Promoting products and services through affiliate links has been one of the best ways to make money online for many years and there are no signs that it’s slowing down anytime soon.
To be successful at affiliate marketing, you must direct and convert the largest number of people you can through your affiliate funnels while making the highest possible margin between what it costs you to attract them and the return they bring in commissions.
And what better way is there to increase the number of people in your funnel and your margins at the same time than by generating free traffic for affiliate offers?
Free traffic has allowed HubSpot and other large well-known companies to scale massively without having to rely on expensive paid traffic.
But what exactly are the ways to do that, and how can you apply those strategies in your business? In this article, we’ll be looking at 7 ways to get free traffic for affiliate offers.
We’ll be exploring how each of them works and how to apply them so you can decide which will work best for your business.
Table of Contents
7 Ways to Get Free Traffic for Affiliate Offers
1) YouTube videos
YouTube allows you to get free traffic for affiliate offers while building an engaged community
YouTube accounts for 35% of all global mobile internet traffic, according to Sandvine’s Mobile Phenomena report. This means that, if you run a business that aims to generate free traffic for affiliate offers, you shouldn’t ignore it.
One of the things that make YouTube one of the best ways to do that is that it allows you to build an audience that’ll keep coming for more, and might eventually buy from you more than once, increasing your customers’ lifetime value.
Needless to say, to do that, you need to provide relevant, high-quality content. You do that by solving your audience’s pain points and establishing yourself as an authority in that subject matter while promoting your affiliate links.
Another huge upside is that, once you upload your videos, they’ll be there forever generating views and bringing you revenue from your affiliate links and YouTube ads.
And finally, if your content is truly great, people will share it with their peers, bringing even more organic traffic.
If you decide to create or grow a YouTube channel to get free traffic for affiliate offers, then check out this post: 3 Ways to Boost Youtube Rankings
2) Write as much content as you can
More content helps your site rank higher on Google and other search engines and get more free traffic for affiliate offers, but don’t leave quality aside
Having more written content on your site helps you get more free traffic for affiliate offers not only because people will have more of your articles to click on, but also because search engines like Google will give it a higher score because of that.
This doesn’t mean, however, that you should create irrelevant content just for the sake of having more articles and posts on your site.
Search engines also value quality, which is measured by many factors, including whether your site or blog has more content on one specific topic, how long your articles are (they usually prefer long-form content), and, most importantly, how much time people spend in your site after accessing it for the first time.
Creating poor content, even if it somehow attracts a large number of visitors at first, will give you a higher bounce rate, which will ultimately lead search engines to believe that your website provides a bad experience to their visitors and will make it rank lower.
If you want more traffic coming into your site and, as a consequence, into your affiliate offers, you need to come up with as much high-quality content as you can.
If you don’t have the time or skills to do that, you can always hire a freelancer on Fiverr or Upwork. Even if you end up paying for it, it still comes down a lot cheaper than paid traffic.
Check out the Top 5 Virtual Assistant Services Sites for High-Quality VA’s.
3) Level up your SEO
Speaking of ranking higher in search engines, optimizing your site and content for SEO is always one of the best ways to get free traffic for affiliate offers, and it’s one of the first things that you should think of if you aim to have a big chunk of your audience coming in organically.
In case you don’t know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it basically means optimizing your website to come up among the first results on search engines like Google.
Just to give you an idea of how important this is, take a look at the image below that shows the average percentage of people that click on each link depending on its position in Google.
Search engines’ algorithms have been built and optimized over the years to bring the most relevant results based on their users’ inputs. Thankfully, there are strategies that you can apply to use in your favor.
But how exactly can you rank high enough to get a relevant amount of free traffic for affiliate offers without having to hire a professional or google agency?
Here are a few quick tips:
Run Keyword Research
There are some competitive intelligence tools that can help you find out which keywords are the most relevant to reach your audience based on what they’ve been researching. By using those keywords in your titles and content, you’ll be able to rank higher by showing search engines that you’re providing exactly what your audience is looking for.
Check out these 3 Free Keyword Research Tools
Use tools to optimize your posts for SEO
There are some strategies you can apply in your posts so they’ll rank higher on search engines. The best part? You don’t need to learn them all. There are tools like Rank Math that can be fully integrated into your site editor that will tell you exactly what you need to do to have your posts rank higher.
Have other sites referring visitors to you
This includes doing things like partnerships with other bloggers to refer to each other in your posts or writing guest posts with backlinks to your site. The more backlinks there are referring back to your site around the web, the higher it’ll rank.
Optimize your site for mobile
As of the second quarter of 2022, mobile devices accounted for nearly 59% of the global web traffic. Search engines know how to differentiate websites that provide a great experience for mobile users from the ones that don’t, and that counts a lot for your score.
