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One of the greatest challenges affiliate marketers face is figuring out how to drive traffic to their affiliate links. In fact, solving this problem alone should be the primary concern of any serious affiliate marketer looking to build their online business.
Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing in which a business rewards several affiliates for each visitor or client brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. In other words, affiliate marketing is promoting other people’s services or products in exchange for a commission.
To be clear, I won’t be talking about affiliate marketing in this article. However, if you are new to affiliate marketing, check out my articles, Affiliate Marketing For Beginners, Affiliate Marketing Case Study, and Best Affiliate Programs for Beginners.
Or you can check out my YouTube tutorial playlist. If you would like to see me applying my strategies, check out my Affiliate Marketing Case Studies playlist.
This blog post will explain how I double, if not triple, my earnings and conversion rates using 4 traffic sources in conjunction. Combining these strategies can drive more traffic to your affiliate links (this means increased conversions and ROI).
So what are the 4 main traffic sources that I use?
Ranging from social media, Q&A websites to blogging and online video-sharing platforms, you have at your disposal an arsenal of means to drive traffic to your links. Among the countless options, I will be talking about the 4 tools that I find most useful:
1. Email marketing
2. A blog/website
3. Youtube
4. Quora
I will go over how to utilize these 4 different traffic sources to their full potential; however, if you would like to view similar content in video format, please check out this video on my YouTube channel H-Educate.
First, using email marketing to drive traffic to your affiliate links
First of all, we will discuss email marketing. There are 4 tactics that I rely on to drive traffic using email marketing: welcome emails, email signature, marketing through a newsletter, and cold mailing.
1. Welcome Email
Sending a welcome email to potential buyers is one of the best ways to advertise your affiliate links. So how do I accomplish this? Easy, the opt-in form. If you check out my home page on H-Educate, you will find a small form at the page’s top section asking for basic personal info.
After filling this form, the user will subscribe to my newsletter, gaining access to exclusive content like valuable tips, tutorials, and more neat stuff related to digital marketing and online business.
As soon as a user subscribes to this newsletter, they will receive a welcome email. Inside my welcome email template, I include plenty of links to my services and affiliate products.
For more details on how this works, check out my video about welcome emails.
The new subscribers will open the welcome email since it is something they had most recently signed up for, and there’s a high chance that they will click on one or more of the links I shared since they’re genuinely interested.
2. Email Signature
Next is the email signature. An email signature is a powerful way to show professionalism to your subscribers. An email signature is normally at the bottom of each mail that you send.
The purpose of this is to build yourself a trademark and to stand out. Also, using a signature is important to build brand awareness, trust, and loyalty. In addition to being a trademark, I attach some of my links to my email signature. For example, I include a link referring to my blog and another referring to my services.
In my case, I receive around a thousand emails daily. Every time I reply to someone, they will receive my email signature, which includes my links; thus, I am getting more traffic to my affiliate links.
3. Newsletters
The third tactic of email marketing is newsletters. As I already mentioned, on the first page of my website, I have an opt-in form through which visitors can subscribe to my newsletter.
By the way, If you don’t have a website, I highly recommend that you make one. If you’re not sure where to start, take a look at this article, which covers how to create a blog for $0.99! However, if you’d like to learn how to make a free WordPress site with free hosting, check out the video below.
Using the opt-in form, you will grow your own email list of people who are genuinely interested in the content you have to offer. You can then send weekly, biweekly, or monthly emails to your subscribers, providing them with your latest content or services. You can also add your own related affiliate links in your newsletter, driving even more traffic to your affiliate links.
For more details on Newsletters, please watch this video in which I talk about how I send my newsletter and how I get up to a 56% opt-in rate.
4. Cold mailing
Finally, the last tactic of using email marketing to drive traffic to your affiliate links is through sending cold emails. Cold emailing is simply sending emails out of the blue to any number of people subscribed to your email list. It is important to understand how to avoid spam using this tactic, as it is a slippery slope, and you do not want to be black-listed as a spammer.
As I always say, no one hates spam more than I do. Please take this to heart; If you spam, you may gain in the short term, but it will get you black-listed. The distinction between acceptable cold emailing and spam is that spam is sending bulk unsolicited emails to random people. In contrast, cold emailing is sending 200 or 500 emails a day but to specific people.
For example, SEMrush is an SEO company that provides SEO tools to its customers. I have signed up with SEMrush’s affiliate program, and let’s say I intend to promote my affiliate links via cold emails. How would I do that without spamming anyone? Simple, I can write an article about SEO tools on my blog or answer a question about SEO tools on Quora.
Then, I can send cold emails to the people who read my article and are already subscribed to my newsletter, and I can reach out to the people who interacted with my answer on Quora. I would of course make sure to recommend SEMrush and provide my affiliate links in the emails.
