Where to get traffic for your affiliate marketing website – Beginners guide

We're going to talk about how to generate traffic to an affiliate marketing website. I will show you how I get traffic to my sites and all about my experiences with generating traffic.

Getting traffic for your website

Whether your goal is, having ads or affiliate links on your website, you need lots of traffic. Traffic is the lifeblood of any websites.

The main points will be about:

• Organic traffic
• Social Media (Pinterest)
• Paid traffic

I've got a couple of affiliate marketing projects on the go right now. And I share everything about those projects, including how much the websites are making. Also, I'm showing you all the work that I do on the sites and how I built the site. You can check out a YouTube playlist here. That's the BestRoofBox playlist – that site is making four figures a month. It's doing pretty well. I've got another one as well on my WheelAlong website, which is all about trolleys.

Analytics for bestroofbox.com

If we look at the source medium report under the acquisition section within google analytics, the number one traffic source is Google organic. Next, we've got direct. That is people typing in the website in the Google search engine. This site has got a lot of direct traffic because I'm always talking about it on YouTube. Next up, we have YouTube traffic, and the site has its own YouTube channel, which generates traffic. Again, I think most of the traffic is coming from me here, WP Eagle. So, I guess we can't count that. Next up, we got Pinterest which is entirely legit. That is Best Roof Box related pins, and that brings in a trickle of traffic. Then finally, we got some other stuff like Bing and Facebook.

Key takeaway: The primary source of traffic is Google organic. In my opinion, Google organic or SEO is the best way to get traffic to your website. It does take work and time, but it brings a steady, healthy flow of traffic to your website in the long term. And without any ongoing cost.

How to rank well on Google to bring us organic traffic?

What you want to do is head over to Google and do some searches around your niche. And you want to make a note of the suggestions that Google presents you with. Now those suggestions are things that people are typing into Google right now. They're entering them. If they are relevant to your niche, they're searches that you want your website to come up for. So, how do we come up for those searches? Well, we create content around them. We answer the questions that people are typing in. You want to go for searches that are questions and that are pretty long. We call them long-tail searches. They have more than three words in the search. The reason for this is they show more buyer intent or more intent in general.

Long-tail keywords tell you two things:

• It tells you that someone is pretty serious about what they're looking for
• they have a lot of lower competition which of course is very important because that gives us a fighting chance of ranking

If you're going for one or two-word searches, that's going to be hard to rank for. Please don't bother; it's too hard.

For example, for my website bestroofbox.com, I go for terms like:

• Best roof box for fishing
• Best roof box for camping equipment
• Best roof boxes for BMW M3

I'm looking for the best roof boxes for different cars rather than just roof box or roof cargo box. They're far too competitive. I recommend you take a look at the Google search results page for each of those suggestions. Have a look at what's coming up. Is it any good? Does the content answer the query. Because you'll find there's a lot of searches that people are putting into Google, and what's being returned by Google doesn't answer the question. So, if you create content that does answer that question in a concise, clear and high-quality way, there's a good chance that you will get ranked without building too many links.

Is building links necessary?

That is something that you need to do because links help Google find your site for a start. They also bring link juice which is authority and reputation, and it flows between sites across links. For example, suppose a site with a high reputation and high authority links to your site. In that case, that authority spreads itself through the link flows through the link to your site and increases your website's authority and reputation. Link building involves creating good content and then reaching out to other sites asking if they want to link, possibly offering them a guest post. You offer a guest post which they can have on their site, which includes a link to your site. It's quite a long process which is why I outsource a lot of my link building.

I've recently been using Stan Ventures that have done a fantastic job with my other site wheelalong.co.uk. They built some links for me, and it shot to the first page of Google for several search terms. The whole website has lifted across the search engines, and traffic is up. I was pleased with their service. They've offered me some fantastic prices here.