4) Create an email list
Email marketing allows you to engage one-time visitors so they’ll keep coming for more.
According to Chet Holmes, who’s been called “America’s greatest sales and marketing executive”, only 3% of a brand’s prospects are ready to buy at any given time. This means that one of the best ways to get free traffic for affiliate offers is to build an audience that’ll keep following you and consuming your content for a long time.
Like with YouTube videos and articles, one of the best ways to do that is by building an email list and using email marketing in your favor. According to DMA research, email marketing can bring an ROI of 42 dollars for every dollar spent.
Reaching out to your audience with high-quality content constantly can build a relationship of trust which, over time, will make the people on your list far more likely to buy the products you recommend, often more than once, than they were when they first met you.
To build an email list, all you have to do is choose an email service provider, set opt-in boxes on your site to start collecting email addresses from your visitors, and start delivering them high-quality content.
Mailchimp and Aweber are two of the most popular email service providers out there. Check out Aweber Vs Mailchimp.
To keep your audience engaged, make sure to understand who your ideal persona is and what they’re looking for, so you can craft emails that deliver value and demonstrate authority while promoting your affiliate offers.
5) Use Social Media
Like email marketing and YouTube, social media allows you to build an audience and communicate with it for free.
Social media can be an excellent way to get free traffic for affiliate offers if you play your cards right. If you’re constantly delivering great content through your social media profiles, more people will start following you, paying attention to you, interacting with your posts, and even sharing them with others.
It’s really important, however, to understand which channels your target audience spends the most time on and choose them accordingly.
If you’re dealing with a younger audience, for instance, TikTok and Snapchat would be great choices. If you have a broader audience and your affiliate offers solve personal problems, Instagram and Facebook are probably the best platforms. But if you’re dealing with experienced entrepreneurs, then LinkedIn is probably the way to go.
If you do it right, you’ll end up with a big audience that you can easily access and interact with without spending anything. A great example of that is Kylie Jenner, who’s built a US$ 900 million business while spending very little on paid traffic thanks to social media, and she credits it for most of her success.
And if you decide to work with multiple platforms at the same time (as you most likely should), it can be extremely useful to have a tool that allows you to manage all of them at once, which saves you a lot of time and helps you achieve better outcomes. Sprout Social is one of the best choices around for that.
Check out our Sprout Social Review
6) Comment on Blog Posts and Quora
Commenting on blog posts and Quora allows you to get free traffic for affiliate offers in a non-salesy manner
One of the best ways to get free traffic for affiliate offers is by commenting on other people’s blog posts and Quora questions. It’s free and, in many cases, people will even put more trust in you than when you’re actively trying to sell them something.
It’s important, however, to make sure that your comments are actually relevant and that you’re not just copying and pasting your affiliate links around the web, otherwise you’ll get ignored and, in the worst cases, blocked.
Like when creating other types of content, take some time to find out how you can add value to the readers and help them solve their problems through your affiliate offers.
7) Promote yourself everywhere to grow your audience
Don’t miss out on offline opportunities to get free traffic for affiliate offers
When it comes to growing your audience, promoting yourself is never too much, and there are many offline channels that you can leverage to do that. These include conferences, networking events, or any time you end up casually meeting someone who might be interested in what you have to say.
In fact, people tend to give a lot more attention and trust when they’re interacting with someone in person rather than reading or watching their content, which makes offline channels one of the best ways to get free traffic for affiliate offers.
Just be sure to have a card or something else that you can physically provide someone to help promote your site, blog, or YouTube channel, and come up with something interesting to say or write that’ll make them want to check it out.
Final Thoughts
If you explore any of these strategies right, you’ll be able to get a lot more free traffic for affiliate offers and your ROI will sure as hell skyrocket.
Just remember that most of them can take months or even years to work and reach their ultimate potential, especially the ones that require you to grow an audience. That’s why you must remain patient and consistent in your actions without expecting immediate results.
Also, remember that none of these are actually free. All of them will cost you time and energy, and that’s why it’s important to avoid doing them all and, instead, figure out which of them have the highest odds of improving your ROI depending on your business, its audience, and your strengths, and weaknesses.
But, of course, when it comes to marketing, each business and audience is different, and real-world testing always turns out to be more accurate than predictions. So don’t be afraid of testing different things over time to figure out what actually works and doesn’t in your case.
If you run an affiliate marketing business or are thinking about doing so, don’t forget to check out these other resources in our blog:
Making an Affiliate Website – 9 Easy Steps to Making Money
27+ Best Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing [Free & Paid]
- How to Make $1000 a Day With Google Ads Affiliate Marketing – Ultimate Guide - October 10, 2023
- Ultimate Guide to YouTube Shorts Ads for Affiliate Marketing - December 23, 2022
- How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners [Ultimate Guide 2023] - December 21, 2022
