How to Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate links
By: Haris Musa
Tags: Email Marketing, Blog, YouTube, Affiliate Marketing, Quora

One of the greatest challenges affiliate marketers face is figuring out how to drive traffic to their affiliate links. In fact, solving this problem alone should be the primary concern of any serious affiliate marketer looking to build their online business.

Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing in which a business rewards several affiliates for each visitor or client brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. In other words, affiliate marketing is promoting other people’s services or products in exchange for a commission.

This blog post will explain how I double, if not triple, my earnings and conversion rates using 4 traffic sources in conjunction. Combining these strategies can drive more traffic to your affiliate links (this means increased conversions and ROI).

So what are the 4 main traffic sources that I use?

Ranging from social media, Q&A websites to blogging and online video-sharing platforms, you have at your disposal an arsenal of means to drive traffic to your links. Among the countless options, I will be talking about the 4 tools that I find most useful:

1. Email Marketing

2. A blog/website

3. YouTube

4. Quora

First, using email marketing to drive traffic to your affiliate links

First of all, we will discuss email marketing. There are 4 tactics that I rely on to drive traffic using email marketing: welcome emails, email signature, marketing through a newsletter, and cold mailing.

1. Welcome Email

Sending a welcome email to potential buyers is one of the best ways to advertise your affiliate links. So how do I accomplish this? Easy, the opt-in form.

The new subscribers will open the welcome email since it is something they had most recently signed up for, and there’s a high chance that they will click on one or more of the links I shared since they’re genuinely interested.

2. Email Signature

Next is the email signature. An email signature is a powerful way to show professionalism to your subscribers. An email signature is normally at the bottom of each mail that you send.

The purpose of this is to build yourself a trademark and to stand out. Also, using a signature is important to build brand awareness, trust, and loyalty. In addition to being a trademark, I attach some of my links to my email signature. For example, I include a link referring to my blog and another referring to my services.

In my case, I receive around a thousand emails daily. Every time I reply to someone, they will receive my email signature, which includes my links; thus, I am getting more traffic to my affiliate links.

3. Newsletters

The third tactic of email marketing is newsletters. As I already mentioned, in the first point about the opt-in form.

By the way, If you don’t have a website, I highly recommend that you make one.

Using the opt-in form, you will grow your own email list of people who are genuinely interested in the content you have to offer. You can then send weekly, biweekly, or monthly emails to your subscribers, providing them with your latest content or services. You can also add your own related affiliate links in your newsletter, driving even more traffic to your affiliate links.

4. Cold mailing

Finally, the last tactic of using email marketing to drive traffic to your affiliate links is through sending cold emails. Cold emailing is simply sending emails out of the blue to any number of people subscribed to your email list. It is important to understand how to avoid spam using this tactic, as it is a slippery slope, and you do not want to be black-listed as a spammer.

As I always say, no one hates spam more than I do. Please take this to heart; If you spam, you may gain in the short term, but it will get you black-listed. The distinction between acceptable cold emailing and spam is that spam is sending bulk unsolicited emails to random people. In contrast, cold emailing is sending 200 or 500 emails a day but to specific people.

Using cold emails you can build rapport with your target audience by starting conversations with them.

Secondly, using a blog to drive traffic to your affiliate links

Starting your own blog is a very effective way to drive traffic to your affiliate links while providing relevant and useful content to your target audience. Blogging is a cheap way for you to drive traffic to your site, promote better inbound marketing, and attract more prospective customers.

In case it’s not clear yet, you can’t work online without having a website. Go now and make a website. I can’t stress enough how important this step is. You won’t lose anything, and you won’t know unless you try. If you don’t want to spend money, try medium.com.

You can use a website to promote physical products as well. For instance, you write an article about the top 10 best cameras, or top 10 best laptops, so on and so forth. As you can see in the picture above, I have almost 6 thousand users, and almost 10 thousand sessions per month all for free!

Third, drive traffic to your affiliate links using YouTube

If you want to promote your affiliate links, YouTube is one of the best organic traffic sources. You can make videos promoting physical products by creating video reviews and linking them to some products in your description.

Finally, we have Quora

Quora is a Q&A platform for people to ask questions for other internet users to answer. The answers are then followed and/or edited, either using facts or opinions.

The reason I use Quora of all Q&A websites is that it ranks 71st in the US; therefore, it gets more than 500 million views each month. Thus, Quora is a powerful platform to use to drive traffic to your affiliate links.

To Wrap up

Here you have it guys, these are the 4 sources of traffic I rely on and the different ways I use each to drive traffic to my affiliate links. Thank you for reading so far. I hope this article helps you get more traffic to your links.