Using cold emails you can build rapport with your target audience by starting conversations with them. I once promoted a product for only 9 people, but the product that I promoted, which was BeRush, allows affiliates to get a 40% recurring commission, which means that every month I get a 40% commission without doing anything.
Another example is TubeBuddy. Using the same strategy, you can recommend any service to anyone using cold mail after leading up to it properly.
If you would like to learn about email marketing in-depth, check out my Email Marketing Definitive Guide.
Secondly, using a blog to drive traffic to your affiliate links
Starting your own blog is a very effective way to drive traffic to your affiliate links while providing relevant and useful content to your target audience. Blogging is a cheap way for you to drive traffic to your site, promote better inbound marketing, and attract more prospective customers. I will share with you the three tactics that I use to drive traffic to my affiliate links using my website.
1. First, writing articles to drive traffic to your affiliate links
Take, for instance, my article in which I talk about MailWizz, which is a self-hosted email marketing automation system used in building your own Email Marketing systems. Throughout the article, I provide my own affiliate links, increasing the number of clicks I get. This article provides my viewers with valuable content and information about Mailwizz, while driving traffic to my affiliate links.
In case it’s not clear yet, you can’t work online without having a website. Go now and make a website. I can’t stress enough how important this step is. You won’t lose anything, and you won’t know unless you try. If you don’t want to spend money, try Blogger.com, which has a completely free version.
Above is another example of the articles I provide. In this article, I share tips on promoting Fiverr gigs with my viewers, and I refer to my affiliate links in the process.
You can use a website to promote physical products as well. For instance, you write an article about the top 10 best cameras, or top 10 best laptops, so on and so forth. As you can see in the picture above, I have almost 6 thousand users, and almost 10 thousand sessions per month all for free!
2. Another example, Resources and Tools
In addition to blog content, I provide my visitors with resources and tools. 80% of the links found there are affiliate links. This page (below) gets more than 15k views monthly. Assuming 5 out of 500 visitors clicked on my links, that’s 150 clicks, and I will receive a commission for each of those clicks.
Most of these links are affiliate links which, some of them like Getresponse and Snov.io give recurring commissions, so all of this is passive income for me, at the same time I’m providing people with helpful tools and services. It’s a win-win.
3. Finally, using banner ads
My website, H-supertools has more than 150 thousand views per month. There, I run google AdSense ads and sell ad spaces. You can add banner ads for affiliate products as well.
To recap
- Start a blog
- Provide resources and tools
- Use banner ads
Third, drive traffic to your affiliate links using YouTube
If you want to promote your affiliate links, youtube is one of the best organic traffic sources. You can make videos promoting physical products by creating video reviews and linking them to these products in your description. Take, for example, the video in which I talk about my set-up at home, my laptops, my microphones, and all the hardware and software I use. in said video, I added links to those products so that anyone’s interested can go to amazon and buy them.
In addition to video reviews, you can create educational videos or video tutorials. Take, for example, my video in which I provide a tutorial on how to install Mailwizz. In the description, I provide my affiliate links allowing people to buy Mailwizz using my affiliate link. these videos provide educational content for my viewers. To me, they’re a 100% passive income. to get a better idea, you can watch the video mentioned.
Note
The links I provide in my YouTube videos’ descriptions are shortened links. Using shortened links is important, as I explained in one of my videos. Using the shortened link is very important because it makes it easier to track traffic to your links. To shorten my links, I use my service link.me; I had bought and published this service from code canyon. If you want to find out how to start a business using this service, you can check out my video tutorial on the topic.
Finally, we have Quora
Quora is a Q&A platform for people to ask questions for other internet users to answer. The answers are then followed and/or edited, either using facts or opinions. I always talk about Quora’s importance to generate traffic in my youtube videos, as I ramped up 70k views on my answers in 30 days.
You’ll find out that I don’t get that many views for nothing. I have a daily routine of sitting down and answering Quora questions for about 10 or 20 minutes. It’s fairly simple, as you can see. However, the key here is to do it consistently. Consistency is key, as by ritualistically answering people’s questions, I get thousands of views per day. In my answers, you’ll find my affiliate links relevant to the questions asked; this way, I get a lot of organic traffic to my affiliate links.
The reason I use Quora of all Q&A websites is that it ranks 71st in the US; therefore, it gets more than 500 million views each month. Thus, Quora is a powerful platform to use to drive traffic to your affiliate links. For more details on how to use Quora properly, please watch my video Quora Marketing: How to Get Traffic From Quora | Best Practices and Tips.
To Wrap up
Here you have it guys, these are the 4 sources of traffic I rely on and the different ways I use each to drive traffic to my affiliate links. Thank you for reading so far. I hope this article helps you get more traffic to your links. Please don’t forget to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn to get the most of what I have to offer. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel if you’re not much of a reader. I’m looking forward to reading your comments below!
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