Traffic is the backbone of an affiliate marketing business. If you’re getting consistent traffic to your affiliate offers, you’re likely making money. This is often the hardest problem to solve for new affiliate marketers. It can be extremely daunting to figure out where to start, how to generate traffic, etc. Although there are seemingly endless ways to get traffic, most affiliate marketers use a combination of a few channels to generate traffic. In this post, we’ll discuss the main ways that affiliate marketers get traffic and you can add any of these into your current affiliate marketing process.
Different ways to get traffic for affiliate marketing:
SEO:
SEO is one of the most proven methods to generate affiliate traffic. With SEO, you can start a blog and write about different topics pertaining to your affiliate marketing niche. Over time, you build authority in your niche and you can generate tens of thousands of visitors per month and get recurring traffic to your affiliate offers.
It’s important to note that SEO takes time and it’ll likely be months to a year before you see any significant traffic to your website. Once established, it’s much easier to scale your affiliate marketing traffic and generate more revenue.
A good example is the Band of Brothers Tour website, which has established itself as a leading resource for World War II historical tourism. Since people usually search on Google for historical tourism, it leverages SEO to build a reputable brand and drive traffic to their tours. You can use a similar strategy if you have a business that’s primarily driven by search.
Social media:
Social media platforms are the single most powerful channels for affiliate marketing. Since Facebook, Instagram, X, etc. have billions of users, it offers virtually unlimited scale for affiliate traffic. The difficult part is choosing which platform best fits your needs along with figuring out the algorithm for each channel. The same way Google has SEO, these platforms also have SEO and you need to find the best practices.
Once you have a sizable audience, your work compounds. You can get compounding traffic as you get more views and get better at creating content on a specific channel. Additionally, many of these platforms will pay you for each 1,000 views. So this ultimately gives you an additional revenue stream for your affiliate marketing business.
Video marketing:
Although YouTube and TikTok would go under the social media category, it’s a completely different model of affiliate marketing than other social media channels. Video marketing is different from other channels because it requires a completely different skillset, producing high quality videos at scale. With video marketing, you can do real-time product reviews, live streams, do Q&A with your audience and more. Additionally, there are other streams of income like sponsorships along with ad revenue.
It’s more difficult to get into video marketing because you’ll need extra skills like video editing, but it’s extremely worth it because video platforms pay very well for affiliate content. Building a video brand gives you an extra level of credibility because you’re putting your voice and face along with your content. It’s a great way to differentiate yourself from your competition and get another platform for traffic.
Paid advertising:
If you have cash on hand, the quickest and most effective way to get affiliate traffic is through paid advertising. With paid traffic, you can leverage existing platforms like Facebook, YouTube etc and get targeted traffic directly to your affiliate offer. This method of getting traffic is powerful because you can find out today how well your affiliate offers convert because you’re getting paid traffic immediately.
Paid traffic comes in many different forms, some of them include:
- Google ads: Helps target high-intent keywords related to your affiliate products
- LinkedIn ads: Ideal for B2B affiliate marketing
- TikTok Ads: Tap into the growing young audience with creative, short-form video ads
- Facebook/Instagram Ads: Leverage detailed targeting options and retargeting
- YouTube Ads: Create engaging video content to showcase affiliate products
A well done example of this is the Studio Suits brand on Instagram. They leverage paid ads to market their unique tweed jackets and custom suits. This is a great strategy for a brand that is visual because it will perform much better on Instagram than a non-visual platform.
Any of these can work depending on your niche and you can use a small advertising budget to make sure you get a positive ROI on your advertising budget before investing more. Once you achieve a positive ROI on your small budget, you can invest further and hire a full time marketer to scale up. The Google ads test can help you find a marketer with the relevant skills to scale your paid advertising efforts.
Influencer partnerships:
Influencer partnerships are another high leverage way to get affiliate traffic to your page. Instead of spending years building a social media brand, you can partner with influencers to direct their audience to your affiliate offers. With influencer marketing, there’s virtually endless affiliate marketing traffic because you can pitch as many influencers as you want.
The large influencers are probably working with big brands and charge high fees so you can opt for targeting micro influencers who may not have yet had their first affiliate partnership. These are creators who have small accounts between 1,000 and 10,000 followers and you can create a deal with them to direct traffic to your affiliate offers.
It’s key to select influencers who have engaged audiences and that are relevant to your niche. Choosing someone who’s not relevant will lead to zero conversions for you and you’ll still have to pay the influencer. You can find them by using hashtags relevant to your niche or search for keywords you want traffic from and directly reach out to them.
Wrap-up
The key to generating traffic with affiliate marketing is to choose any of these channels that best suit your skill set and to be consistent with it. You don’t need to do all of them at once, just using one or two is enough to generate enough affiliate traffic to get you to the next level. It’s important to get into groups with other affiliate marketers to see which strategies are working, so you can avoid the common pitfalls most beginners run into. If you’d like to join the JvZoo affiliate marketing group, check out our resource here.
