What is traffic in affiliate marketing? Traffic is the term used for visitors to a website, most commonly. Although traffic can also be driven to landing pages and sales pages where affiliates make sales for a “vendor”. The vendor is the owner of an affiliate product. The “affiliate” promotes other people’s products and services for a share of the profit.
To make sales, affiliates must drive traffic to affiliate products and services online. This is done in many ways. Traffic is pretty important for affiliates because without it, they don’t make any sales. Most affiliate marketers start out with zero traffic and attempt to build traffic to their websites using a variety of methods. Once on their website, visitors can browse their content and purchase affiliate products through their affiliate links.
What Is Traffic In Affiliate Marketing? Driving Traffic
To get traffic onto a website takes more than just building the website. Most new websites won’t get any visitors at all. A good analogy I once heard is that of a gas/petrol station in the desert. A gas station in a desert won’t get any passing cars filling up with petrol! A brand new website without any promotion won’t get any traffic either! To get visitors to land on your website is done through a number of promotion strategies:
- Paid marketing – Adwords, Bing and Yahoo platforms are used to drive search traffic from the main search engines.
- Blogging – content marketing via blogging is a long term strategy website owners use to generate traffic. If their blogs are successful, they pick up organic traffic through the search engines.
- Back linking – linking to your website from other websites and social media sites can have a two fold benefit on traffic generation. It can drive traffic directly from those sites and generate a positive SEO effect (search engine optimisation). This means search engines will reward the website with more views.
- Email marketing – email marketing is done by collecting subscribers information from a website and sending out email messages to subscribers automatically.
See also what does an affiliate marketer do?
What Is Traffic In Affiliate Marketing?
Some websites drive tens of thousands of visitors to their pages every single day. But if you’re starting from scratch, you’ll be starting with zero daily visitors to your website. To build traffic organically, (for free) takes some time. But you can turn on paid advertising and get a lot of traffic almost instantly.
Most beginner affiliates struggle getting traffic to their website and making affiliate sales. Without traffic, affiliates won’t make any sales.
The initial stage of building content on a website is pretty labour intensive. But once you have a lot of content, (and the search engines like it), you’ll start seeing more regular visitors. Over time this grows and affiliates can make a full time living from their affiliate commissions through using either paid or organic traffic to their sites.
Turning On Traffic To A Website
To turn on traffic quickly to a website, you can use platforms such as Google’s Adwords. This platform lets website owners direct search traffic directly to their website targeting specific keywords which are relevant.
So if your website was about mobile phones, for example, you could use the keyword “Mobile phone for sale” to send targeted traffic towards your site. Alternatively you can write content on your website and promote it through social media websites for more traffic. Over time, content can attract free traffic through the search engines. See how to earn money through blogging. This is a much slower strategy than using paid advertising however. So you’ll need to be patient if you decide to pursue this marketing strategy as an affiliate.
If you’re interested in becoming an affiliate, check out my article on “what do I need to start affiliate marketing?“
What Is Traffic? – Summary
Traffic to a website is vital for it to make money. Some website owners build their sites just for fun. But affiliate marketers use websites to get a lot of visitors (traffic) in order to sell affiliate products and make money. Without traffic, an affiliate won’t make any sales. Traffic generation is one of the biggest problems for new affiliates.
There are millions of competing websites on the search engines which makes it very difficult to rank content generated through blogging. Paid marketing can get expensive but you can easily limit your spendings by setting a daily budget you can afford. For more information on affiliate marketing, checkout the free video series by clicking on the image below.
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