Traffic is one of the most important factors of your affiliate marketing business.
No matter how good your website looks or how good your product sells, if you have no visitors, you are not going to make money. Fortunately, there are many different techniques you can use to drive traffic to your site.
The question many have when they begin promoting their website is:
Should I use free or paid traffic strategies?
Free Traffic
Free traffic methods are the route that most affiliate marketers take in the beginning. They do so because they have a limited budget to spend on their business. It’s highly possibly to make good money by only using free traffic methods. SEO is a great technique which involves ranking your site high in the 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.”
This way, Google and other search engines will have no doubt as to what your site is about. With enough back links and relevant, high quality content, you can take your site to the first page of the search results, where it will be seen by almost everyone that searches for your targeted keyword.
Forum marketing is another effective free strategy for traffic. This involves becoming a member of forums related to the niche of your website. If you join and become active by sharing quality information, you may gain trust with many other members. Placing a link to your site in your signature on the forum allows it to gain exposure each time you make a new post.
Paid Traffic
Paid methods of traffic are usually what affiliate marketers begin to invest in once they have money to put back into the business. You must learn all you can about paid advertising, because you can lose a great deal of money very quickly if you aren’t careful. However, paid traffic methods can be even be more lucrative and faster in earning you 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 placing bids on the keywords you want to target with your website. When someone searches a keyword you are targeting, your ad will be displayed in the search results. The location of the ad will depend on how much you are bidding as opposed to what other marketers are bidding.
