Free traffic sources for affiliate marketing are the best to help you achieve your results if you are just starting out in affiliate marketing. Once you have chosen the right niche and product and have your affiliate link, you need to get traffic to that offer.
Generating free (organic) traffic can benefit your affiliate website to run lucrative affiliate marketing campaigns. To bring free affiliate marketing traffic to your site, you need to know its sources first and then use them in the best way.
In this post, we highlight the top 5 free traffic sources for affiliate marketing that you can use to increase your sales.
What Is A Traffic Source for Affiliate Marketing?
Online traffic sources for affiliate marketing refer to the point of origin through which people discovered your affiliate website. Traffic sources for affiliate marketing are classified into two types:
– Organic (free) traffic
Organic traffic is unpaid traffic that comes from search engines. To generate free traffic, you need to wait longer and you need to know about search engine optimization techniques.
– Paid Traffic
In paid traffic, you attract visitors to your website or promotional page by paying for ads like Google Adwords, which is an advertising service created for businesses that want to display ads on Google. Paid traffic works instantly but if you are just starting out in affiliate marketing, it can be difficult to make your paid traffic profitable. Therefore, it is recommended for beginners to start with free traffic.
Why Free Traffic Sources for Affiliate Marketing?
Free traffic sources for affiliate marketing is a great source of revenue because it allows you to drive traffic to your affiliate site without having to pay additional advertising fees. The best traffic for affiliate marketing is free organic traffic because it allows you to earn money by increasing conversion rates.
Its disadvantages are that it requires time and effort. The reason is that free/organic traffic does not just appear on your site; you have to search for it and make it appear. There are several sources to get free traffic sources for affiliate marketing, but here we discover the top five most effective to bring relevant visitors to your affiliate site.
5 Best Free Traffic Sources for Affiliate Marketing
If you are just starting out in affiliate marketing, you need to look for free traffic sources. There are some great strategies you can use to drive free traffic to your affiliate website.
1. Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the best ways to make money with affiliate marketing and generate free traffic. Content marketing involves creating content that is interesting enough around a particular keyword related to your offer to get people to engage with your website and ultimately generate conversions.
Using content marketing for affiliate marketing means that you promote a product by creating content that provides value to your audience and teaches them something useful about the product you are promoting, and you use a special affiliate link to promote that product.
When one of your readers clicks on that link, they are directed to the website and you receive a commission when that person makes a purchase. Content marketing is also a great way to create a brand image and attract the attention of potential customers. But it does have some drawbacks, such as the fact that it takes time and effort to build a solid SEO reputation.
In fact, search engines will send traffic to the most qualitative and constructive content that is regularly updated. If you’re using content marketing to generate free traffic for affiliate marketing, you need to update your content regularly and stay on top of Google’s latest algorithm changes so you don’t jeopardize your entire SEO progress.
The main types of blog posts you can create to get free traffic for affiliate marketing are:
Reviews
By creating a review blog post, you review the product or services in your niche that you really like and link to it using your affiliate link.
Tutorials
The tutorial article is simply teaching someone how to use the product you are affiliated with. For example, if you really like a certain product or service, you can write a tutorial blog post on how to use it by inserting affiliate links into that post.
Groupings
This is simply a list-type blog post where you mention a lot of products that you use and enjoy.
2. Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the best free traffic sources for affiliate marketing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website’s articles and pages so that they are easier to find by search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. when a person searches on search engines. According to Statista, by December 2021, the market leader, Google, held an 86.19% share of the global search market.
Optimizing your content for SEO is therefore a necessary practice to generate increased traffic and revenue. A properly optimized article can generate leads and revenue years after it is published.
In fact, SEO is the easiest and most effective way to attract targeted and higher quality traffic for all online businesses including affiliate marketing and involves many other factors including:
– Researching keywords that match a user’s search queries.
– the realization of site audits
– implementing link-building strategies.
But it also has some drawbacks:
– Search engine algorithms are constantly changing
– It is not a fast process and it takes time for your site to get good rankings.
3. Marketing On Social Media
Social media today offers many opportunities to set up effective advertising campaigns which makes it one of the best free traffic sources for affiliate marketing and a great way to engage your target audience, build brand awareness and increase sales. According to a study by Kepios, there will be more than 4.62 billion social media users in the world in January 2022.
To use social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, – Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube Videos, TikTok as the main traffic generators, you need to build an audience of people interested in the content you create.
