In this post, you will learn about the best paid traffic sources for affiliate marketing that will bring real visitors to your website.
While organic traffic is, without a doubt, the most reliable and invaluable source of visitors, it requires a lot of time and effort before you see your first results. Alternatively, buying traffic allows marketers to widen their reach in no time. With the right approach, paid traffic will secure you a fast return in terms of more leads and conversions.
Whether your goal is to increase conversions, boost sales, or improve brand awareness efforts, you may have considered paid traffic marketing.
Paid traffic marketing is just what it sounds like; you’ll pay to get more traffic to your website. From Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) to banner ads and social media marketing, there are many paid traffic sources to choose from. However, how effective your paid traffic marketing efforts are will depend on you.
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The Ultimate Guide to Best Paid Traffic for Affiliate Marketing Success
A successful advertising campaign always consider one’s marketing objectives, desired budget, target audience, and the online behavior of said audience.
Paid traffic has its pros and cons. It’s not always easy to find high-quality visitors who will actually convert on your website. However, there are ways around this problem. In fact, you might be surprised by which methods turn out to be successful.
BEST Proven Strategies for driving targeted traffic to your site
Let’s take a look at some of them below.
1. Paid traffic gives you control. With PPC traffic, you decide exactly how long someone sees your ad before being redirected to another page. On average, most users see their landing page within seconds. Meanwhile, search engines give you full control over the kind of keywords used to show your ad to prospective buyers. As such, you can optimize your campaigns to target specific niche groups, demographics, regions, etc.
2. Paid traffic provides better conversion rates. One of the biggest challenges faced by online marketers is converting leads into actual purchases. People rarely purchase items right away after clicking on an advertisement or seeing an offer on Twitter. They typically wait until they receive something in return for making the transaction. When you combine this delay with the fact that potential customers may already have made similar decisions elsewhere, you realize that paid traffic helps boost conversions significantly.
3. Paid traffic increases profits dramatically. While it’s true that free traffic brings in lots of new subscribers and followers, it doesn’t produce nearly as large of revenue streams. A study conducted by Forbes found that only 1% of clicks result in a sale. That’s barely half of what you’d expect with traditional advertising techniques. Even worse, the same report showed that only 0.15% of clicks lead to a sale via PPC advertising. Not surprisingly, this number drops even further once you factor in the costs associated with running ads.
4. Paid traffic builds trust faster. Once you begin receiving positive reviews from your audience, you’ll soon notice that their level of engagement rises substantially. Users become loyal fans, and they feel compelled to spread the news about your brand far and wide. Because of this, they tend to share links to your posts or articles with others who could benefit from the information contained therein.
5. Paid traffic drives higher ROI. Most people assume that the main goal behind PPC advertising is simply generating more income. Unfortunately, the truth is that it has nothing to do with finances. Instead, the primary objective is increasing customer retention, boosting word-of-mouth referrals, and growing your mailing lists. All three factors increase your chances of selling additional goods or services down the road.
Which is the best free traffic source for affiliate marketing?
You really shouldn’t limit yourself to one method of attracting free traffic. Rather, you should diversify your approach, taking advantage of different platforms whenever possible. Here are our top four picks for doing so.
1. Article Marketing
When it comes to free traffic generation, there’s no shortage of opportunities available. Many bloggers publish free ebooks every day, and you can easily write your own blog post and submit it directly to major directories like EzineArticles and HubPages. If you’re interested in learning more advanced methods, check out these sites dedicated to helping you promote your work effectively.
2. YouTube Videos
YouTube is home to countless videos discussing various topics related to web design, programming, blogging, internet security, and more. Some of these videos go viral immediately, giving rise to thousands of views overnight. Others attract attention gradually, slowly gaining momentum as viewers continue watching each week. Either way, YouTube is a fantastic place to host educational videos and gain valuable insights. Plus, since everyone loves cats, you can probably figure out how to monetize your channel pretty easily.
3. Social Media Posts
Social media plays an important role in today’s digital landscape. Whether you prefer Instagram or Pinterest, Snapchat or Tumblr, LinkedIn or Reddit, these platforms allow you to connect with a massive network of individuals across the globe. By sharing interesting stories and engaging in conversations with other members, you stand a chance of earning backlinks to your profile and spreading awareness of your brand.
4. Email Subscribers
As mentioned above, email remains one of the best ways to reach a huge amount of people. Simply put, you’ll never run out of prospects to contact. Furthermore, unlike social media accounts, emails aren’t limited to certain niches. Therefore, you can send promotional messages to anyone who subscribes, regardless of whether they fit your ideal customer base.
