Affiliate marketing can be really expensive for an advertiser if they are relying on paid sources to get their content seen. Yes, that does guarantee you that people will read what you write but there is still no guarantee that those people will click and buy the products that you are promoting. And, if they are not buying something, you might not get anything in return and that is a loss on your end. Paid sources like social media ad’s or website or search engine ads are getting expensive and are great for the reach but, if you rely only on them, the chances of earning profits are really low. In this article, we will talk about some of the sources where you can promote your affiliate marketing links for free and you can also expect to get those clicks that give you huge commissions.
Free Traffic Sources to do better Affiliate Marketing
Social Messaging or Engagement
Even if you have zero followers you can send message to anyone on Instagram, facebook or linkedin. Isn't it? So, why to wait for the followers to come. Start from wherever you are and send message to your relevant audience on social media. Use your real account to establish trust with your audience. As such, you can make sales, create clients and establish long term partnerships with your targeted audience. It does not stop here. There are hell lot of opportunities. You can send coupons and deals about your service on messages, ask for collaboration or make them interested either way that helps you in your business.
Web Forums
There are a lot of web forums available on the internet. There will be many related to the products or services that you might like to market. Search for those forums, join them and post your links with smart content. If you post it too directly, you might end up in the blocked section of those forums. That is why go slow and play it smart.
Communities/Groups (Facebook/Linkedin)
Just like the web forums you can join Facebook and Linkedin groups. These groups allow people to post but there might be some groups that review before posting. Here too, a direct selling pitch might decrease the chances of getting conversions. The only key to get conversions is by writing good content that explains the product well and can convince people that it is what they need. There are a lot of affiliate marketers who are just posting generic content with their affiliate links. These social media groups can dramatically increase your website traffic and bring huge affiliate sales.
Organic SEO
SEO undoubtedly open the door for free traffic. SEO as of today, however, is not 100% source of free traffic. Depending upon your niche, you may have to spend on it as well. On page SEO is free but off page SEO mostly tries to loose your pocket. However, if you do it right way, then surely with Organic SEO you can reach to your targeted audience. It is pertinent to note here that you always have to consider opportunity cost of SEO activity. If you are investing more time and resources doing SEO but with no such good results, just switch to other tactics.
Guest Posting
In order to give a push to your own website, you may opt to start doing guest post on other websites or blogs. You can join any outreach program and take recourse to any outreach tool for better dealing with the blog owners. As a contributer on renown publishing websites, you can easily increase the authority of your own website. To be seen on the top of search results, website authority is very crucial. Thus, guest posting can help you in long term and solid results that can improve traffic over time.
Moving on to twitter, it is definitely one of the best social media tool that can give you chunk of traffic if you do it right way. What is the right way? You might be wondering. So, most of the users starting off with twitter get depressed seeing their followers count. But believe me, its just a number. Don't try hard to increase your twitter followers. Instead, follow the trend and use better hashtag and try to focus on your current post. Mostly, news websites and online media publications make the best use of twitter. Due to the twitter algorithm, it gives priority to the trending topics and hashtags. Mostly, news websites publish trending and recently happened content and that is the reason they get benefitted. So, if you have any such website then never ignore twitter as a source to free traffic on your blog to do affiliate marketing.
Quora
Quora is a Q&A website where most of the people around the world come to get answers to their problems. Create an account if you don’t have one already and start looking for those questions that are related to the service or product that you are promoting. This is what can give you those much-needed conversions. Of all the sources that are mentioned here, this is one of the most powerful websites. Some people are finding things for their business and some potential customers are looking for better options. Find them, give them the option they might not know about. Here is the golden chance that you can’t miss.
Most of us don't use reddit, but do you know the fact that it has over 1.5 Billion monthly traffic. If you publish any catchy content on reddit, it is possible that you will quickly start collecting hits. Reddit has many communities and before you post in any of the community, you have to join it. There are rules and regulations for these communities which are set by their moderators. If you don't follow these, you are immediately banned from the community. Thus, it is advised, as long as your domain is not whitelisted, to post the content that follows the guidelines of particular community. You can join the community that best related to your blog niche and increase your blog traffic.
The best thing about most of these social media platforms is the fact that they possess great authority; they rank for your keywords and help you redirect to your page for which you couldn't rank. As such, you can rank for highly competitive keywords with the help of these social media network. Pinterest is one of the key contender in these platforms. Due to fact that it only shows a picture and contains major keywords, it compels the visitors to redirect for more information about the topic. As such, you can create boards and pins to immediately get redirected traffic from pinterest. Interestingly, it also gives you SEO juice that is beneficial for your website's future growth.