Just like building an audience through search engines, building a large audience on social media takes time but the advantage of social media advertising is that you can target your marketing directly to your ideal audience. By associating your affiliate niche with keywords, and specific interests, location, demographics, age, etc. you can direct your advertisements directly to the people most likely to be interested.
You can even generate huge data on your advertisements by actively engaging with your readers, which can yield tremendous results if done correctly. You also need to think about which channels are best suited for your niche, and then take into account your customer profile to choose the best place to place your advertisements.
The main social media channels are:
Facebook is the leading source of traffic as it has about 2.91 billion monthly active users in the fourth quarter of 2021. Many digital and affiliate marketers use this platform to promote their products and services by creating a Facebook group or Facebook page.
Facebook allows you to make an infinite number of connections and get real visitors to your affiliate site by simply sharing a short piece of amazing content with an affiliate link via Facebook Ads. You can promote your affiliate products on Facebook in different ways:
Facebook Page
This involves creating a Facebook page around your product or the general category of products you are promoting to offer helpful tips and interact with your audience. The more posts you make on your Facebook page the more likely someone will see your posts and click on the link you provide and buy the product.
In general, Facebook doesn’t like you linking directly to affiliate offers, so you need to send the link to your landing page where you collect the visitor’s email address and then send them to the offer. The advantage of using Facebook pages for affiliate marketing is that you can use Facebook Analytics to track everything.
Facebook Group
Facebook groups are a great way for people in a similar niche to interact with each other. You can create a Facebook group around a particular product you’re promoting or around your niche so that people find your group organically if they search for terms that are related to your group name. To get traffic to your affiliate offers, you need to post regularly and promote offers within this group while inviting people directly to join.
Instagram is a social media that focuses on sharing photos and videos, owned by Facebook, which in December 2021 reached a new milestone with 2 billion active users worldwide. Since the officially targeted ads on Instagram go through Facebook you don’t need to have an account on Instagram, but a Facebook account and an official page for your business are necessary.
Instagram Page
Your Instagram page can be related to the general niche of the products you’re promoting or is directly about the specific product. You can upload photos or videos as a post and in the description, promote your product and ask people to click on the link in your bio. Instagram similar to Facebook doesn’t allow you to link directly to an affiliate offer. So you need to link to your landing page or website and then from there send the visitor to the affiliate offer.
It’s very important when you post to Instagram to make sure that you use hashtags that are related to your offer.
While LinkedIn is a platform with 756million users and is mostly known for job searching and professional networking, you can also use it to promote affiliate links. The platform allows you to connect with professionals in your industry, and see if they would be interested in writing a review or becoming an affiliate of your product/service. For better engagement try to create content around the products/services, rather than promoting them directly.
Twitter is also used for marketing on a larger scale and is a great free traffic source for affiliate marketing. Opening a Twitter account is free and you can start building your audience by tweeting a lot, preferably with helpful tips, commenting on other people’s tweets, and even Retweeting them.
Remember that the title and description of your Tweets should succinctly explain the content so that people can click on it. The images in your Tweets should also be attractive enough and of the right size so that they are not truncated
To promote affiliate links you can also use Twitter feeds which are individual tweets that are linked together. Instead of adding your link in the first tweet, add your link at the end of a Twitter feed to increase the chances that the algorithm will promote your tweets and people will share your ideas.
YouTube
YouTube is a popular video marketing platform that allows you to post videos for free to build your own audience. Although YouTube is categorized as social media, it is the second most popular search engine after Google. Video marketing via YouTube is an interesting free traffic source for affiliate marketing if the content is impressive and trendy. Creating your channel is free and you don’t need expensive tools to create videos.
Having a YouTube account or channel in conjunction with your website allows you to drive more traffic to your website. Your video can be ranked on the first page of Google, so you will have more chances to generate free traffic to your affiliate marketing business from both YouTube and Google.
In your videos, you can create relevant video content by offering product reviews, recaps, tutorials, general tips and tricks about the niche you are working in and add a link to your website or go directly to the offer link.
Pinterest is an image-based social marketing tool with 431 million monthly active users worldwide that looks like a social media platform but functions as a search engine. Pinterest is one of the most essential free traffic sources for affiliate marketing.
Don’t forget to create beautiful and attractive images of your affiliate product so that the audience can click on it first and add links in the board pins.
