As an affiliate marketer, first you must get traffic to your work. Without the traffic to your site, you simply just won’t make any money. There are three types of traffic that affiliate marketers focus on. Some focus on one more than the other, but the ideal set up is to get traffic from all three to your site. There is organic traffic, direct traffic and referral traffic. Let’s examine each of them!
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic comes when the search engines discover you or rather when you rank in the search engines. Ideally page one is the place to be. To get organic traffic you need good content and some basic SEO tactics and good usage of keywords without over stuffing. You can write a good article or blog post or Squidoo lens or what ever platform you use and get just organic traffic. Organic traffic is good, yes it is.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic is traffic that is not from the search engines nor from another source or link. It’s when someone simply types in your url into the address bar. This kind of traffic comes usually later rather than sooner. It is the results of branding for the most part. I get direct traffic to my forum like this. It gets a little more each day. I can give you an example of how this came to be. I am branding myself across the web as Carolina Robin. There are some out there that know me as Carolina Robin owner of lovegirltalk.com and others that know me as Carolina Robin owner of Pajama Affiliates.
Love girltalk.com is far more known because of the posts that I post on facebook and my blogs that I write. Not to mention I have it in huge letters on most of my Squidoo lens. A woman runs across some of my work. A week later she has an issue in her love life and just remembers lovegirltalk.com and ta da she types it in and she is there.
Referral Traffic
Referral Traffic comes from links our there on the web. It can come from a link that you have that direct back to your site. There are too many ways to list referral traffic sources but a few are social media sites like facebook, posting on forums in your niche (very targeted traffic here by the way), writing articles, writing blog posts, videos marketing, blog commenting, squidoo lens and many many others.
All of these sources actually work together to aid in your success as an affiliate marketer. The more referral traffic and direct traffic you get, the more the search engines see value in your site and this does help you ranking go up over time, which will convert to more organic traffic.
So if you are wanting more traffic to your site, remember these three sources and focus on all of them, perhaps one at a time. One day I will write a new blog post on my site such as I am doing here. I will then post it on facebook, which creates referral traffic back to this post. Someone will land her and perhaps in a few weeks or maybe sooner or later, will begin to wonder about affiliate marketing, remember the term pajama affiliates and type it directly into the address bar and land as a direct traffic source her.
I repeat this over and over along with a few other things, and the traffic comes, Google and other search engines take notice and push me up in the ranks. This evolves over time, so my words of advice to you as always are to just keep creating. What you create today, pays you tomorrow or slightly down the road and one day, ta da, you hit the tipping point and the money just starts rolling!
Pajama Affiliates is a great place to network and learn affiliate marketing. I have a private support group on facebook for students, along with my online at home study course. Won’t you join us today?
Another great post Robin. And look what just happened with my affiliate post that I posted in the group – suddenly it’s on the first page of Google after being out there for a couple of years. We never know when the work we put in yesterday is going to create a miracle today 🙂