Affiliate Marketing Traffic
Welcome to the topic “Affiliate Marketing Traffic.”
Traffic is the life blood of all businesses. For brick and mortar businesses such as Walmart, traffic means people walking into the store. And in case you haven’t noticed, you walk through a sales funnel, where you view various sales offers for products that they are pushing to increase revenue. The “essentials” that you really came for – the groceries, hardware, paper goods, etc. – are at the back of the store.
In the online space, traffic means sales prospects on a computer or mobile device, viewing your sales offers through a digital sales funnel. This is where you first introduce your sales offer in a way that arouses their curiosity. Then ask them for their email address, and thank them for providing it. Which in turn triggers the process of sending a welcome email and giving them their first opportunity to purchase your offer. I’ll come back to all this in a bit more detail shortly, but for now just remember that driving traffic is the first critical step in affiliate marketing lead generation.
Best Affiliate Traffic Sources
Traffic is generated in two ways. You pay for it, by purchasing Solo Ads, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, and the like. Or you build it organically by creating digital content for a Blog or a You Tube Channel or a Facebook Group that attracts viewers. Then you advertise directly to them. In this case, your primary cost is the time it takes to generate high quality written and video content on a regular basis.
You can minimize the time it takes by learning to re-use the same content for more than one purpose. Learning to re-purpose your content is one of the keys to success with organic traffic. As a simple example, you can re-use your blog post as the content for a You Tube video. You simply record yourself reading a summary of one of your blog articles, and upload it to your You Tube channel.
Organic Traffic: Each Source A Digital Real Estate Asset
Ideally you should use both forms of traffic, but it’s a good idea to at least start building a blog and a You Tube channel right away. They complement each other, and over time each of them can become more and more valuable as a digital real estate asset. You have the ability to hold your audience’s attention for longer periods of time with a blog than with an ad. And likewise, with a You Tube channel. You get to know them better, and they get to know you better. And as they get to know you better, they become hotter sales prospects. Prospects who are much more likely to purchase your sales offer than one who just clicked on an ad.
Paid Traffic: Build Most Valuable Digital Real Estate Asset Faster
The advantage of paid traffic is that it allows you to collect emails faster. So, if you have the capital to pay for high quality traffic, it provides a faster way to build your email list. And your email list is your most valuable digital real estate asset in the long run. Thus, as usual, it’s a trade off. And you have to make the trade off that works best for you, given your resources and skill set. If you choose to start with paid traffic, I recommend Solo Ads as a good place to start, once you have your sales funnel in place.
All Traffic Should Be Driven To Your Sales Funnel
It is important for you to understand that all affiliate traffic sources, organic or paid, should be driven to your sales funnel. You may generate traffic by getting viewers to click on a call to action (CTA) in your blog, or to click on a paid ad. It doesn’t matter. All clicks should lead to your sales funnel. Why? Because your primary goal is to capture leads and build your email list, your most valuable long-term digital real estate asset.
Affiliate Marketing Sales Funnel
The affiliate marketing sales funnel is the second critical step in online lead generation strategies. The basic concept is a two part sales funnel, consisting first of a Landing page / Opt-in page / Capture page and second a Thank You page.
The Lead Capture Page
You first present your sales offer on the Landing page, the sole purpose which is to capture as many leads as possible. That is why we often refer to it as the Lead Capture page, or just Capture page for short. You describe your offer in a way that arouses the prospects curiosity, arousing it enough that they want to learn more. As a result, they agree to provide their name and email address. Once they agree to provide their name and email address, they become a subscriber to your email list and an active sales lead.
The Thank You Page
The Thank You page is where you congratulate the subscriber for joining your list. You may do this through either a written sales message or a video. As a part your written or spoken message, let them know that a welcome email is on the way to their inbox. And then make your final front-end sales pitch, and ask them to click a button to learn more about how to do xyz. If they click, they will be taken to the sales video for your offer. And if they purchase your offer, you have what is called a front-end sale.
The Magic of the Email Autoresponder
Email autoresponders are one of the technologies that make affiliate marketing possible. Your Capture page is connected to an email autoresponder. So when you tell subscribers “that a welcome email is on the way to their inbox”, it is the magic of an autoresponder that makes that possible. This welcome email is the first of a series of autoresponder follow-up emails designed to get to know your leads and further introduce your sales offer. The autoresponder is the bridge between the sales funnel and email marketing, discussed in detail below.
Aweber is among the best email autoresponders for affiliate marketing beginners. It is easy to learn, and has great 24/7 chat support to help you with any issues. But there are many other great autoresponders with proven track records, including Sendlane and GetResponse. And don’t hesitate to do your own research.
Also Read: Is Affiliate Marketing Still Profitable? | Expert Opinion
