Traffic is one of the most important factors in your affiliate marketing business.
No matter how good your website looks or how well your product sells, if you don’t have visitors, you’re not going to make any money. Fortunately, there are many different techniques you can use to drive traffic to your site.
The question that many have when they start to promote their website is:
Should I use free or paid traffic strategies?
free traffic
Free traffic methods are the route most affiliate marketers take at first. They do this because they have a limited budget to spend on their business. It is quite possible to earn good money using only free traffic methods. SEO is a great technique that involves positioning your site high in search results for the top keywords in your niche.
For example, if your site is on dog training books, you’ll focus your content, meta details, and other on-page and off-page SEO on the phrase “dog training books
In this way, Google and other search engines will not have any doubts about the topic of your site. With enough backlinks and high-quality, relevant content, you can get your site to the first page of search results, where it will be seen by almost everyone searching for your specific keyword.
Forum marketing is another free and effective strategy for traffic. This involves becoming a member of forums related to your website’s niche. If you join and become active in sharing quality information, you can earn the trust of many other members. Placing a link to your site in your forum signature allows you to gain exposure every time you make a new post.
paid traffic
Paid traffic methods are generally what affiliate marketers start investing in once they have money to put back into the business. You should learn as much as you can about paid advertising, because you can lose a lot of money very quickly if you’re not careful. However, paid traffic methods can be even more lucrative and quicker to make money than many free methods.
Pay Per Click advertising, or PPC, is probably the most popular form of paid traffic for affiliate marketers. Google AdWords is an example of PPC. This involves bidding on the keywords you want to target with your website. When someone searches for a keyword you’re targeting, your ad will show in search results. Your ad placement will depend on how much you’re bidding compared to what other sellers are bidding on.