Back in the day, a given convenience store wasn’t called as the best place to shop just because they had a large variety of high quality, top of the pile stuff. No matter how much of the good stuff you pile into the shelves, as long as the people don’t walk in through the front door, it just doesn’t matter.
Twenty years on, it still works the same. A shop—be it offline or online, only works in case there’s incoming traffic. And at this very moment, the biggest virtual shop of affiliate marketing thrives on various sources of traffic and the traffic sources for affiliate marketing are the ones that bring in the audience.
There are a lot of roads to take when searching for the traffic sources for affiliate marketing, but some are more efficient than the other—social media, SEO, push notifications and what not. But with so many options at disposal, which ones actually do the trick of bringing in the audience?
Let’s look at the best traffic sources of affiliate marketing in 2023 that are capable of driving insane amounts of audiences to your website—the ones that actually convert into good, hot, returning users. Read away!
Are you a low key bookie? Well, there would be a lot of bidding for traffic sources when it comes to affiliate marketing. Pay per Click aka PPC is one of them. In this source of traffic, the paid traffic network charges you an amount for every click that you receive on the website.
How do you receive these clicks, you might ask? You pick a traffic network (Google AdWords and Bing Ads are on top of the list right now) and create search advertisements in accordance to keywords based in the search engine’s database. After that, you bid a specific amount per click and run ads on it.
Whenever we talk about the symo traffic sources for affiliate marketing on Social Media, Facebook is our very initial guess. But there’s more to social media marketing than the rather advanced mechanics that facebook offers. Social media platforms are making a tectonic shift and trendy platforms like Instagram and Snapchat are becoming users’ first choice.
Check Out: 5 Ways to Promote Your Newsletter on Social Media
Social media marketing is a whole lot cheaper as a source of traffic but every inexpensive traffic source comes with plenty of research. You need to research on multiple dimensions and target audiences so as to make the most of a social media campaign. But note this: Social Media would be an important affiliate marketing source in the coming future.
This one’s a hot buzzword on every digital marketer’s lips and rightly so. But this one comes with a catch. Undoubtedly, SEO is one of the best traffic sources for affiliate marketing… in the long run. SEO gets you a whole lot of organic traffic through Google and other search engines.
The best part is that SEO is absolutely free of cost and it depends on multiple factors. From the quality of content to website’s reputation, social media connections and various technical factors, SEO is not a child’s play. But once people get a hang of it, they can salvage huge chunks of organic traffic from it. It takes months before you get a successful SEO camp up and running.
With the rise of smartphone culture and everyone carrying a mobile phone, push notifications have risen to be one of the top traffic sources for affiliate marketing. You can say that it’s a bit ahead of its time, but this service started as a medium for mobile users to get instant notifications on desktop and phone.
The best part about push notifications is that they don’t look spammy—the user opts in to receive push notifications because they genuinely want to be notified. You don’t have to worry about quality of traffic anymore, as in most cases, the traffic is HQ. The customization options are plenty and open rates are high.
Native ads match the look and feel of the website on which they run on. They look like “just another piece of online content” on media, entertainment and news websites, but these pieces link to your website. Native ads are not spammy or anything for they are marked as “sponsored stories” on most websites.
CPM (Cost per Mile) is charged in Native Ads which is nothing but a specific pay for every thousand views you get. Native campaigns only work when they have good content and match the class of the publishers’ websites. Some of the supreme native ads networks are Taboola, Outbrain, and Yahoo Gemini.
Email marketing is a dark horse not only in the list of top traffic sources for affiliate marketing, but in the whole digital marketing picture. The best way to build a long term affiliate marketing relationship is by creating a traffic base that gets your emails everyday and that these emails contain valuable content.
You can go the long haul and build your own email audience for newsletters or you can buy spots on prevalent newsletters to generate traffic. Do note that every email newsletter doesn’t explicitly sell spots, but you have to ask them about it.
Often known as banner ads, contextual ads are blocks of images that are placed in between articles. They contain links to the advertiser’s website and this traffic source can work wonders when it comes to complimentary selling. Google AdSense is a prevalent platform on which enterprises market through contextual ads.
Once you do the needful, the sites that are in partnership with Google AdSense for the purpose of monetization will start displaying your banner ads in between content of relative nature. The likes of Media.net, AdBuff and Chitika also deal with contextual ads.
There are many websites that are willing to make a living by selling ad space. And since you are looking for top traffic sources for affiliate marketing, you won’t really mind buying them. Display ads are run by websites holding a good amount of traffic on their exit pages, side pop-ups and basically any space where they can.
However, do note that display ads don’t work as smoothly in case you have a niche product/service to sell. In general sense too, we’d advise browsing the other sources of traffic on this list before thinking about display ads.
These are the 8 best traffic sources for affiliate marketing at the moment. You can sell anything on the internet and make good money off from it as long as you deliver the good stuff in your content. Remember that the efficiency of a traffic source varies with the niche and type of content.
Once you find your set of audiences through the right traffic source, your virtual affiliate marketing shop will be up and running!
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