Social media – Pinterest

Organic search is unmistakably one of the best ways to generate traffic to your website, but there are a few other things that you can do. Pinterest is an excellent way to generate traffic, especially if you're in a very female-oriented niche. To get traffic from Pinterest, all I've done is I've created some lovely-looking pins for my content using Canva, which is my favourite graphics package. Although there is a pro version that I love because it has loads of stock photography and other features like a background remover, this tool is free. Canva has some great templates for Pinterest graphics. I create these pins, add them to my content, and share them on my own Pinterest account. Although the traffic numbers aren't huge, it does bring in a bit of traffic. And it also generates some links.

A fantastic way to generate traffic with YouTube

Another great way to generate traffic to your website, but you do need to create some videos. And the better those videos are the more traffic. You don't have to make videos like this where you're showing your face off or anything like that.

This is what you can easily do:

• do screen shares
• record PowerPoint presentations and talk over

There's a lot of ways to create pretty easy videos. And once you start to get a bit of momentum on your youtube channel, you'll find that it generates quite a bit of traffic. And people click through the links in your cards, and these things works. I've had great success on YouTube, and pretty much anything that I talk about in these videos gets traffic. It's an excellent way to generate traffic to WP Eagle and all the other sites that I talk about on this channel. In terms of my affiliate channels like Best Roof Box, I haven't done as much work on those as I probably should have done. I've got a few videos, and I get a trickle of traffic, but I know that if I created some helpful videos, I'm sure that I could get a lot more traffic from youtube.

Traffic from Quora – Is it possible?

This is something that I've been playing around with for a while. And Quora is a question and answer site where people ask questions about stuff, and anyone can answer them. It's an excellent opportunity to build links and generate traffic because you search for questions relevant to your niche, and you answer them. And you need to provide a high quality, in-depth, thorough answer. If you do that, your answer should stick, and there is an opportunity there to add a link or two back to your website. I find Quora works pretty well, but it's only a trickle of traffic compared to Google organic.

Should I send paid traffic to your affiliate marketing website?

My initial answer is always no. The reason for that is that paid traffic can be quite expensive – especially in competitive niches. And the problem with sending paid traffic to an affiliate marketing website is it's tough to track that traffic outcome. For example, you have an affiliate marketing website, and you send a whole load of paid traffic through Google. And people then click off your site through your affiliate links over to Amazon and make a purchase. There is no way of you linking that sale back to your paid search campaign or whatever it is you're running. There's no way of optimizing your paid ads. And then it becomes very inefficient, and you'll always end up spending more money on ads than you generate from commissions.

The trick with paid ads is that you track everything very accurately, and then you can focus your paid budget on the bits of the campaigns that are working well. The 80/20 rule applies to it. 20% of your ads are going to generate 80 of your revenue. But you have to figure out which 20% are the ones that are working; otherwise, you're going to be wasting a lot of money on the 80% that aren't. When people ask me should I run paid search, my initial reaction is no. But I guess you could do it if you can extract a lot of value from that traffic, maybe by capturing email addresses or having some other opt-in system going on like a funnel or something. That would probably work, but generally, just sending paid traffic through to an affiliate site, don't do it.

Are Facebook groups suitable for your affiliate website?

The final thing I want to talk about is Facebook groups. I've not had any experience with this. I do have a Facebook group for WP Eagle, and you should come and join us. It's a great place to hang out and chat about affiliate marketing and WordPress. But I've never created a Facebook group for my affiliate marketing sites.

I hear that they can work, but my experience with groups is that they take a while to get members and build up a nice community. You can't promote stuff too much within the group because your members don't like it if you're posting links all the time. I guess they can work, but it's going to take quite a bit of time and overhead in terms of management. Maybe create a Facebook group when you start your site and encourage people to join it.

Conclusion

Organic search is your friend. That's going to be the best way for you to generate traffic. Focus on some good quality content. Do some research on Google and answer the questions that aren't already being answered. And you should be able to generate some healthy, regular, and free traffic from organic search.

Leave me a comment below on how you get traffic to your websites.

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