are very effective in getting more visitors to your affiliate sites. Google Ads (formerly, AdWords) is the most popular paid traffic generator.
Paid traffic does have an initial cost attached, but it can help create brand awareness when you start working as an affiliate partner. You can make targeted campaigns and measure your advertising efforts via tracking tools to monitor things like cost per click (CPC), cost per action (CPA), and cost per thousand impressions (CPM). A statistical analysis can show if your paid marketing effort was worth it and you can tweak it accordingly.
Organic
Organic traffic is free. Therein lies its biggest benefit.
Organic search traffic most often comes from the unpaid section of a search engine’s search results. It can be a gold mine, because once you’ve optimized your website for Google search, you’ll find your conversion rates increasing. Content marketing and search engine optimization are time-consuming and labor intensive, but worth the trouble.
If you’re building quality content on your social media pages, or making videos and tutorials on YouTube, you not only gain followers but are also able to drive other organic traffic for an affiliate program.
The major downside of organic traffic is that search engines and social media services often update and change their ranking algorithm, making it tough to keep up.
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What is a Traffic Source?
A traffic source can be any platform that takes potential customers to the affiliate site, blog, or social media page. While it is recommended to have a website to send your traffic to, many affiliates and bloggers do work via their social media accounts.
It takes time and money to develop traffic from any traffic source, and to ensure the incoming traffic is high-quality. Doing so, though, is what will lead to business success.
Types of Traffic Source
Traffic sources can be divided into two broad categories: Paid and organic.
Paid
Any traffic you get from direct marketing is paid traffic. It’s a result of a paid ad campaign or pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Paid campaigns are very effective in getting more visitors to your affiliate sites. Google Ads (formerly, AdWords) is the most popular paid traffic generator.
Paid traffic does have an initial cost attached, but it can help create brand awareness when you start working as an affiliate partner. You can make targeted campaigns and measure your advertising efforts via tracking tools to monitor things like cost per click (CPC), cost per action (CPA), and cost per thousand impressions (CPM). A statistical analysis can show if your paid marketing effort was worth it and you can tweak it accordingly.
Organic
Organic traffic is free. Therein lies its biggest benefit.
Organic search traffic most often comes from the unpaid section of a search engine’s search results. It can be a gold mine, because once you’ve optimized your website for Google search, you’ll find your conversion rates increasing. Content marketing and search engine optimization are time-consuming and labor intensive, but worth the trouble.
If you’re building quality content on your social media pages, or making videos and tutorials on YouTube, you not only gain followers but are also able to drive other organic traffic for an affiliate program.
The major downside of organic traffic is that search engines and social media services often update and change their ranking algorithm, making it tough to keep up.
BEST Paid Affiliate Traffic Sources
These are a few of the best paid traffic sources available. All have some pros and cons, and some might suit your niche more than others.
Paid Search Advertising
You directly market your website on search engines. You only pay the search engine when someone clicks on your ad, and bid for keywords that you think will be in potential customers’ search queries.
You’ll have traffic from people who are searching for popular keywords in your niche. Google Ads is most popular for PPC advertising, followed by Bing and Yahoo.
Contextual Advertising & Display Media Buying
Contextual advertising is also known as displaying banner ads on other ecommerce partner websites, chosen according to the content of the site. This is a great option for a performance marketing campaign. The ads are chosen by an automatic system and are shown to people who are interested in the affiliate program niche.
Native Advertising & Discovery Content
Native advertising is a subliminal digital marketing technique where the ad is integrated into the theme of the site. There are no distracting banners or pop-ups that can increase bounce rate.
Native ads don’t cause a sense of rejection in readers and more intelligently drive traffic to your website. The engagement of users in the case of native ads is 40% higher than with conventional banners.
Social Media Advertising
You can pay social networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter to display your ads. When the user clicks on a Facebook ad, they’ll be directed to your Facebook page or website landing page.
Mobile Advertising
Mobile is the fastest growing traffic source, and mobile video advertising is dominating this sector of the advertising world especially, because of dedicated ad networks.
Mobile users convert differently from desktop users, so make sure your banner ads on your website or other websites are optimized for mobile use. Mobile advertising is a cheaper ad spend but the returns are high.
Retargeting
Retargeting shows ads to leads and customers, but on third-party sites. It helps return a user who is familiar with your affiliate products and leads to high conversion rates with minimal effort.
Video Marketing
Just like social media sites, you can post ads on video platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Many influencers and affiliate marketers have YouTube videos related to the products they’re trying to market. They post ads directing people to these videos and later convince viewers to visit the merchant’s site.
Blogging
The golden goose to producing masses of traffic and leads online, is blogging. While there are massive upsides of blogging, there are also massive downsides.
Here’s what blogging can do for your affiliate marketing business.
- Massive amounts of organic and targeted traffic
- Quality leads and customers
- Brand recognition
- High conversion rates
Here are the downsides of blogging and affiliate marketing.
- More difficult to do then other traffic generation methods
- Can be costly
- Long time commitment
We suggest that affiliates blog to supplement their affiliate traffic and income.
Are you ready to draw customers to your affiliate website?
Ready to Drive Targeted Paid Advertising to Your Website?
Now that you have these tactics in your toolbox, you should be able to put together a simple strategy for getting more people to your site. Remember, though, that this isn’t a one-off exercise, nor do you have to try everything at once or use only one tactic at a time.
Try something. See if it works. If it fails, stick at it a little longer but bring something else into your roster. Most importantly, make sure the technical aspects of your site are running smoothly — if you need targeted audience, for example, we’ve got plans to suit any budget!
You can target users based on their demographics, psychographics, geolocation, online behavior, type of device, and operating system. Retargeting options and weather-dependent offers are available as well. Web Targeted Traffic has partnerships with numerous big ad networks like Smaato, InMobi, AdColony to grant you access to even more publishers. Its attractive features are omnichannel advertising and AI-powered optimization.
Just like with most internet marketing services, there are right ways and wrong ways to do things. If the traffic is junk, and if you can’t choose how long your traffic campaign will be, specify an exact number of visitors, and target your visitors location and interests, then what’s the point in buying traffic at all? We give our customers the best targeting options and flexibility, which sets us apart in this industry.
