7 Ways To Drive Traffic To Affiliate Products

Do you want to know how to get people to buy the affiliate products you’re promoting? You need to know how to generate traffic from all sources possible.

Now that we’ve discussed what kinds of products you can promote and where you can find them (quickly go and check the previous posts under affiliate marketing category if you’re seeing this for the first time). Now, we’re ready to get to the fun part: making money.

Filling your store with great products is only the first step. You get people into the store if you want to make sales. The same applies to affiliate marketing. To be a successful affiliate marketer, you need to find great products (Expertnaire is the best place to find these products, no jokes). After you’ve discovered products to promote, you need to send traffic to them.

There are many ways to drive traffic to affiliate products. Some are as simple as adding the tracking URL to articles on your website. The most effective ones involve building up an audience and promoting affiliate offers to them, I explained that in detailed here.

Now, let’s discuss seven ways to generate traffic for your affiliate products. These are seven proven methods that affiliate marketers use today to build their businesses. It’s not a complete list, but it does cover the most well-known methods.

Table of Contents

• 7 Unique Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate Products Without Breaking the Bank
  • 1: SEO Websites
  • 2: YouTube Channel
  • 3: Social Media
  • 4: Guest Blogging
  • 5: Quora
  • 6: Paid Advertising
  • 7: AFFILIATE MARKETING + EMAIL = GOLD

7 Unique Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate Products Without Breaking the Bank

Most successful affiliate marketers use multiple methods to drive traffic to their products. The approach that I take is to build an email list and generate most of my affiliate sales from that email list. Using the Trojan Horse approach which is explained here.

However, other affiliate marketers take different approaches. Some build SEO websites that review their affiliate products and get traffic primarily from Google. Others create a YouTube channel or Instagram profile and promote affiliate products to their followers.

There are affiliate marketers who succeed using each of these approaches.

1: SEO Websites

As of 2019, Google processes over 3.5 billion searches a day. It’s the go-to website when people want to ask questions or find solutions, and it’s also a great opportunity for marketers to get their message in front of qualified leads.

If someone types “best skincare product 2021” into the search bar, there’s a good chance they’re looking to buy a skincare product. The websites that appear at the top of those search results will probably be the ones they check out. Thousands of people search for those keywords every day, which means those websites will get a lot of traffic and a lot of sales.

Because of the sheer volume of traffic Google generates, ranking at the top of keywords with “buyer intent” like the one above can generate a lot of traffic for your website. If you promote products on your website, that translates into a lot of sales.

Optimizing your website to rank highly on search results is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Affiliate marketers use websites or blogs that are optimized for SEO to promote affiliate offers. The most common approach is to create a blog and post articles that target particular keywords. Those articles will usually be educational, reviews, comparisons or listicles.

For example, suppose you have a blog that’s all about skincare. In that case, you might believe your readers could be interested in skincare routines. You might publish an article to target keyword “best skincare routines.” That’s a popular keyword, which means there’s a lot of competition to rank for it. You might also publish an article to target the keyword “best daily skincare routines to pratice for flawless skin.” That keyword is longer and searched less often, which means it’ll be easier to rank for.

The upside of creating SEO websites is that you can generate a substantial amount of revenue once you start ranking for keywords. The drawback is that it takes a lot of time to rank for most keywords. During that time, you won’t generate much revenue, which can be discouraging You also don’t have an opportunity to build an ongoing relationship with this approach unless you combine it with one of the other methods in this article.

2: YouTube Channel

YouTube is the second largest website on the internet. People watch over 1 billion hours of video every day. It’s increasingly replacing television in people’s viewing habits, and its growth shows no sign of slowing down. The barriers to entry on YouTube are much lower than on traditional television. Anyone with a smartphone and inexpensive editing software can start a channel and build an audience.

YouTube is a great opportunity for affiliate marketers. If you create videos and release them regularly, you can build a channel and an audience. You can monetize that audience by promoting affiliate products. While there are some rules and regulations around how you can present affiliate products, this is a popular way for many YouTube creators to monetize their channels.

Video is a great medium to promote physical products. Any product you can show off on camera makes for a good demonstration, review, or comparison video. Entire channels have been built just on showing off products.

The key is consistency. You need to create and publish videos consistently. The videos need to be of good quality, and the listings optimized for YouTube’s algorithm. None of these things are technically challenging. The biggest challenge you can have is the consistency part.

The drawback to YouTube is that it takes a substantial amount of time to see results. You won’t just put up a couple of videos and start making money. As Dan Locke says, you need to hit 50 videos on your channel before YouTube takes notice of you and starts promoting your videos.

Most YouTubers don’t get that far, so if you can stick it out, then you could carve out a slice of YouTube’s giant pie.