There are dozens of other options waiting to be explored. From podcasts to blogs, audio files to live streaming events, you can literally draw inspiration anywhere. Just remember to keep track of the channels you visit regularly so you can stay consistent.
Things to consider before you choose a traffic source
Before we get into what are the best types of traffic to use, there are some things that you need to look out for.
Rules and regulations
Depending on your traffic source and where you are pointing that traffic too, you may have to comply with certain laws, regulations and rules.
Reading up on the regulations doesn’t take too long and it can mean that you don’t get penalized or lose business altogether in the future.
The price of the traffic
You need to weigh up a few different options when it comes to the cost of traffic.
Are you overpaying for traffic that is coming from a source that is unlikely to lead to many conversions due to your niche? Maybe the quality of the traffic isn’t great or you are overspending your budget to gain more hits and views?
Real, targeted traffic isn’t usually dirt cheap (although there are exceptions) but you need to consider what you can afford compared to how much money it can potentially make you.
Traffic quality
What is the point of having tons of traffic to your website if it’s poor quality and unlikely to convert?
Paying for a lot of bots might boost your numbers on Google Analytics but it isn’t going to gain more conversions and sales. Consider the actual quality of the traffic because while more traffic might seem like a good idea, it might not produce the results you desire if it is poor quality.
What are the best traffic sources?
So, now that we have looked at what you need to consider with affiliate marketing traffic sources, what are the best sources to use?
Mobile traffic
Mobile data is set to grow enormously over the next few years (by 700% by 2021) and it is the fastest growing source of traffic in the world.
More people now use a mobile device to access the internet than anything else (including laptops and PC’s). One thing to be careful of is that mobile traffic and other traffic convert differently and websites and pages need to be optimized for both to be fully effective.
Search traffic
We can break search traffic down into 2 categories – organic traffic and paid ads such as PPC.
The conversion rate is 7x higher if someone finds your landing page and affiliate marketing link via a Google search than if they used any other means. Organic traffic is highly effective because it takes a lot of work to succeed. Even though you can take a slight shortcut with paid ads which are among the best-paid traffic sources and while they do target specific groups of people, organic traffic is still the number one traffic source to aim for.
What Is A Good Affiliate Marketing Conversion Rate?
The short answer: It depends.
A conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by impressions.
Conversions can be anything: starting a free trial or downloading an ebook. They’re actions your visitors complete. Impressions are all of the people who saw your offer.
For example, if you run a Facebook ad leading to an affiliate landing page. Now imagine 5,000 people arrived on your landing page, and 300 of them signed up for your newsletter.
Three hundred clicks divided by 5,000 impressions (multiplied by 100) equals a 6% conversion rate.
Use paid advertising
Using paid ads is another effective way to promote affiliate links. And the best part is that paid ads allow you to target specific audiences. This can help you reach people most likely to purchase your products.
The obvious downside is you’ll be spending money to capture the leads. This can reduce your margins considerably. So you’ll need to do that calculation to confirm whether it makes sense to use paid ads.
That said, Google Ads presents one of the best opportunities to promote affiliate links. It allows you to create ads that can appear in Google search results or other websites across the internet.
To successfully promote your affiliate links using Google Ads, ensure you create relevant ads.
How to increase affiliate conversions and overall conversion rate
There are basically two ways to get more sales:
- Drive more traffic to the landing pages
- Increase the number of clicks on the links.
Many marketers concentrate more on driving traffic, but increasing the clicks on the links is just as important as increasing visitors to your landing pages.
Conclusion: How do I drive free traffic to my affiliate link?
There’s a lot of confusion about paid traffic versus free traffic in affiliate marketing. Paid traffic comes from various methods that drive people to websites where they’ll click on an offer or make a purchase. The most common method is pay-per-click advertising (PPC), which pays affiliates based upon each visitor clicking through their link.
If there was no cost involved with driving them to your site, then it would be considered “free” traffic. But because you’re paying someone else to send visitors to your website or landing page, it’s called paid traffic. It’s important to note that while PPC is often referred to as “paid”, it does not mean that you have to spend any money at all. Instead, you merely agree to pay the advertiser when one of their ads directs a person to your site.
You may also hear this term used when referring to other types of online traffic such as social media, email, display advertisements, etc., but we will focus on PPC for now since it is by far the most popular type of paid traffic available today.
Ready to Drive Targeted Traffic 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.
