What traffic sources to use
If you made a decision to become an affiliate and take part in an affiliate program, you’ve probably heard or read a hundred times that you need to choose the right traffic source. Indeed, your traffic defines your income. Whether it’s costly and high-quality or cheap and dirty, it’ll reflect your profit in the same manner. So you’d better take it into account while considering traffics sources.
To help you better understand and make the profitable choice our team provide you with a beneficial guide on how to choose suitable traffic source for your exact purposes.
After reading the article you’ll get familiar with the most relevant and up-to-date traffic source for profit generation.
Let’s start from the basics and unpack the meaning of the “traffic source” (sometimes affiliates have a very dim view of it).
Traffic is all about people. In other words, traffic is the number of visitors that appear on your website, social media account, landing page, etc. The quality of your traffic depends on your marketing strategy and the traffic sources you prefer.
So traffic source is the platform where you can buy traffic. Depending on the source itself you may anticipate how much money you have to spend and what quality your traffic will be.
Hope it’s clear and we move on to the types of traffic sources.
There are mainly two types: free and paid traffic sources.
Free Traffic Sources
Yes, in this case you don’t need to pay for traffic. Seems like a perfect solution especially when you’re a beginner. However, to succeed in getting traffic from free platforms you have to spend a great amount of time and make huge efforts. Let’s explain why.
Free traffic generally comes from the following sources:
• Users’ search generated by SEO (Search Engine Optimization);
• E-mail newsletters;
• E-mail spam or spam in messengers and
• Own blogs on social media channels.
So now you may guess why it’s not that beneficial to use free traffic sources. It’ll take lots of time (sometimes years) to generate enough traffic for your program. For example, to get to the top in the search engine’s list, you have to possess an incredible knowledge of SEO plus extraordinary content on your website. Or you must stand out from the bloggers’ crowd and work hard for so long to attract your target audience to your Instagram or Youtube blog. Are there any offer makers who are ready to wait for you getting the necessary amount of traffic? Probably not.
Therefore let’s get straight to paid traffic sources which are highly preferable by webmasters and more efficient in terms of money generation.
Paid Traffic Sources
Paid Traffic comes from advertising networks and is more targeted to affiliate specific requirements due to networks’ systems that allow target customers based on some factors including their location, occupation, gender and so on.
One of the greatest merits of paid traffic is the possibility to quickly check your ideas and hypothesis. It works easily: create a marketing campaign, buy targeted traffic and check whether they positively react to your advertisement. If yes — (again simply) buy more traffic, if not — think of another creative solution to attract customers.
It’s time to review key advertising networks that offer paid traffic.
Search Engine Advertising Networks
These networks are one of the most efficient sources of high-quality traffic and a good conversion rate because you’ll catch your target audience while they’re searching for what they need in Search Engines. You probably realize how much time people spend on searching and how easily you can obtain the necessary traffic (of course, if you advertise well). Furthermore, due to the advanced technologies used in search engines, you may set up preferable settings for your audience with ease.
Nonetheless, it’s quite expensive.
Let’s look at the kingdom of search advertising networks and identify key players.
Google is a giant among all search engines and takes an incredible share of around 88% (2019). So we’ll pay close attention to Google AdWords, which is designed for affiliates (while AdSense — for advertisers).
Google AdWords is an advertising tool that shows your ads according to specific keywords you’ve chosen. It’s user-friendly, so you don’t need to have a Ph.D. in Computer Science to manage the program. You can be sure that coming traffic is organic and there’s no other website that’s visited more than Google.
Bing
It’s the second largest search engine, which is quite popular in USA, Canada, France and Australia. It takes around 5-6% of global search, comparatively low, but still advantageous in terms of cost and usability.
Baidu
Chinese search engine and obviously 94% of users are Chinese citizens. If your target audience is mainly located in China, Baidu is the most appropriate choice. Considering the disadvantages, you must have a non-refundable deposit of around $800. To become a member you also have to pass a long registration process.
Yandex
Russian search engine which accommodates more than 50% of Russian users, so for organic highly targeted traffic in Russia Yandex is more than the right choice. It’s not self-serving and relatively cheap.
Yahoo
Yahoo is a large scale search engine with billions of users around the world and mostly suitable for mobile and native ads. It’s very specific in targeting preferences (e.g. add one location and exclude others) and has a low cost per click.
Social Media
It’s not a surprise that Social Media is one of the most usable and preferred channels for advertising. The number of users is increasing dramatically day by day and it’s a huge opportunity for businesses and marketers. Why?
Customers’ reach and engagement are high. That’s because users of social media are in the search of entertainment and communication. So it’s easier to sell the product or service in this relaxed atmosphere.
Native ad format isn’t annoying for most users and seems like an organic news feed, for instance. So Click-Through Rate is better due to a high level of trust in social media.
Free data inserted by users offers a great opportunity for targeting in diverse characteristics.
Since we’re aware of the brilliant power of Social Media we need to analyze main players in there.
The best social media platform in terms of the tremendous number of organic traffic and advanced options for targeting. No search engine offers you to target customers by their behavior, hobbies, etc. Facebook ads is a unique and affiliate-friendly program for complete beginners, who don’t need to have extensive programming skills.
Owned by Facebook, Instagram is a rapidly growing social media channel with more than 800 million users. To advertise on Instagram you don’t even need to have an Instagram account, all operations come from Facebook ads. You may utilize photo, carousel, video, and stories content to make your ads.
Youtube
The second most visited website and the most popular video platform. If you develop video marketing, you’re good to go with Youtube. It allows exploiting skippable & non-skippable video ads, banner ads, displays ads and so on.
It’s a microblogging platform with over 330 million users. Twitter is popular among webmasters for its high CTR, engagement rate and relatively low level of competition. Twitter ads provides affiliates with diverse target options and fairly low cost.
You can also pay closer attention to platforms for advertisement like Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, LinkedIn and so on.
Native Advertising
The next traffic source with high popularity and reputation is Native Advertising. Native ads are placed on websites with similar themes, so it fits the content and doesn’t look like a straight aggressive advertisement. That’s why psychologically visitors will rarely reject this type of ad. Native Advertising is usually introduced in the form of images and text and follow Cost Per Click (CPC) payment method.
Top platforms for Native Advertising are Outbrain, Taboola, Revcontent, Nativo, Triplelift, and others.
Mobile Traffic
Just imagine, around 52% of web traffic comes from smartphones! Isn’t it a reason for exploiting mobile traffic at full capacity? We think it is!
Most users’ smartphones aren’t protected by adblockers, so you have a unique chance to earn a lot of money using Mobile Traffic Sources.
What you need is creativity and basic knowledge of marketing to make your customers feel excited about your product and click this call to action button.
Look at the most reliable platforms for gaining Mobile Traffic: Airpush, Go2Mobi, MobiCow, LeadBolt, AdCash.
Display Advertising
It shows your ads on specific websites in the format of text, video, images and flash. With display advertising, you can reach a huge amount of traffic for a short period of time, but only if you thoroughly consider relevance, a niche of business, landing page, type of ads, etc.
To be involved in Display Advertising you may appeal to Google Display, Buysellads, Admedia and others.
There are still plenty of other efficient traffic sources such as Popunders, Adult, Retargeting Advertising, Media Buying, that are preferred by many webmasters as well.
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