While there are numerous ways that you can drive traffic as well as build revenue for your website, instead of PPC. One of the most effective and low-risk methods is by participating in an affiliate marketing program. Affiliate marketing consists of a strategy in which you partner up with an affiliate that will promote a specific product.

You will provide that affiliate with links to your product, which they will use on their website to market to their audiences. In return for all of these work, you’ll provide the affiliate with a percentage of the profits that you make on the sales that they have helped to create via their promotional efforts.

Not only are you making money due to someone else’s work – your affiliate is also sending you traffic that you can redirect to your website.

Why Affiliate Marketing Can Drive Traffic?

Affiliate marketing is a great way to drive sales, but it’s also an excellent way to increase your blog’s traffic. This isn’t because your website is being linked to as a result of the product being advertised, but because in order to purchase your product, a customer will have to provide their email address.

Alex Jeffery has 9,500 unit sales from Affiliate. That means there are additional 9,500 emails address for him. That also mean he can send 9,500 traffic to his blog anytime. Affiliate marketing works because it motives affiliate marketer to send traffic with monetary.

Figure from Vendor [To see the full figure, Click Here]

So in addition to increasing sales, you are also building your email list, which is a fantastic strategy for increasing traffic to your blog since you can email these customers about new blog posts in the future. You’re probably thinking that this sounds a little too easy to be true.

That’s because you actually need something to sell that affiliate marketers can promote – and we’re not talking about an expensive physical product that customers need to order and have shipped to them.

We’re talking about low-priced products that can be downloaded immediately – products that you’ll have to create. However, keep in mind that that this strategy is not going to be very effective if you make the product available elsewhere. It should be a premium product that can only be purchased through your affiliate’s promotion.

A great example from Problogger who also did sell Ebook by using affiliate marketing to drive traffic

How Can I Get Started?

First, you’re going to need a product that your affiliate marketers can promote. It should be a premium product in a digital format that customers can download immediately. The quicker they have access to it, the more willing they will be to purchase it. The product should be “Wow” and deliver its promise.

Products can include things like eBooks, plugins or tutorial videos just to name a few. You just need to make sure that the product you offer is going to be of value to the customer – a poor product that you’ve thrown together just to take advantage of affiliate marketing as a way to boost your blog traffic generation isn’t going to do you any good. Why would anyone bother with your blog if your eBook is worthless to them?

In fact, they’ll probably unsubscribe right after you’ve sent out that first email as a result. Not to mention that your affiliates won’t want to be affiliated with a poor product as this hurts the trust they’ve built with their audience. Now let’s talk about the price point.

Set Your Price Low For Higher Conversion

The lower the price, the better. In fact, you might actually make more money this way. If you price your product too high, nobody will buy it whereas many people will be tempted by a lower price point, which means that there’s a better chance that you’ll make more sales. This is a strategy known as a “low price entry.”

Even if you end up making more money by using a higher price point for your product, you’ll be doing so with fewer customers. You need to think about the long-term strategy here. The more people that buy your product, the bigger your email list grows.

This can cause an incredibly beneficial chain reaction – in addition to creating more customers (and therefore, more potential return customers), you’ll also help increase the traffic to your blog, which in turn increases the odds of blog content being shared or liked via social media, which will end up increasing the traffic generation of your blog. In the long run, these benefits are much more valuable than a few extra dollars in short-term sales.

Ensure You Have Positive ROI

Even though building your email list should be your primary traffic generation strategy, earning extra money by doing so is obviously a huge plus. Once you’ve created your product and obtained affiliates to market your product, you don’t have to do anything else in order to earn money, you can just focus on emailing new subscribers and working on your blog.

If your product is great and your affiliates are doing a good job promoting your product, then you’ll be gaining additional revenue without having to do any more work. Since your affiliates are making a commission by promoting your product as well (since they will get a small percentage of the resulting sales), they have an incentive to work hard to make money. You also need to careful when setting your price and ensure you have enough sale volume to cover the cost.

Why Your Email List Is More Important?

We’re harping on the fact that using affiliate marketers is a great way to build your email list so that you can in turn boost the traffic to your blog. Why it matters?

By Eloqua

You may ask: Why not just have your affiliate marketers send traffic straight to your blog by skipping the middle step?

There are two reasons:

1. Having an email address is more important – Say someone follows your affiliate’s link to your blog. They’re not terribly impressed with the first post they read and then leave. Or maybe they read it, think positively about it, but then leave and simply forget about the blog’s existence.

   You’ve lost that reader forever. If you have their email address, you can send them an email about a new blog post to remind them about your blog or to obtain a second chance. But, never spam them.

   This is especially helpful for bloggers that are just starting out and whose content may not be in the best shape at first, but who are continuously improving their blogs and could benefit from a second chance. Think of the email address as traffic insurance for your visitors.

2. Why don’t we just set up a landing page with free ebooks and request affiliate marketers to send the traffic to that landing page? First of all, the product will act as a filter – If you have an affiliate that is promoting your blog instead of a product, then there are a few things that could happen. First of all, the affiliate might abuse your relationship by creating a ton of fake email addresses in order to earn more money without actually benefiting you in any way since you will be building an email list full of useless emails. Offering a product that needs to be purchased eliminates this possibility since your affiliate will lose money by engaging in this practice.
   
