2021 has been called the year of growth and expansion in the digital world. Many seasoned experts have said that the after-effects of 2020 will be diminished by a consistent increase in traffic and conversions on online forums to help make a difference in the thriving world of e-commerce.
The most outstanding challenge marketers face today is the generation of sustainable traffic and leads. Surveys indicated that almost 60% of marketers are stuck in the same loop.
In an online economy that thrives on traffic and leads, countless marketing professionals have chosen the road previously less traveled; affiliate marketing. In this arena the choice of traffic sources and promotional platforms plays a critical role in the success of a campaign.
Traffic is the route to better conversions, which eventually generate enough profits to keep you afloat. But when the traffic fails to penetrate the target audience on affiliate products, the effort would come to naught. This is where targeting the right audience becomes vital for your marketing efforts.
Before you go ahead and Google the best traffic sources for affiliate marketing, it is ideal for you to understand the holy trinity of affiliate marketing. It is a combination of 1) reasonable offers, 2) best traffic sources, and 3) stable trackers that ensure your campaigns smooth sails.
Once you have an offer that compels the audience and a tracker, you can get to the main avenue to traffic generation.
It would be best to hit the correct chord when you decide to get offers on affiliate platforms.
Defining a traffic source
When free traffic sources for affiliate marketing are brought up on different platforms, we believe that explaining traffic sources will help laypersons doing their initial research about the subject.
Essentially, a traffic source is a primary space that brings visitors to your site. There are multiple ways of inviting visitors, but affiliate marketing revolves around paying for concrete traffic. It is an efficient, quick, and genuine way of getting things done.
Affiliate marketing involves paid efforts that connect advertisers with publishers to form effective collaborations.
Those new to the subject look for the best adult and push traffic sources for convenience.
But one must remember that the affiliate gurus tend to judge the source’s quality by assessing the base characteristics.
Why traffic sources matter in affiliate marketing?
To accomplish a successful affiliate marketing campaign’s goals, you need to have traffic on the site. This goal cannot be achieved by only listing down the best traffic sources for affiliate marketing. Instead, it would help if you started generating targeted traffic through an omnichannel approach to boost traffic from the sources that matter.
Free traffic sources for affiliate marketing may be available in abundance, but the question is, are they truly worth the effort?
The professionalism reflected in your site will help your clients and products get the attention they deserve.
The primary goal here is to have an affiliate website built with love and adorned with care to ensure that it strikes a chord in the visitor’s heart.
It must please the eye as it tickles the intellect.
Whether you are an affiliate marketer taking a tour to pick sites for affiliation or an affiliate site looking for tips to better your service for your clients, here is a list of the seven best traffic sources for affiliate marketing in 2021.
Exploring Pay Per Click Affiliate Advertising
The pay-per-click affiliate market is fiercely competitive in the race of search results and traffic. The marketer receives revenue from the visitors’ actions, such as the leads, impressions, and clicks.
The key here is to choose a niche where you can easily engage your target audience and compel them to take the desired actions.
This means that if you wish to target Gen Z for your tech-savvy products or customized AirPods cases, then you approach platforms like Buzzfeed to create enough buzz about your product that it starts generating traffic for conversions.
Had you gone the other way of advertising your service on a website about news and upcoming events, you would have observed a lack of performance!
This is because Buzzfeed caters primarily to your target audience, whereas a news and events journal would not be of much use to you!
Targeting the audience according to demographics, age, and lifestyle is critical for any PPC campaign’s success.
Once you understand what is affiliate marketing and the sheer scope of pay per click campaigns, you will realize that this direction is riddled with data and ideas that could seem overwhelming at first.
But it would be best if you tried to take your time to look for the ideal PPC platform that is well-suited to your business and target audience.
Today’s most familiar platforms include Adsense, Media.net, Outbrain, Taboola, Adsterra, and Bidvertiser.
It would be best to keep in mind that a PPC affiliate program is different from mere affiliate marketing. Commissions are received online when the visitor clicks on the site promoting the product/service.
Here is how you can boost your incomes from PPC affiliate programs:
Boost up your Cost-per-click: when advertisers bid for a specific keyword for website clicks, you can try to improve the overall CPC for your site by following the tutorials by Google Adsense.
You can choose niches that offer high profitability in health, home loans, banking, real estate, and automobiles. The other technique is about targeting the right audience.
Ensure that you don’t overdo it because that could lead to abandonment and hence decrease your income. Make sure the sources of traffic are organic.
