The success of an affiliate marketing website is dependent upon the number of sales it can drive for the businesses that it’s partnered with & its incoming traffic that’s responsible for generating those leads and sales.
This means that securing constant traffic is one of the most important tasks an affiliate marketer needs to do.
And whilst purchasing traffic is a common and reliable method for boosting campaigns, it simply just sometimes costs too much for many new affiliates.
So in this article, we’re going to show you where and how to get free traffic for affiliate marketing campaigns and most importantly, how you can provide the boost your business sorely needs.
Why Get Free Traffic For Affiliate Marketing?
Visitor traffic is the bread and butter of any affiliate marketing website. Without it, an online marketing campaign is good for nothing.
Website traffic comprises the bulk of potential spenders who will eventually turn into paying customers & the primary reason affiliates campaign to get free traffic for their websites is, obviously, the zero cost attached to it.
Having access to free traffic incites some good advantages other than the fact that it does not entail expenses.
First, you don’t have to hire third-party sites to drive traffic to your website, and you can save money that would otherwise go into advertising.
Another reason is that you don’t have to deal with staff who are usually out on weekends and holidays.
With free traffic flowing into your site 24/7, your business can thrive no matter the holiday, and you can generate loads of passive income.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a good and practical method for driving traffic organically, and we shall explain why in the next section. However, SEO becomes less of a necessity if you can draw free traffic from other sources (but as outlined in our free training course, it still always remains our #1 recommendation to focus on).
How To Get Free Traffic For Affiliate Marketing
In any online marketing niche, competition will either drag businesses down or raise them to new heights. For this reason alone, affiliate marketers need to stay ahead of the game by doing everything possible to drive traffic that will convert to sales.
Since the internet is diluted with so many possibilities, you can have a few tricks up your sleeve to stay in the game. Here are your options:
Improve Your Website
Most importantly, your website must appeal to the senses of at least a large portion of your target audience. Let’s admit it; no one can please everyone.
However, it is quite possible to capture the hearts and minds of the majority to sway them into making a purchase. If you haven’t the faintest idea of how to improve your website, the following list will tell you the most important pointers.
Quality Content
The quality of your website content refers to how much it can convey intended messages to achieve certain goals.
In affiliate marketing, content quality should equate to insightful information with excellent formatting, readability, syntax, and grammatical correctness. It also refers to useful resources for visitors, such as infographics, pictograms, images, videos, and auditory implements.
Quality content is the most basic trigger of all affiliate marketing success.
Search Engine Optimization
Let’s say you lack the penchant for too much insightful information, but you want to drive traffic organically.
You can make this possible through SEO. With SEO, you fill up your website with many keyword phrases that correspond to the most searched topics related to your website’s niche.
As long as the right keywords are in place, search engines might display your URL near the upper end of a results page. Nevertheless, major search engines such as Google also integrate metrics to determine whether your website deserves to be in the top results of a search.
For this reason, we highly recommend embedding keyword researched terms into high-quality content.
Functionality
Who would want to dwell within a website full of non-functional buttons, non-playing videos, and erroneous links?
Complete functionality must accompany every little bit of your high-quality content for visitors to have their eyes planted on their screens. As long as your website remains functional, you can always expect waves of free traffic to roam your pages.
Aesthetically Pleasing Appearance
The physical appearance of your website is part and parcel of your quality content in its entirety. Even when you have insightful information to share, your readers won’t stay long or even bother reading a sentence if your website looks messy.
Aside from text formatting, consider giving your website a streamlined look so that a viewer can easily focus on the essential details. This way, you can easily convert casual visits into sales.
Actionable Steps For Getting Free Traffic
Once you’re happy about the content and appearance of your website, you can start attracting traffic with the methods that all affiliate marketers should know.
Leverage Email Marketing
Email marketing refers to sending commercial messages to a specific emailing list. It involves requesting business, sending advertisements, referring products and services, or soliciting donations or sales.
The problem with email marketing is that you would need to build a list containing the emails of your potential customers. You may access the email addresses of target customers through their business profiles.
However, you have to ask them through a newsletter signup field within your website to get a visitor’s email address.
Participate In Guest Posting
Guest posting refers to writing content for someone else’s website in exchange for generating traffic to your own site.
Basically, you look for relevant websites to cooperate with your website so that you can exchange the flow of traffic between your businesses.
Write Blogs and eBooks
One of the best ways to strengthen the authority of your affiliate website is by supporting it with blogs and written articles containing relevant topics. Starting a blog is the best way to generate money for a business, especially for marketers. Efficient affiliate websites have a steady stream of new content to help visitors ease into purchasing products and services.
Comment on Blogs
Another way to get free traffic is to comment on other blogs relevant to your marketing campaign and leave a link to your website. Doing so increases engagement with your target audience and potentially builds relationships with bloggers who can promote your business.
