As an affiliate marketer, generating more traffic to our platform and finding more leads are often the biggest challenges. Yet, they are also the most important things we should consider if we want to be successful as affiliate marketers.
With that being said, here we will discuss some actionable tips that you can use right away to generate more traffic, find more leads, and get more affiliate sales.
1. Deciding on a Platform
Nowadays, we have various platforms we can use to do affiliate marketing, and technically, you can do affiliate marketing on any of these platforms.
However, arguably, there are two main platforms where it’s much easier to get affiliate sales at the moment: a blog and a YouTube channel.
Starting a blog nowadays is relatively affordable, and a professional blog with your own .com domain name should only cost a few dollars per month. The main concept of blogging for affiliate marketing is to write high-quality content covering the product (i.e. review content) and then optimize the content for SEO.
You can add affiliate links to your content and generate organic traffic through SEO (and other content marketing strategies if you are marketing a SaaS brand.)
The other platform we’d recommend is a YouTube channel. Obviously, starting a YouTube channel is totally free, and you can upload as many videos as you want for free. You can add affiliate links in your video’s description (and tell your viewers to click on these links if they like the product).
Basically, choose a platform where the audience is attracted to review-type content (since this type of content tends to be the most effective in affiliate marketing). Also, remember that nowadays, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires us to be transparent about affiliate links and endorsements, so make sure to disclose your links.
2. Building Your Audience
Once you’ve set up a platform of your choice, our focus is on how we can build our audience and generate traffic to the platform. Here are some tips:
SEO
If your platform is a blog/website, optimizing it for SEO is a must. While SEO for enterprise companies is a very broad subject on its own, here are some general tips you should implement:
- Make sure to do keyword research before you develop your content, and find target keywords with high enough monthly search volume.
- Optimize the technical aspects of your site: Make sure your site is mobile-responsive/mobile-friendly, has decent page speed, and is properly indexed by Google.
- Content is king. No amount of SEO can help weak, low-quality content.
- Backlinks remain the most important ranking factor in SEO, so make sure to generate high-quality backlinks to your content. While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach in link building, building relationships and continuously publishing high-quality content remain the key.
Social media
Social media is where our audience is nowadays, so it would only make sense to promote our content on social media. While it can be tough to build your own social media followers nowadays, we can still do it by regularly publishing meaningful, relevant content for our target audience. We can also use various paid social media marketing options, including working with other influencers to improve our reach.
However, when using paid options, make sure to carefully consider your budget and ROI to ensure you won’t lose money.
Email marketing
Building your email list and starting an email newsletter is still a very effective method to generate traffic and also to nurture leads. You can build an email list by offering something valuable (a sample of your affiliate product, an ebook, etc.) for free in exchange for their email address.
Obviously, these are not the only traffic sources you can use, but they remain the most effective. Also, it’s advisable to focus on one traffic source at first rather than jumbling on different options at once. Once you’ve got a traffic source established, you can start building the next one.
For email marketing, check out UpLead, a great alternative to ZoomInfo for database building with information about business people and companies for sales, marketing and recruiting professionals.
3. Content Is King
No matter the form of your content, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and so on, it will remain your most effective weapon in attracting more leads.
What’s important in creating content for affiliate marketing is how you can talk about the product interestingly. Yes, you can be technical in covering the product (and its competitors) from various technical angles, but make sure it’s interesting.
Create content that excites your target audience instead of being purely educational. Also, it’s very important to understand your target audience’s behaviors, needs, and problems. If your content can solve their problem while being interesting, it’s likely they’ll share your content with more of their friends, generating more leads in the process.
4. An Optimized Landing Page
If you use paid advertising methods to generate your leads, then it’s very important to have a conversion-optimized landing page.
The idea is to use your ad to attract people to this landing page, and this landing page is going to be the one that converts incoming traffic into potential leads, and—hopefully—, customers.
So, how can we optimize this landing page to generate more conversions? There are some key factors:
- Your landing page should include an offer that you give for free. This is what we call the lead magnet. Your lead magnet is only as good as its lead magnet.
- Make sure it’s mobile-friendly and loads fast. More than 50% of people will bounce from your page if it loads in more than 3 seconds.
- Be straight and to the point, and keep your messages short. Be clear with your call to action.
- Make sure it’s as easy as possible for them to convert. If you use a form, don’t include too many fields, and don’t require them to input too much information, especially financial information, unless it’s necessary.
End Words
While the four tips we’ve shared above aren’t the only ones you can use to find more leads as an affiliate marketer, they are among the most effective ones. You can use them as a foundation and expand with other tactics later. Content quality remains the most important factor in attracting more leads. So, focus on delivering interesting, valuable content for your audience and be consistent both in quality and quantity.