Always opt for qualified traffic sources instead of running amok on traffic that only increases views without leading to any further action by the visitor.
Social Media Marketing To The Rescue
Social media is the quickest yet most straightforward tool to begin your affiliate traffic generation. Social media affiliate marketing is all about forming partnerships with external parties to promote a product. The goal here is to ensure that your affiliate traffic adds value to the client instead of merely increasing impressions and views.
You must engage the audience to build authority over them. This may involve a diverse approach towards attention, entertainment, and promotion.
Ensure that your content strategy for social media covers sufficient ground to generate a desirable number of clicks and conversions.
A smart content strategy will allow you to grow within a short period. Just don’t get carried away with one type of content because it is working for now. Repetition will disinterest your audience and leave them feeling bored.
This will further push your audience towards alternative social media outlets with similar content that is more engaging. There is a very delicate balance between maintaining your brand tone and blatantly reproducing the same content again and again.
Best social media platforms for affiliate marketing include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Facebook: an all-inclusive platform that entertains almost every niche you may come across about affiliate marketing.
Suppose you already have a good readership on your blog or a good number of regular visitors on your Podcast or YouTube channel. In that case, you can use Facebook as a community-building platform. Measure the popularity and reach of your actions to find out what works best with your intended audience.
If you play on the relevance card, then you can quickly boost traffic and conversions organically.
But if you would like to go the paid route, then Facebook affiliate link ads are another option.
Instagram: a top-rated picture-sharing app that is used to build a swipe-up audience for some quick responses.
Please take a minute to imagine the number of times you have seen your favorite influencers add an affiliate link in their stories about the outfit they are wearing or a lifestyle item lying in their background.
When social media influencers add in a discount code for their following and immediately ask you to check out the stocks for their ‘favorite’ things, you know what’s happening there!
Remember that you can only use the swipe-up CTA with influencers who have an audience above ten thousand followers!
Twitter: a platform where birds tweet and trends wreak havoc on all other platforms, Twitter is a pro for all affiliate social media campaigns.
It would help if you built a strong community with your followers to ensure that your audience believes the views and words you share on your profile. The public and private lists on Twitter are an exciting way of finding out more about your follower’s consumption patterns.
Keep a close eye on the keywords that perform well, and that is all you need to know when you develop an affiliate strategy for Twitter in 2021.
Making all the difference with SEO
Search Engine Optimization is a growing field in 2021. It is the bread and butter of every marketer in the digital era of Google. When Google is the master of the universe of recommendations, answers, and addresses, you cannot ignore the search engine’s celebrity status.
The truth about affiliate marketing is elementary; you need to direct your efforts to space where they matter. SEO is amongst the best cheap traffic sources for affiliate marketing because the results are organic and far more approachable than those squeezed from other platforms.
SEO helps a website and store boost its rank on search engine results, better known as SERPS. This is the essence of SEO affiliate marketing. The higher you rank, the better your chances of conversions. The technical elements of site speeds, age of the domain, link building, and abandonment rates have a collective impact.
Many experts on different platforms have been seen sharing tips that helped them earn millions of dollars through affiliate marketing in their sleep. But those who have genuinely experienced the journey would say that it takes time, a lot more than you would like to admit right now.
SEO is a process and not an event. This is why it is evident that you cannot scale your affiliate site without knowing the highest impact practices that are counted amongst Google’s top-rated procedures instead of those blacklisted by the search engine.
You can generate paid traffic for affiliate marketing by merely beating your competition in terms of content quality. If you offer a comprehensive experience with elements that add value to the reader, you will quickly climb up the ranks. Dedicated keyword research will further boost your ROI on content.
If you optimize your CTR (Click-through-rate), you will notice your newer articles’ increased visibility on the scale. This means when you have a high CTR, you can leverage it with the help of inbound links to get a higher rank. Thus boosting views for your site!
You can also opt for revising and reusing all the old content on your site. Since that content has already aged in the books of Google, a little optimization for readability and keywords can work magically for your on-page performance.
Add a faster loading speed, and you are already done!
Social media advertising for the tech-savvy folks
Paid campaigns play a beneficial role in boosting your traffic via social media. You can invest in paid social media campaigns to increase the reach of your affiliate content.
Facebook and Instagram ads reach the feeds of audiences that are naturally interested in your product because the algorithm is based on statistics about content consumption. It will direct your ad to a consumer who is actively looking for your product.
How many times have you seen Instagram advertise something you have been looking for?
Suppose you were planning to apply for a Spain program and had been actively searching and discussing it with your friends on the app.
