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Affiliate marketing can be quite daunting and it’s often hard to know where to start. You may have a beautifully designed website with some informative content, but it’s not going to do you any good if nobody is visiting your site to see it. That’s why actively driving website traffic is an important part of being an affiliate.
Driving highly qualified leads through to the merchant will give you a strong conversion rate. Attracting poor and irrelevant website traffic will result in a high bounce rate and damage your motivation. Below I have listed my top ideas for driving traffic to your affiliate website.
Driving Website Traffic with Content
1. Optimise Old Content
Go through past content and ensure it is fully optimised for search engines. Although your content should be written for the reader and not the likes of Google, it’s important that you include unique and relevant title tags, URL’s and Meta descriptions.
2. Site:yoursite.com in Google
To help optimise old content, do a Site:yoursite.com search in Google. This will show you how many Google indexed pages you have and what they look like in the search engine results. You can go through and check they are all fully optimised and make any changes where necessary.
3. Use Long Tail Keywords
Search trends have evolved and nowadays long tail keywords are a lot more valuable than short, one word phrases. People are looking for specific answers and often include as much relevant detail in their search term to help them find what they are looking for as quickly as possible. Use the Google keyword planner to search all relevant terms for your industry and topic, and then use them naturally within your content.
4. Build an Email List
Email marketing is a great way of sending relevant content directly to highly qualified leads. You could gather email addresses with a simple form on your website. You may want to ask people to sign up to your newsletter, or you could offer them something for free by entering a few details. For example, if you have the knowledge and ideas to create an eBook relevant to your website, visitors may be interested in downloading this directly to their email.
5. Create an Email Signature
Creating a tailored email signature is a really simple way of promoting your website every time you reach out to someone. Include your name, contact details, website and links to any social pages. This way, when you contact someone they can quickly and easily navigate to your website and find out everything they need to know. Making it difficult for people to learn about you and find your social/contact details etc. makes it harder to build trust, so be open and encourage people to contact you to see what you have to offer.
6. Use Google Alerts for Timely Content Ideas
Set up Google Alerts for topics and industry relevant key terms. This will enable you to create timely content or share newsworthy articles as and when they happen. If you are promoting a niche with little news focused reports, it may give you content ideas for future posts.
Driving Website Traffic with Social Media
7. Mention Industry Professionals in Your Tweets
When tweeting about industry news or topics, if there is a brand or influencer you are talking about or promoting, @ mention them in your tweet. You should also think about the hashtags you are including to promote your tweet to the most relevant audience.
8. Create a LinkedIn Profile
Create a LinkedIn profile with your contact and website details. You can then join relevant groups and connect with professionals in that industry. You can read, comment and post relevant and informative articles here and build relationships with other people in the same field.
9. Post Content to Social Sharing Websites
You can submit your best posts to websites such as Digg, Reddit and Stumble Upon. These are content sharing platforms and allow you to reach a new and wider audience who may not have otherwise come across your content. Although Facebook and Twitter are two of the most popular social platforms, there are so many other social sites that you can utilise to drive traffic.
10. Use Photo Sharing Platforms
If you use a lot of imagery on your website and want to use this as a way of driving traffic, there are several websites which enable you to connect with potential leads via photo sharing. Some great example are Pinterest, Instagram and Flickr. These sites enable you to upload images with an optimised description and link to the relevant page on your website. This is a great alternative way of getting people interested in your content by giving them a snippet of information and an engaging image to drive them to find out more.
11. Comment on Industry Relevant Blogs and Forums
You should follow other blogs and forums which are relevant to the industry you are promoting. This way you can engage in conversations and offer your opinion and thoughts on other people’s content and questions, or start a thread of your own. As long as you are adding value to a conversation it is worth doing as you will begin building relationships with others in the industry and, when appropriate, you can link people to your website for more information. This is a good way to gradually build traffic over time.
You should now have lots of fresh and exciting ideas for how to drive traffic to your website. It’s good to think outside of the box and do something a little different to other websites who are promoting similar things.
If you want to discuss any of these suggestions in more detail feel free to drop me an email at emily.matthews@moreniche.com or leave a comment below.