To get people to click your links, ensure that your comments add value and new information.
Organize Expert Roundups
Expert roundups are quite the reverse of guest posting. Instead of being the guest on another marketer’s blog, you invite marketers to guest post on your website.
Since you get to choose the people with expertise on your particular topic, you are essentially improving your website’s authority.
Promote Through Social Media Platforms
You’ve done all the basics, yet you still have to generate more traffic to turn a profit. Don’t spend your money just yet, as you can still obtain free traffic from several social media modes.
Social media apps offer 100-percent free venues for gathering a targeted audience and directing them to visit your website.
Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide, and it boasts one of the highest numbers of active users monthly. It is an app with group tools, fan pages, messaging tools, and a marketplace.
Furthermore, it allows links, text, images, and videos to be uploaded directly to its pages. While using all of these tools is free and can significantly help direct traffic to your site, Facebook also offers paid promotional services in ads.
YouTube
YouTube is the largest video-sharing site on the planet, and it is one of the most visited websites, ranking second with Google at the helm.
It can be your best friend if your marketing campaign uses lots of video content or can benefit from several videos. In fact, you can embed videos from the YouTube servers into your web design.
Another goldmine of free online traffic is Instagram. It is a photo and video sharing service used by many brands, businesses, celebrities, social influencers, and affiliate marketers to reach their target audiences.
Unlike YouTube and Facebook, Instagram’s user base comprises predominantly young and global users.
TikTok
While Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram have been around for some time, TikTok has recently emerged as one of the trending apps for social networking.
TikTok is a video-focused application allowing its users to upload and share 15-second to three-minute videos on almost any topic imaginable. To date, social media users keep wondering whether TikTok would surpass the ratings of Instagram.
Whatever the case, the app has hit an all-time high rating, and it would benefit you to grab it as a source of free traffic.
If mood boards, pinboards, and instructions sheets can help your website thrive, Pinterest can greatly help your affiliate marketing content. It is an image-sharing platform that enables the discovery of graphical information on the internet.
With the capacity to connect your pin with other pins, you are essentially drawing traffic from other posts to your content.
Twitter is a microblogging app that allows users to post and interact with messages, more popularly known as “tweets.” This app spearheaded the use of hashtags, which are metadata tags using a pound sign or hash symbol prefix.
Today, a marketer can use hashtags across several platforms to make content consistent for the audience and direct the correct audience to a post.
Other Social Media Platforms
If your business can thrive on any of the platforms mentioned above, you’re well on your way to generating tons of traffic for your websites. Nevertheless, an expansion won’t hurt, and you can still exploit the free traffic you can get from other apps.
The trick is to understand the strengths of each application so that you can efficiently get the traffic you need.
Here are other social media apps you can use:
- Snapchat
- Telegram
- Quora
- Craigslist
Alternatives To Free Traffic
With all the available free traffic sources for affiliate marketing websites, one would think twice about acquiring the costly services of third-party traffic generators.
But if you give it some thought, free traffic can be hard to get, even when exploring all the available sources.
Sometimes, a paid traffic source boost is all you need to get free traffic pouring into your landing pages. While you will find platforms offering traffic-generating services, the most reliable paid traffic comes in the form of advertisements.
Social Media Ads
The biggest social media platforms have the power to bring your content to your targeted audience through social media ads. Even if social media app users do not click on the ads, they are more likely to become aware of your business as they browse through the apps.
Link and Banner Ads
Website links and banners are the simplest types of advertisements that you can find on almost any website. Links are usually in plain texts, while banners contain a collage of images in a single strip.
Compared to social media ads that stay within social media platforms, links and banners can go almost anywhere, even within emails.
Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
With a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisement, you market your website directly on external sites. However, unlike most ads, PPC ads will only cost you as much as the number of times people actually land on your page.
Passive Income Through Free Affiliate Marketing Traffic
If you know how to get free traffic for affiliate marketing, you’re on your way to building a source of passive income.
It may seem challenging at first, but give it some time and effort, and you’ll surely reap some benefits. However, if free sources are not enough to set your business into overdrive, you might want to set a budget for paid traffic.
Just remember though, to always prioritize free traffic over paid traffic because essentially free traffic acts as the foundation that your business sits on. If your paid traffic efforts begin to cost too much or stop converting, at least you will always have the free traffic sources to fall back on.
And if both traffic (free & paid) is as targeted, the free will be worth much more money to you in terms of ROI.
But ultimately this guide is just skimming the surface of generating free traffic. There are so many tips & tricks that it simply wouldn’t be possible to list them all in one single blog post & so that’s why we invite you to check out our free training course.
In our course, we explain (in-depth) how you can actually put free traffic methods into action & begin getting clicks through to your offers without any upfront spend. Be sure to check it out before you leave.
