First of all, lets cover just exactly what affiliate marketing is. Affiliate marketing is when you sell or get leads for someone else’s service or product. You are going to find that there are so many people that do this. When a company needs some help making sales, and they allow people to sign up as affiliates, they are pay a commission or a flat rate per lead or sale.
Targeted traffic. How to generate targeted traffic and how to increase conversions. But the fact is, you have to generate traffic, to make money online.
The 2 Types of Traffic
First, there are basically 2 types of website traffic. Paid traffic and free traffic.
Paid traffic can be expensive but is more targeted than free traffic and you have results faster.
Free traffic, is basically a volume game, as well as cracking the search engine algorithms. There are other forms of free traffic, which include other sources besides search engines, for example forums, articles, and social media.
How to Get Free Traffic
1. Understand that you can get extremely targeted traffic from forums and social media platforms. People who engage in these online platforms are already interested in the niche that you are in. Don’t start off instantly with promoting your link though, build your reputation and socialize with the community.
Become an authority in the topic you are in. That’s when people will come to you to ask for advice and information. You could also drop your links within your signature, but keep it low to avoid being banned.
2. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or Pinterest work on the same principles as this. Imagine now you have a link from your Pinterest to your affiliate website, and maybe it brings in 2-3 visitors per day. Now imagine a YouTube video that brings in another 4-5 visitors per day. It all adds up, and your site will grow after some time.
3. Search Engine Optimization is the process of ranking your site on Google. However, using this solely as a source of traffic is risky, as many people are competing for the most profitable keywords, as well as changes in the algorithms could wipe out your main source of traffic over night. To do this, you will need to study more in depth about the factors which makes a site worthy in Google’s eyes.
You should be targeting keywords which are easier, but just targeted, with your website. For instance, instead of going after the term “weight loss”, go after the term “rapid weight loss results in 10 days or less” it’s better to use long-tail keywords.
Imagine 5 highly targeted visitors per day thanks to your highly targeted article for the long tail keyword mentioned. The more articles in your site, the more targeted traffic you build, and your risk is spread compared to only having 1 main keyword to rank for. The concept remains the same, proper link building from authority sites, as well as social shares help to give the long tail keywords a boost up the SERPs.
Paid Traffic
Paid traffic, with the most popular being Google AdWords, can be a dangerous thing. First and foremost, it is costly to run. You could mistakenly let your campaign run and notice a bill of thousands of dollars at the end of the month. But it is still effective. So how do people make money online using this method then?
The answer is in the conversions. Your site must be optimized for conversions before you do this. How would you test this? One effective method is by constantly doing split testing. This involves making 2 variations of your site, and sending equal amounts of traffic to both these sites.
Then, you would calculate the amount of sales attributable from these 2 sites, and measure your earnings per click. This is a good indicator of your conversions, and which site the customers are more inclined to buy from. It can even be as close as changing a certain font, or color, or background of your website that influences buyers to purchase.
Affiliate marketing is not anything that you can make money with over night. You need to be able to build up and keep adding to your website daily or weekly, and keep it going. You can do it, just don’t give up.
Using and combining these 2 methods of traffic is not easy, and it’s better to starting with free traffic at the beginning. Learning how to generate traffic is a game of skill and numbers
P.S.
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