Getting Traffic For Affiliate Programs

One of the easiest ways to make money online especially for “newbies” or new internet marketers is by selling other people’s products; since it’s much easier than creating you own product. There are many outlets that host different programs that can fit into whatever niche your website is in. But the two most used to find affiliate programs is ClickBank and Commission Junction.

There are many people that make their living online just by promoting affiliate products, but some will still struggle with selling anything. But what separates the huge money earners from the “strugglers”? The answer is simply one word…….TRAFFIC. You need to get as much potentials buyers in front of your offer in order to make any sales. Where most people stumble is not in the time and effort they put into their promotional efforts but in how they choose to promote the product.

Before we look at some ways to get traffic to something you’re promoting, we have to look at the important concept of preselling. The concept is simple, if you just show somebody something once and say buy this, they are less likely to even consider the offer than if you have had some prior relationship with them. Building that gap between you “the affiliate” and them “the buyer” is like building a friendship, one based on trust and honesty.

Having An E-mail List
The best way to create that trust in buyers is by establishing an email list where you give them useful information on a regular basis. Many affiliates miss this important step in creating that trust in buyers and preselling. You must also only recommend products which you feel will be useful to others. Don’t just sell something because you know it will make you money. And you must be honest with people. Give your honest opinions about the products and don’t overhype or hard sell.

Organic Listings
One way to introduce a product to somebody is by having relevant content on a website or blog and placing links to the product within the body of the page. This not only aids in the preselling approach but the person is more likely to click if they find the information/offer might be useful.Now to boost the effectiveness of this page would be to try and show up in the organic listings in the search engines. The organic listings are search results that show up in the search engine after you type in a word. They are more heavily clicked on by surfers than sponsored links and ads. To show up in the listings you have to do some search engine optimization (SEO) techniques on the page. To find out more about about SEO, take our free seo course.

Pay-Per-Click
If you have a little money in your budget for marketing, utilizing pay-per-click search engines can be beneficial to getting traffic for your affiliate program. This type of advertising is most popularly done on Google or Yahoo! Search Marketing (once referred to as Overture). You can use it to either drive visitors to an email list (where you slowly build them up to your affiliate offer) or send them directly to your affiliate link. Try as much as possible to do the former.

If you do the later try to cloak the affiliate link which might look like this www.product.com/aff?123 to something looking more professional. You can buy a domain with a similar name to the affiliate offer and then redirect the page to your affiliate page. You can do this using the options for the Cpanel of your webhost or by including a bit of code. You can also make the redirect from a site you already own from a page like this www.mysite.com/recommends/product

To get codes for redirecting urls CLICK HERE.

Article Marketing
A short cut to getting listed in the search engines is by writing articles. If the keywords you write about are not highly competitive and the article site has a high pagerank you can generate a listing in the search engines from posting your article in their directory. Make the article related to the affiliate offer and include a link to your affiliate page in your author signature box. Some article sites frown on placing affiliate links in your articles, so you might have to have links to another page you own that has the affiliate offer listed.

Social Bookmarking
Utilizing social bookmarking (SBM) sites or establishing a Web 2.0 strategy is an easy and cheap way of getting traffic to your affiliate page. There are many sites now on the internet that allow you to bookmark pages that you like for free for future reference. But don’t just bookmark your affiliate page alone. That won’t work. Try and get some content related to your affiliate offer like articles and blog posts, have a link in it to the affiliate offer and then bookmark that page. Utilize sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Furl, Spurl, Twitter and many others. (At the end of each of my posts there is a link to a bookmarking tag. Click on it and see a list of sites I’m talking about.)

But don’t just stop there! If the program is popular utilize Squidoo and HubPages to write reviews about it. People sometimes search for the terms “productx review” or “buy productx” and if you write about it on one of these sites you can score high in the search engines for those keywords. You can also search for less competitive keywords related to the product and create pages on the two sites mentioned before related to them. And of course include a link on the page to the affiliate program you promote.

But don’t just stop there!! Further bookmark the mini-pages you’ve created on Squidoo and Hubpages on the SBM sites. And even more, link to each content you create about the product to another page about it. Say for example you wrote an article, have a product review on Squidoo and have a content page on HubPages.com, link from the HubPage to the Squidoo page to the article. In that way you provide relevance to each site and by interlinking you have a better chance of ranking well with more than one page.

To learn more about becoming a better affiliate read the FREE report Affiliate XFactor. Where a super-affiliate goes through some techniques he used to generate a $40,000 Clickbank affiliate pay check in 72 hours selling a $77 ebook. Find out more here http://www.addtrafficnow.com/recommends/xfactor.html

Summary

In summary, utilizing some of the more effective traffic generation methods can help in making affiliate sales. An important concept to remember is that the buyer must be presold to the offer to maximize conversion rates. Apart from the more popular website promotion methods utilizing a Web 2.0 strategy can be influential in gaining more traffic for affiliate programs.