In that case, it will suddenly start showing your ads about either language class for Spanish or tickets to Barcelona and what not!
When the reach is increased, traffic automatically grows in the target audience—the app’s target audience through segmentation for age, gender, location, and interests. The best thing is that these ads are a lot more pocket-friendly than the other methods mentioned in this blog.
Paid advertisements do not substitute organic reach, but they are a part of a broader strategy that eventually yields a lot more success than the previous projections.
Keep in mind that quality and relevance matter most. Your traffic will only convert if you upload something meaningful. This will help you strengthen your community and establish your authority over the following!
Spread The Word With Contextual Advertising
Contextual ads are found in the form of advert block in the content associated with them. These adverts are mostly run via Google and Microsoft pubCenter.
The visual ads are usually stylized as a question or a couple of sentences hitting one of your pain points that you are currently reading or searching about. The pictorial banners are a preferred form of contextual ads.
An ad published under the context is a collaboration between a pair of partners found through Google AdSense. PPC is a standard method of measuring performance for each advert. The purpose of these blocks is to help the reader have a convenient experience when searching about your niche.
Significant amounts of traffic are generated through this technique. This is why many people question the role of contextual adware applications in affiliate marketing.
Data suggests that the ads promoted based on context are more successful because they work on two principles that always apply to the digital audience.
It adds value to their experience and also helps them see what they are looking for!
Technically, adware companies work as a network to allow users to run ad campaigns through a search engine of choice. Keyword targets are established, and designated URLs receive the bids like PPCSE campaigns.
One must remember that a contextual advert would charge according to cost per view CPV instead of PPC.
Email marketing for better reach
Affiliate email marketing is highly underutilized for traffic generation in current times. The power of an email is often underestimated because of the fear of getting tagged as spam. But when it comes to affiliate marketing, there is a lot of room for enticing and engaging the audience.
Whether it is advert space on newsletters or direct leads, emails work ideally for redirecting the reader to your website. A little wordplay and research are needed to find the recipe for the perfect email marketing strategy for affiliate projects.
In the case of email advertising, it is necessary to utilize software intended for the same purpose. Whether it is an automated tool or a specific promotion strategy, you must focus on the campaign’s core theme.
Affiliate marketing advertising may sound like a jumble of like terms stringed together, but this concept works like magic each time an individual tries it on emails. This implies that you need to start gathering the bells and whistles of email marketing as soon as you can.
After all, emails are an underrated contestant among the best traffic sources for affiliate marketing for 2021.
Every affiliate marketer faces the same dilemma of saturation of the same idea in the same demographic of the target audience. It is significant to understand the ideal approach to reach your target audience in a condensed market like email advertising.
This is where you must find a way to develop an unbreakable trust with your audience. It’s a game of authority that we have thoroughly reiterated in this blog. The better your authority, the higher your chances of converting the traffic that comes to the destination.
Keep in mind that emails may not be a prevalent trend for traffic generation at the minute, but it is an excellent method of building an audience that continues to visit your site over the long haul. They are ready to convert and visit you out of loyalty.
This audience becomes your tribe and helps you maintain steady revenue throughout tumultuous periods.
Try native advertising for something different.
Native advertising affiliate marketing is slightly different from other variations of affiliate marketing. While most adverts appear according to the context, a native ad appears as the content itself on search engine results.
They perform better because the tags of ‘promoted’ or ‘sponsored’ are often unnoticeable at first glance. If you don’t pay a lot of attention before clicking a search engine result amongst the top ranks, you are more likely to visit an affiliate post.
Native ads feature on apps, websites and also contribute to the aggregate content. They are straightforward to slip in between other blog posts and links on the original site. Mobile ads specifically are beneficial for native PPC ads.
Since native ads are camouflaged as the content itself, that’s why it is easy for them to perform well! This slight manipulation is why these ads can solve the common queries about paid affiliate advertising.
Conclusion
The choice of traffic sources depends on your niche. While the beginners in affiliate marketing are suggested to opt for mainstream networks, those with little experience choose to go different. It is ideal to choose a traffic source and perfect it so that your campaigns perform proficiently.
Remember that the jack of all trades was a master of none.
There’s no harm in keeping an eye on alternative traffic generation sources, but it is better to master a technique first for a broader scope. With time, you can quickly narrow your niche’s scope and even explore the underrated traffic sources.
We hope that this article has helped you choose the source(s) and strategy for traffic generation for your affiliate marketing campaign.
To learn more about the trends in the digital world, stay tuned to the Digital 200 blog!