3: Social Media

“Social media” is a large tent that includes multiple platforms. At the time of this writing, Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook Groups are the most viable social media platforms for affiliate marketers. However, social media changes so fast that other platforms might be viable when you read this section!

Social media allows marketers to connect with people and communicate with them on an ongoing basis. Many brands have built up audiences and promoted affiliate programs to them on one or more of these platforms.

While there’s potential for affiliate marketing on social media, I would caution you for a few reasons.

First, social media platforms amplify certain messages and muffle others with their algorithms. If you build a Facebook group with thousands of followers, only a small percentage of them will see each message you post.

Second, social media platforms are continually changing their rules, often without notice. You need to stay on top of these changes. Otherwise, you risk losing the audience you’ve worked so hard to build.

Third, social media platforms are not thrilled about affiliate marketing. While some kinds of affiliate marketing are acceptable on some social media platforms, the platforms are generally skeptical of promotions, and you’ll have a tough time breaking through.

I would suggest not relying on social media as your primary source of traffic for affiliate products for all of these reasons. That said, it can complement one of the other methods discussed in this article.

The next three methods I’ll discuss are less direct. Assuming you’re using one of the first three methods I discussed (or email marketing) to build an audience and promote affiliate products, the next three can help you grow the size of your audience.

4: Guest Blogging

Earlier, I told you how starting a website or blog and optimizing it for search engines can generate traffic for affiliate programs. The downside is that this strategy takes a significant amount of time to pay off. What if you could get your message out on a blog that someone else has already built up?

That’s the premise of guest blogging. It works exactly as the name implies. You find a blog that has an audience similar to what you’re targeting. You then writes high-quality articles and offer them to the blog’s owner. They get a piece of free content, and you get a link to your website (you promote the affiliate products on your website, not the blog post itself).

Guest blogging leans on quality content and relationships. Your opportunities will vary niche by niche. Some niches are filled with active blogs. While it’s tough to get your content posted on the biggest ones, there are often small or mid-sized blogs that are more receptive to outside content.

The best way to find blogs in your niche is to go onto Google and type different keywords in your niche. Often, the top results will be blogs. There will usually be contact information on the blog to submit guest posts. In some cases, you’ll find them on social media as well.

This is a numbers game at its core. You probably won’t get accepted the first time you reach out to someone with a guest blog post. It takes ongoing effort. If you’re persistent, then guest blogging can be a good source of traffic.

The downside is that you likely won’t generate enough traffic just by using guest blogging. I suggest viewing it as a compliment to your other traffic strategies rather than your primary one.

5: Quora

Quora is a website where people ask questions on every topic imaginable. If you go onto Quora and answer questions on topics related to your niche, you can help people and build credibility and trust.

Quora isn’t just for developing your brand. You can also generate traffic from it. If you already have a blog with articles in your niche, you can post links to those articles in the answers you post on Quora.

For example, let’s say you have an article on your website about the 10 best flavour source for fruit cakes. You see a question on Quora from someone asking about how to get more flavour for their cakes as a baker beginner. You can answer the question by providing a few ideas and then encouraging them to check out the article on your blog to get even more ideas.

Like some of the other sources I’ve discussed in this article, you likely won’t generate enough traffic from Quora to build a business. That said, it can complement some of the other traffic methods you’re using.

6: Paid Advertising

While most of the approaches in this article involve generating organic traffic, you can speed up your results by paying for it. By investing in ads, you can generate substantial traffic to your website, email list or wherever you’re promoting your affiliate products.

The advantage of this approach is speed. While most of the other methods take months to generate substantial results, investing in traffic can pay off in days. Many of my students find more success with this approach because they can see a payoff sooner than the other methods.

The drawback is the money you’re investing. While making smart investments in traffic is great, new marketers struggle to profit, especially if they point their ads directly at affiliate products. Many traffic platforms also have rules against buying ads that promote affiliate programs directly.

I’ve invested a lot in advertising. It’s the primary way I build my following, especially my email lists.

This brings us to the final method of generating traffic for your affiliate products, Building an Email List. It’s my favorite method by far.

7: AFFILIATE MARKETING + EMAIL = GOLD

Email marketing is the primary way that I’ve been using to generate revenue for my affiliate products as an affiliate. While the other methods I’ve discussed earlier work, the most common way me and my students succeed with affiliate marketing is by building an email list and promoting affiliate products to our subscribers.

Study shows that email marketing has a higher rate of return than other platforms. Potential customers are more likely to see and read emails, and they’re also more likely to click on the links inside them than they are to do the same on social media.

I’ve sold thousands worth of products online as an affiliate. It’s by far my biggest source of revenue. While I use social media, YouTube and paid advertising, the purpose of those methods is to build the size of my email list. I make sales via email.

Using email marketing to promote your affiliate products is the most sweetest and that is why I encourage you to watch this video here.