4. Online Q&A Forums and Community Sites
The good thing about Q&A forums is that they are ranked in Google and get traffic right away. The most popular online Q&A forums are the following:
Quora
Quora is the largest Q&A site where people answer questions and edit them for facts or opinions. You can use this platform by answering any question related to your niche, sharing your experience or knowledge on the subject, expressing your opinion, helping others by giving them advice and inserting a link to your landing page or to your site, or containing the affiliate link of your product in this answer.
You won’t be able to directly advertise affiliate marketing offers there because the purpose is to help other users, not to post links, but you can use your website’s expertise or content to attract visitors who may convert. Create useful content for forum members that actually answers their questions and then promote your link but remember that advertising your site inconsiderately is not appreciated by community members.
To attract more engagement, your answer or comment should be neither too short nor too long and preferably accompanied by an image to attract attention, and above all avoid providing more links, so that your message will not be considered spam.
Warning
Quora does not allow direct links to affiliate offers and replies containing direct affiliate links are considered spam and may result in account suspension.
Reddit is a social news site with over 52 million daily active users that has become a favorite place to seek out honest reviews and information. Reddit is composed of numerous forums, where communities gather to discuss their interests in real-time.
All posts are archived and are easily searchable on the website and by search engines and sometimes even Reddit discussions appear on the first page of Google. So, when you publish your blog posts or YouTube videos in your Reddit post, it can help them rank higher in search engines and get ranked faster.
You can generate a lot of traffic from Reddit by posting interesting comments, then link back to your website or landing page that will drive the visitor to your affiliate offer. Keep in mind that Reddit does not allow direct affiliate link placement and may ban accounts for placing direct affiliate links.
Look for terms related to your affiliate website and look at the comments to find those that get a lot of engagement to get the most traffic. You can find specific subedits that are related to your offer’s niche. Use Reddit’s keyword search tool, Keyworddit, to find keywords related to your niche.
By entering the name of the subreddit, into the Keyworddit tool, you’ll find all the keywords related to that subreddit along with the monthly search volume and context. To access the SERP page containing all the results corresponding to this keyword click on “Context”.
Udemy
Udemy is a huge platform where you can do free or very low-cost courses to start building your brand and authority. This way you can generate signups or affiliate commissions.
Medium
Medium is a platform where people write articles and can be considered a great way to generate free traffic for affiliate marketing if you publish articles in your own niche and offer lots of useful tips.
5. Email Marketing
Email marketing is a great free traffic source for affiliate marketing that allows you to nurture relationships with your audience, promote content and drive sales by sending information directly to their inbox. Email marketing is also very cost-effective and has an amazing ROI of 4,200%!
Building an email list is one of the most important aspects of your work as an affiliate marketer to get more free traffic to your website. Some of the most effective ways to build your email list include challenges, email courses, and lead magnets that promote products that solve a problem. Once people are on your email list, you can use it to build a deeper relationship with your readers and promote links to other content or include links directly in the freebie. The main advantage of email marketing is that you own your email list, so you set the rules.
Even a small but productive list can generate excellent profits by using the right source of desirable affiliate traffic, namely your email list. Just like social media management tools, you can automate your email marketing campaigns.
How to Choose the Best Free Traffic Sources for Affiliate Marketing?
Traffic sources play a crucial role in attracting more visitors to your site, which is why you need to choose them wisely. Free traffic for affiliate marketing can be created from different sources and choosing them well can play a crucial role in attracting more visitors to your site.
Understanding the affiliate offers you are promoting also plays an important role in choosing the traffic source. Once you have determined what you want to promote, you need to define who would be interested in your offer and then find the right platform where your potential customer is most likely to spend their time online.
The more you know where your audience is, the more you will know where to focus your efforts. Google Analytics can help you determine information such as the location, age, gender, and language of your visitors as well as their devices used (mobile, tablet, desktop, laptop).
Once you have determined the best traffic sources for your business, you can create more targeted campaigns to better position your affiliate products.
Conclusion
Thank you for reading this guide to free traffic sources for affiliate marketing. These are the top five free traffic sources for affiliate marketing that if you use them wisely can improve your website’s visibility and generate profits.
The tip is to know where your audience is and how they find you organically and then invest in the ones that have the most business value. So choosing the best free traffic sources for affiliate marketing has a big impact but you don’t need to use every channel on this list.
It is very important as an affiliate marketer to master one traffic source at a time, focus on it to get traffic and see the results before moving on to the next traffic source.
Start exploring these free traffic sources for your affiliate marketing campaign!
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