The most challenging skill when it comes to affiliate marketing is the ability to generate targeted and buyers traffic to your affiliate website.
In today’s challenging online world many niches became saturated with both affiliates and products battling for a piece of the market share (in terms of traffic).
You need to be able to put your affiliate website in front of your target audience to generate affiliate sales.
Running an affiliate blog and selling your affiliate products from there can help you utilize many traffic generation strategies.
Preparing your Affiliate Website for Traffic
Affiliate marketing thrives on traffic, because the more traffic you get the higher the potential sales will be.
Before you start thinking about getting traffic to your affiliate website, you need to first prepare it to convert any traffic it gets.
First start writing quality blog posts about different issues and problems in your niche, because after all people love free problem solving solutions which you could provide through your content.
To find content ideas that people in your niche need and love, you could browse through niche related blogs like yours, and then find the most interactive blog posts they have.
You can use Google to find those blogs:
Use “KEYWORD “10 comments” to find blog posts about your topic.
Browse through the list of blog posts that Google generates for you and find out which one of them has the most social interactions.
Write your own blog posts about the same topic knowing that people are looking for such topic and if you wrote the article well, then your blog post can go viral on social media too.
You also need to create a Gravatar account and upload your head-shot picture there.
When you create an author profile on WordPress using the same email as your Gravatar, your head-shot picture on Gravatar will automatically show up on your blog post next to your author name.
Same goes for when you comment on other blogs using the same email as your Gravatar, your picture also show up next to your comment.
The importance of this is that you show people that you are real human behind your blog, and it helps them connect with you faster.
Doing affiliate marketing via product reviews is a great technique because you get a chance to show off your copywriting skills.
First you need to create a product review page to promote your affiliate product.
Create a blog post that discuss the pros and cons of your affiliate product and provide as much information about the product as you can while adding your affiliate link. And if it has videos than add it too.
Not every visitor you receive will buy your affiliate product on the first visit, and you need to capture that visitor somehow so you can communicate with him further.
Build your sales funnel so that when someone visits your affiliate website, you get the most benefit from that visitor.
This can be done by building your list of subscribers on your blog.
Create a comprehensive PDF guide or report and offer it for free to your incoming visitors and in exchange for their email subscription.
Create an autoresponder account (GetResponse, Aweber or MailChimp) so that you can manage your subscribers and send your free PDF guide to them with ease.
Inside your Autoresponder account you will be able to create a lead capture form.
Use the HTML code they provide you for the form and insert it on your blog as a side widget:
Your Autoresponder will automatically deliver your PDF guide once the visitor opt-in to your list and provides you with a working email.
Now your affiliate website is ready to receive traffic and get the most out of it.
Draw a Traffic Plan for Your Affiliate Website
Once you have your affiliate website ready and full of helpful content and setup your sales funnel, you need to draw up a traffic plan and commit to it.
A successful affiliate marketing campaign will depend greatly on your ability to devise and implement a solid traffic generation strategy.
This diagram represents a must do traffic strategy:
You need to comment on other niche relevant blogs and leave an insightful comment.
If possible leave a link to one of your blog posts that either on the same topic you are commenting on, or on another topic that complement the post.
If your comment is long enough and really adds value then the blog owner will approve your comment with your links.
But don’t forget to leave your real name and use your Gravatar email so your comment looks authentic and gets accepted.
Depending on the blog you comment on and on how many blogs you comment on per day, you should be receiving traffic to your blog posts.
But never post more than 5 comments per day, as this could trigger Akismet comment spam plugin.
Akismet is installed on almost all WordPress blogs and it tracks your commenting activity across all blogs that you comment on (not just on 1 domain).
Excessive commenting could make Akismet deliver your comments in the Spam section of the blog owner, meaning that your comment could never be seen and gets immediately deleted.
So be careful with your commenting frequencies.
You also should be active on at least 2 social media websites, I prefer Twitter and Facebook.
For twitter, try to post 1 tweet a day containing your main keyword for your blog post and a link to it.
This is because there are many people on Twitter who do searches for keywords that could be related to your niche.
Fresh tweets always appear at the top of search results, and that’s why you need to daily tweet your blog post you are promoting.
This is an example of Twitter search results, and you should leave a link to your blog posts like this:
Now you need to do SEO for your product review pages.
SEO Plan: Keyword Research and Backlinks
SEO provides a reliable source of traffic for any affiliate marketing business, and failing to take advantage of it could hurt your affiliate marketing success and slow it down.
Finding keywords that are relevant to your affiliate product you are reviewing is the first step in keyword research.
Google can provide you with a list of highly relevant keywords that you can use to rank your affiliate product review page.
Enter your main keyword followed by “a,b,c..etc”
Collect the keyword that you feel are more relevant to your affiliate product.
Because you want whoever searches for that keyword on Google to find your product review relevant to what he was searching for.
Enter your selected list of keywords into Google Keyword Tool to find out how many searches each keyword has:
Start by targeting keywords with searches between 100 and 300, because they are easier and quicker to rank for.
If you rank for just 1 keyword with 100 searches a month and only 2% of those visitors bought your affiliate product, then you could be getting 2 sales.
And for a $30 affiliate commission product it means $60 a month from just 1 keyword.
Wise Words
Smart affiliate marketers who are hungry for success must understand what it takes to achieve affiliate marketing success.
There are many other pillars to affiliate marketing than just traffic, and covering them all will guarantee a lasting and consistent progress on your affiliate website.