   Secondly, the product will filter your audience – people that buy your product are going to be interested in your brand almost by default.

   If people were being sent to your blog instead, many of them would probably be low-quality leads – especially if the affiliate was promoting your blog in a manner that wasn’t relevant to their audience. Because of these reasons, offering a free product is a poor option. That’s why, I do not recommend to pay per leads (PPL) or pay per impression (PPI) because you want laser targeted traffic for the future.

Affiliate Marketing Trends

At the end of the day, remember that affiliate marketing is a way to boost your content marketing strategy. You are trying to gain exposure to your blog and improve its traffic generation. The emails you are getting are helpful in doing this – and you can continue to nurture these leads using your content while also using these leads to increase the readership of your blog.

Unfortunately, there is a trend in which some businesses out there who think that affiliate marketing is a way to skip the content marketing step. Who needs a blog with good content if you’ve already captured leads for your email list, after all? The thing is, you’re not going to be able to nurture them and turn them into customers if you can’t provide them with good content. In fact, if this is your line of thinking, many of your emails are going to end up marked as spam by all those new leads you captured through the sale of your product.

Because affiliate marketing is catching on in such a big way, the expectations of affiliates marketers are growing as well. They want their vendors to provide exclusive sale pages or webinars in addition to bonuses that will compliment the main product. For example: Long tail Pro JV, they have prepared 5 bonuses for this launch for ensure high conversion rate.

Affiliate Marketing Is Great But…

It may seem like there are no cons to affiliate marketing. What’s the risk of participating, whether you are paying for affiliates to promote your product or you are promoting a product of an affiliate in return for a share in revenue? Well, let’s go over the pros and cons so that you can properly measure the risk versus the reward:

The Cons:
1. Potential use of unethical tactics – Some affiliate marketers will provide the wrong information to their audiences because they are simply aftering the revenue generated by your product’s sale.
2. Low level of control – You won’t have any control over your affiliate promotes your product and what message it provides to its audience, which means it will lack a branding element.

The Pros:
1. Fast outreach – Affiliate marketing is a fast way to gain new leads and customers, especially when you’re not the one doing the promoting – your affiliate is.
2. High traffic – The sale of your product is going to bring a lot of new visitors to your website. Additionally, you can promote your blog to the new leads on your email list to drum up traffic on your blog. You will see affiliate flood in traffic.
3. Affordable cost compared to PPC ads – PPC ads are similar in that they can help bring in more blog traffic as well as sell products. However, with PPC ads, you’re paying for each click, while affiliate marketing, you’re only paying commission on sales. Not to mention that an actual third party business is usually more effective at promoting someone else than an advertisement.

Tools For Affiliate Marketing

There are tons of affiliate marketing tools out there:

1. ClickBank



2. CJ Affiliate by Conversant



3. JVZoo

These are sites that are used to help product creators connect with affiliate marketers. These platforms are incredibly useful as they can be used to provide instant affiliate payments, access to global vendors, stylish button creation, tracking and statistics and much more.

Connecting With An Affiliate

At this point, it should be clear that affiliate marketing can be quite beneficial for both parties. However, you’re probably asking yourself, how exactly do you go about finding an affiliate and convincing them to promote your product?

Set up a page on your website that explains the benefits of promoting your product. In addition to detailing what’s in it for them financially (how big of a cut will they get from each sale?), also explain how they’ll benefit from being associated with your brand.

If you know of an influencer that would be effective at promoting your product, simply approach them and speak to them about becoming an affiliate marketer. To find influencers, you may refer to my previous blog on “how to find influencers” and pitch them to join the affiliate program.

Additional Tips: Pitching influencer to join and motive them to drive more traffic

Provide Free Copy – Allow to have potential influencers a free version of your product so that they can see what it is they are promoting and whether they want to promote it. If you have a good product, they’ll be more inclined to become an affiliate.

Social Proof – Boast about past results with previous affiliates if you’ve participated in affiliate marketing in the past. You’ll want to show how many products a previous affiliate sold in order to convince potential influencers that it’s worth promoting.

Scarcity – Create a time limit for your product. If you are only selling it for a certain amount of time, then influencers will be less hesitant to jump in as an affiliate since they know there’s a small window in which they can make some money promoting it.

Offer Competition among the influencers – Entice potential influencers by revealing a contest. Offer a special prize – such as a bonus – for the affiliate that sells the most products. They will be motive more ways to promote your brand.

This is one of email from the vendor. Everyone will do whatever it takes to reach the top sales and obtain the 1st prize ($2000)

Affiliate marketing has very few drawbacks – and these drawbacks can be avoided by making sure you work with influencers that have a solid reputation. The benefits that affiliate marketing can provide, from additional sales to increased traffic generation for your blog, are too good to pass up.

Pull A Wave Of Hungry Readers To Your Blog And Gain Profit

• A Step-by-Step Guide to Affiliate Marketing
• Practical Approach, No BS
• Beginner Friendly

Updated: 21 November 2024

About Allysa

Allysa is always eager to learn something new whenever she got some free time and that includes SEO and inbound marketing. She also has a passion for traveling and discovering the unknowns.