Quick Definition: In the context of affiliate marketing, traffic refers to the flow of potential customers to your website. The goal is to invite high-quality traffic to your affiliate marketing sites to generate leads and convert them into sales so you get paid commissions.
Affiliate marketing is a super simple business model where you get paid for recommending products online and generating sales.
Note: I said it was simple, not easy.
The biggest reason affiliate marketers fail is a lack of traffic.
Now you don’t need a lot of traffic to make money, but it is the lifeblood of any online business.
Everyone struggles to get traffic for their market offerings, so do not think that you are alone in this. But wait, do you know what traffic is in marketing?
What Is Traffic In Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing traffic is simply the number of visitors who have visited your webpage or website. From a holistic point of view, it is a numerical figure that represents the popularity of your web profile. This traffic consists of potential leads and long-term customers for businesses.
It is better perceived as an overarching concept that describes the activity of all the users and visitors on a business’s site.
In affiliate marketing, individuals avail the opportunity to earn money by advertising someone’s product on their website. Amazon set the benchmark and following in its footsteps, other businesses also started viewing affiliate marketing as a viable and effective approach to increasing their market share.
A recent study revealed that 63% of businesses have claimed that their greatest challenge is to generate traffic and leads for their business.
Businesses must understand that their whole marketing strategy forms the basis of the sources of their traffic. Therefore, it is pertinent to understand traffic and its sources before a business can go on implementing various strategies.
What Is An Affiliate Marketing Traffic Source?
Well, you may be confused getting to learning about this term. Basically, a traffic source is a platform that navigates potential customers and leads to the site of an affiliate marketer; it can be a blog or even a social media profile. This expedites the process of affiliate marketing.
Though it is recommended that bloggers and influencers direct customers and potential leads to their own websites, they mainly do all their work through their social media pages.
2 Main Affiliate Marketing Traffic Sources
You can primarily divide traffic sources into two major categories: paid and organic.
1. Paid Traffic
Paid traffic is essentially any kind of traffic you pay for. Think Google, Facebook, YouTube or Pinterest ads.
2. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is free traffic that comes to your website via search engines like Google or Youtube and it’s the best kind of affiliate marketing traffic because you don’t have to pay for it.
Any commissions you make are 100% profit.
This means that people searched for your business or your market offering and then they visited your website. Now this game is controlled by SEO; if you are on top of the search results, chances are that the customers will search your website first.
Organic traffic has undoubtedly the best returns on investment; if you are hiring somebody to make your content SEO appropriate, your organic traffic will grow with time. It is a long-term investment, unlike paid advertising in which you have to continuously pay to avail of the service or marketing.
Other Ways Of Generating Affiliate Marketing Traffic
If you are unsure about agreeing on a single way of sending traffic to your website, then here are some effective suggestions for you:
1. YouTube
YouTube has garnered a lot of popularity and viewership over the years. It is the second biggest search engine on the internet with more than 3 billion views each day. So, if you are not reeling in traffic with interesting videos on YouTube then you must re-evaluate your affiliate marketing strategy.
Share your details or the call to action link in the description of your videos.
Product Reviews
People tend to read the reviews online before they make a purchase, they want to know if other users were satisfied by it or not. It was deduced that 90% of potential buyers assess reviews online before they visit the website of the brand and make a purchase decision.
These statistics show that writing honest and unbiased product reviews related to your niche will help you gain the confidence of your audience. If there is any product associated with your affiliate marketing efforts, then publish a review.
Blog Posts
These are a great way to generate traffic; if you boast an active readership then you must capitalize on this approach. This means that your audience is receptive to your suggestions.
But do not make your blog posts hubs to sales and marketing purely; you have to keep your audience riveted. Make sure you publish content that continues to offer value to the readers.
Social Media
Everybody is on social media so if you haven’t used this channel as a way to attract affiliate marketing traffic, then you are really far behind. This is the easiest and one of the most effective traffic sources.
Make sure you participate with communities online that require your product. Run multiple advertising campaigns and share your blog content either on your own page or promote it on other pages.
You may think that this is an outdated trend and who even reads such emails?
But you will be surprised to learn that 64% of companies believe that it is the best marketing practice that offers 3800% ROI. Now, this staggering figure will definitely change your mind.
So if you haven’t already, make sure you’re building an email list.
Guest Blogging
Even if you have built a blog for your brand, it can never hurt to expand your scope and approach. This tried method is quite promising in terms of generating affiliate marketing traffic.
You can guest-blog on reputable sites that are aligned with your niche. You have to make sure that you post interesting content and add links to your profile and your affiliate offers.
You can also accept different and known guest bloggers to your site. This will also help you attract a whole new set of followers.
The Single Best Way To Get Traffic & Sales
Now you know what affiliate marketing traffic is and some of the potential traffic sources you can tap into to start generating commissions online.
But not all traffic is created equal.
Remember, the whole point of driving traffic as an affiliate marketer is to make sales.
So what’s the best way to drive traffic that will result in a 6-figure affiliate income?
Building an affiliate marketing website that attracts free and organic traffic 24/7.
We’re talking laser-targeted traffic who will click your affiliate links and buy.
Not sure how to do that?
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
Take our free Fast-Start training now and we’ll walk you through it step by step.