Medium
Medium lets you contribute on their platform and help you reach with millions with your content. It is like a free press release. If you are not already familiar with Medium, then you should definitely know about this social bookmarking website. Medium garners over 200million of traffic every single month. By contributing on Medium, you can definitely bring in huge chunk of traffic to your blog. Additionally, Medium has partner program where you can earn money for your writing.
To be honest, Instagram can be an option but not the best source of free social traffic for your website. Unlike Twitter, Instagram does not you to post content with links. With instagram, you also can't use links in captions or status. Even the swipe up feature is restricted for the users with over 10k followers. With a huge millennials audience, you can't expect much traffic to come on your website through Instagram. But that definitely doesn't suggest you to overlook it. In fact, there are other ways to garner traffic via instagram on your online channel. You can instigate users to click the link in bio and use special links in your bio that accomodates all the links you want to promote. For the same, you can take help of Instagram tools such as linktree.
Share for Share
Cross sharing as always been one of best sources for free traffic. If you want to get quick and organic traffic then there no other way as solid as s4s to gain traffic. To genuinely attract the audience, here in this case, you have to attract the industry friends first. It is like mutual collaboration where you promote them through your online channels in an expectation that they will do the same for you. It is very powerful as long as you do it with most relevant niche leaders. The problem in this type of collaboration lies in tendecy of hesitation among leaders who don't want to patch up with new bloggers. Hence, you have to be very careful while you negotiate. It is better you do this with confidence or do it when you have achieved a marginal growth.
YouTube/Vimeo/Dailymotion
Who can forget YouTube when it comes to free traffic on blog for affiliate marketing via other online channels. Infact, YouTube, vimeo and other video sharing platforms are perfect for affiliate marketing. The reasonability behind is the fact that users these days prefer video content over textual content. As such, they tend to make their buying decision influenced with video content. Due to this tendecy of most visitors, you can better bring traffic for your affiliate marketing campaigns from these platforms. This traffic will be highly convertible and thus profitable for you as an affiliate.
Email Marketing
If you are really serious with your affiliate marketing endeavours then Email Marketing is one such medium that can give you highly convertible traffic and leads. With the use of right email marketing techniques you can make a hit out of your affiliate campaigns. Below are few ways to do email marketing right way:
- Build your email list
- Optimize your email messages
- Don't be spammy
- Leave an unsubscribe link
- Write better call to active
- Proofread your email content
Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is nothing but a technique to implement tools and strategies through which you can grow faster. By using these viral marketing tools, you can increase traffic and achive your end goals. Giveaway is one of the most used tool of viral marketing. There are many viral marketing software you can find online for running online giveaways. With the help of online giveaways, you can not increase traffic but also increase social media followers and trusted audience. Gleam and Kingsumo by Appsumo are the trending tools for creating online giveaways.
Blog Commenting
Commenting on blog is one of the viral ways to increase not only traffic but also the authority score of your website. Overtime, with the overuse of this by spammers many bloggers and website owners have limited their blogs for commenting. As such, they have either removed website field from the comment or have deleted the entire comment section. So, blog commenting have become very tedious as you rarely find blogs where you can comment. Additionally, even if the aforementioned things are not met, you get either no link click or they don't approve comment at all. Just because of these hurdles, bloggers have created communities and they keep on doing cross commenting for rank gain. But obviously, overuse of that either can be very bad for rankings. However, you can find good blogs by keeping an eye on your competitors with the helps of tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs.
Create Backlinks
It is obviously not an instant way to get traffic. Creating Backlinks is an Indirect way to gain traffic. Backlinks however help you gain rank in long run which can ultimately give you huge chunk of traffic if you write good content continuously. As such, creating backlinks is an effective method to gain traffic for your blog in the long run.
Can i get free traffic from Pinterest?
Yes, Pinterest is a wonderful social platform to gain free traffic. If you create a rankable pin then you can redirect visitors from that ranked pin to your website. To rank a pin first do the image SEO and then write SEO optimized keywords and description for your pin.
Which is better for free traffic, Facebook or twitter?
If you have good followers, then Facebook can definitely give you good results. However, in lack of noticeable amount of followers only twitter can save your game. With twitter you can get free traffic no matter how much followers you have despite the fact that reach is less but not zero.
Conclusion:
Affiliate marketing methods are changing and more than ever, you now need to be creative and uptight. The above-mentioned sources are free and can give you great results if you focus on all activities like using the content in the right way. It’s time when you can do a lot with free sources in Affiliate marketing, spending money on ads is good but there should be a ratio. If you are doing affiliate marketing seriously then you should probably take the organic to inorganic (Free: Paid) ratio as 70:30. The more you focus on the free sources, the more will be the chance to earn profits. There are a lot of affiliate marketers who make the mistake of going full throttle with ads and other paid methods and they just get in losses.
Add a comment