Traffic sources are websites, search engines, social networks, and other platforms where the potential target audience of the offer gathers. Driving traffic from one source or another means placing ads to motivate users to perform targeted actions.
What are the sources of traffic?
Traffic sources can be:
- Paid. To work with them, you need a marketing budget. They give the fastest results and access to a large audience.
- Shareware. You do not need to pay for advertising, but for full-fledged work, you will need to buy consumables, for example, accounts.
- Free. Such sources do not require financial costs. It takes a long time to develop them.
The Best Free Traffic Sources for Affiliate Marketing
When choosing any source, you should analyze the audience: geo, gender, age, and interests.
SEO
This is shareware organic traffic from search engines. To develop a site that will receive SEO traffic, you will need investments in hosting, a domain, the services of designers, copywriters, and the purchase of external links.
Potential customers come to the offer page by entering search queries. They go to sites from the top of the issue, including the web resource of the arbitrator, where the offers are posted. The arbitrator receives money when visitors complete targeted actions.
The advantages of this type of traffic:
- the ability to advertise any offers;
- lack of moderation;
- the ability to place any format of advertising.
A news forum that is popular in English-speaking countries. Working with it requires a thorough analysis of the audience, and the search for suitable communities – subreddits, where potential customers gather.
It is important for Reddit to think about native ads and creatives, and launch them only after gaining a rating and reputation. For direct advertising, other users are banned or trolled. Reddit is suitable for advertising product offers, travel, information products, gambling, betting, and dating.
Bing
Microsoft’s search engine lags behind Google’s popularity. Nevertheless, its audience is large – more than 1 billion visitors per month. To get free traffic from Bing, you need to optimize your sites for popular keywords that users most often enter.
Yahoo
This search engine is a competitor to Google and is popular in the UK. If you intend to work with this geo and need to drive traffic to an English-language resource, Yahoo is the right choice.
Youtube
To promote the channel, it is necessary to optimize the titles and texts for the video, and insert the most popular keywords into them. Keys can be analyzed using Google Trends, Google Keywords Planner, and YouTube’s search suggestions.
The platform has an algorithm that displays the video as a recommendation and actively shows it to a wide audience – provided that the video has received interactions in the first 24 hours. It is acceptable to use moderate cheating or create a network of channels with different accounts and write comments under your videos.
You can drive free SEO traffic from YouTube to offers of all verticals. If you are going to work with gray niches, for example, with adult, you will need many accounts since the hosting will often ban ads for such offers.
Other services
When testing links and hypotheses, you can work with other free sources, for example:
- Pinterest. A social network where more than 60% of the target audience are solvent women with an annual income of $100,000 or more from Tier-1 and Tier-2 countries. You can promote offers of product, nutra, education, and travel verticals.
- TikTok. Offers targeted at a young audience are well promoted here: dating, nutra, goods, gambling, betting, games, and mobile applications. You need to create an account, place a link to the spacer (Telegram channel, Instagram account) in the profile description and regularly upload warm-up creatives.
- Instagram. The principle of operation is similar to working with TikTok. An account is started on behalf of a fictional character – a person who looks like the target audience. The character maintains a lifestyle blog and encourages page visitors to go to the offer. Stories, Reels, and videos work well for engagement.
- Thematic forums, sites with questions and answers. For example, Quora or entertainment portals where gamers gather. They make it possible to merge for free on any offers. First, you need to familiarize yourself with the target audience and rules.
Paid traffic sources for affiliates
Working with paid sources requires a budget and careful control over its consumption. The test needs to determine what indicators must be obtained to be successful or completed. For example, conditionally spend an amount equal to the payout for two leads, or get 30 conversions.
Google Ad
The traffic that comes from Google is considered high quality and is valued by all affiliate programs. On Google, you can only advertise white offers, or you can use powerful cloaking. Advertising methods:
- search – search engine;
- KMS – Display Network;
- UAC – advertising in applications.
The competent warming up of an advertising account and the conquest of trust is of great importance. This is necessary to avoid bans and extend the campaign. It’s also important to learn how the auction works and manage your bids to show your ads at the top so they’re more visible. You need to work on increasing the CTR and, at the same time, monitor whether there are good conversions with high click-through rates.
Facebook Ad
Ads set up with Ads Manager are shown on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network. Narrow targeting is available by interests, solvency, geo, and specific cities.
Not all offers can be advertised on Facebook: moderation rejects even white goods if there were any violations. It is important to familiarize yourself with the site’s rules before draining and preparing the creo.
If an arbitrage specialist sends gray offers, such as gambling, adult, betting, or nutra, you must set up cloaking. To scale, you need many accounts and high-quality farming.
Ad network
Ad networks show ads and creatives on sites whose owners – webmasters and publishers – cooperate with them. For example, a webmaster has a platform with jokes and memes, which is visited by 10,000 people a day. He sells advertising space, and the affiliate can place a banner with a gambling offer.
Examples of ad networks: Richads, PropellerAds, Exoclick, Taboola, TrafficStars, Outbrain, EvaDav, Adsterra, Mgid, Revcontent.
These sources provide several types of paid traffic; we will consider them further.
Other services
Any platform where people have the opportunity to see ads can become a source of traffic. Other paid sources include:
- TikTok Ads – targeted advertising on TikTok is suitable for promoting white offers; the setting is similar to Facebook Ads;
- Huawei Ads – traffic comes from ads placed in services and applications from Huawei;
- Baidu Ad is a popular search engine in China, suitable for draining traffic from this geo, and advertising is configured in the same way as in Google Ads;
- LinkedIn is a social network for professionals and networking, where you can also set up targeted advertising suitable for promoting goods, services, and software for business, information products, and HR offers.
Paid traffic types
Paid traffic provided by advertising networks is divided into several types according to the ad format.
Popunder Traffic
Popunders are ads that appear on the site, covering the entire screen. If the user is interested in the benefits the creative is talking about, he will go to the offer. Popunder traffic sources are suitable for dating, gambling, betting, nutra, binary options.
Popup Traffic
Setting up pop-ups provides inexpensive traffic and wide audience coverage. The best sources of pop-up traffic show themselves in Tier-3 geos.
Banner advertising
When setting up banner advertising, you need to show the benefits of the offer briefly, use the emotions, interests, pains of the audience. The image should be contrasting, the text should be easy to read because the user usually views the banner within fractions of a second.
Mobile advertising
This is advertising in mobile applications or In-App traffic. For example, a commercial with an offer can be shown when a user plays a game on their smartphone. Various ad formats are available, such as banners, and videos.
Native advertising
Native advertising is an unobtrusive promotion when information about the offer fits natively into the content of the thematic site. This is an ad with a high cost per click, but it gives access to a warm and solvent audience. It is important to prepare the most relevant text, describe the benefits, focus on the portrait of the target client, and show expertise.
Teaser advertising
Teasers are ads that attract attention, involve emotions. They are effective in those geos where users have not yet developed banner blindness and are ready to be interested in new products in Africa and Latin America.
Summary
It is important to test all traffic sources. Profit is not affected by how much the affiliate has spent on advertising. You can drain the budget by working with an expensive source or make a profit without investments by posting an ad on the forum. It all depends on experience, a competent strategy, and the ability to analyze the effectiveness of the bundle.
When choosing a traffic source, it is important to consider the affiliate program’s requirements. Not every affiliate program accepts traffic from all sources. It is also desirable to assess what targeting capabilities the source has, and what budget is needed.
