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The 5 Best Free Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing

Stevens

New Member
affiliate
I’ve tried a whole bunch of different free traffic sources over the last 2 years of my affiliate marketing journey including : YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, WonderHowTo, Forums, Quora, Google+, StumbleUpon and probably a few others I can’t of at the moment. I’ve had some level of success with almost all of these, but there a few clear winners that will get you the best results for you time.

Personally I’ve had the best success on YouTube, especially when it comes to converting the traffic. I have one gadget based channel that gets me thousands of views per video, another channel that pulls in a couple hundred views per video, and I just started a third YouTube channel this week (that’s how much I love YouTube). This may not seem like a lot of traffic, but just between the two channels that are already established I make anywhere between $1,000 and $3,000 per month.

Some tips that have helped me get the best results on YouTube are uploading consistently, having good channel branding, and putting a lot of effort into SEO.

  • Upload Frequency I recommend uploading as frequently as possible without sacrificing quality, for me that’s once per day on the gadget channel and 3 times per week on my other channel. If you aren’t uploading quality content you can’t expect to get traffic. If you wouldn’t even watch your own video you sure as hell can’t expect some random people on the internet too!
  • Channel Branding The goal with using youtube for affiliate marketing is to become the go to authority figure for all the questions in your niche, and that starts with branding. Branding makes it easy for people to recognize your videos, know exactly what your channel is about, and ultimately helps you make more affiliate marketing sales. So how do you create good channel branding? It's all about consistency and following a theme. You want to make sure your thumbnails include the same logos, colors and even the same text, you want to make sure that you have a good Channel Banner that lets newcomers know exactly what your channel is about and how often you upload, you want to have a good intro and outro for every video, and lastly you want to make sure you have a good Channel trailer that tells everyone exactly what to expect out of your Channel.
  • SEO When you're just starting out on YouTube most of your traffic is going to come from searches, so you need to make sure your SEO game is on point. This means doing keyword research using free tools like keywords everywhere and to tubebuddy, and then including those keywords in a good description, in your title, and of course in your tags as well. I try to make sure my video descriptions are 200–500 words long, and I make sure to transcribe my videos (every little bit helps)
The other free traffic source I’ve a lot of success with is Instagram. I know Instagram is really tough for affiliate marketing due to its lack of analytics and lack of support for clickable links, but it is a lot easier to grow compared to YouTube. Here are three tips that I use to get the best results possible on Instagram.

  • Tip #1 Post links to your landing pages and websites within your stories. Now before you get all like, but I need to have like 10,000 followers to be able do that. Let me give you a simple strategy to get there asap.
    • The strategy I use is one I found from Gary Vee and that’s the $1.80 strategy. This strategy may take a little bit longer than follow unfollow method, the fan page method etc, but it gets high-quality active followers that will convert. Basically with this strategy you search up 10 hashtags in your niche and and leave your 2 cents, AKA a comment on the top 9 posts for each hashtag.
  • Tip #2 Use a tool to put multiple links in your bio. This is especially helpful for the people who haven’t unlocked the ability to put links in their stories. I use the tool elink.io(Its Free). It lets you share links to multiple different landing pages and offers which is great for split testing, while you simultaneously share links to your other social media, and even your website. So now you don’t have to choose between a link to your landing or a link to your YouTube channel, you can have both
  • Tip #3 is to consistently post valuable content to your followers. Now valuable content will be different in each niche, but a good rule of thumb is to post inspiring, helpful, informative or motivational pictures and videos at least once a day. If you’re struggling to come with ideas on what to post just go look at what other influencers in your niche are posting, and post similar content. Of course you’ll want to make it unique, but looking at other accounts is a good way to figure out what type of posts the people in your niche respond to the most. An important thing for to mention here is to avoid making your account a pitch fest. Of course your goal is to get people to click the links in your bio, but if you make every other post about an offer or a link all your going to do is piss people off, and ultimately lose followers. I’ve found that one promotional post per week is the sweet spot to not piss off your followers, but make sure they know you have an offer out there.
 
I’ve tried a whole bunch of different free traffic sources over the last 2 years of my affiliate marketing journey including : YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, WonderHowTo, Forums, Quora, Google+, StumbleUpon and probably a few others I can’t of at the moment. I’ve had some level of success with almost all of these, but there a few clear winners that will get you the best results for you time.

Personally I’ve had the best success on YouTube, especially when it comes to converting the traffic. I have one gadget based channel that gets me thousands of views per video, another channel that pulls in a couple hundred views per video, and I just started a third YouTube channel this week (that’s how much I love YouTube). This may not seem like a lot of traffic, but just between the two channels that are already established I make anywhere between $1,000 and $3,000 per month.

Some tips that have helped me get the best results on YouTube are uploading consistently, having good channel branding, and putting a lot of effort into SEO.

  • Upload Frequency I recommend uploading as frequently as possible without sacrificing quality, for me that’s once per day on the gadget channel and 3 times per week on my other channel. If you aren’t uploading quality content you can’t expect to get traffic. If you wouldn’t even watch your own video you sure as hell can’t expect some random people on the internet too!
  • Channel Branding The goal with using youtube for affiliate marketing is to become the go to authority figure for all the questions in your niche, and that starts with branding. Branding makes it easy for people to recognize your videos, know exactly what your channel is about, and ultimately helps you make more affiliate marketing sales. So how do you create good channel branding? It's all about consistency and following a theme. You want to make sure your thumbnails include the same logos, colors and even the same text, you want to make sure that you have a good Channel Banner that lets newcomers know exactly what your channel is about and how often you upload, you want to have a good intro and outro for every video, and lastly you want to make sure you have a good Channel trailer that tells everyone exactly what to expect out of your Channel.
  • SEO When you're just starting out on YouTube most of your traffic is going to come from searches, so you need to make sure your SEO game is on point. This means doing keyword research using free tools like keywords everywhere and to tubebuddy, and then including those keywords in a good description, in your title, and of course in your tags as well. I try to make sure my video descriptions are 200–500 words long, and I make sure to transcribe my videos (every little bit helps)
The other free traffic source I’ve a lot of success with is Instagram. I know Instagram is really tough for affiliate marketing due to its lack of analytics and lack of support for clickable links, but it is a lot easier to grow compared to YouTube. Here are three tips that I use to get the best results possible on Instagram.

  • Tip #1 Post links to your landing pages and websites within your stories. Now before you get all like, but I need to have like 10,000 followers to be able do that. Let me give you a simple strategy to get there asap.
    • The strategy I use is one I found from Gary Vee and that’s the $1.80 strategy. This strategy may take a little bit longer than follow unfollow method, the fan page method etc, but it gets high-quality active followers that will convert. Basically with this strategy you search up 10 hashtags in your niche and and leave your 2 cents, AKA a comment on the top 9 posts for each hashtag.
  • Tip #2 Use a tool to put multiple links in your bio. This is especially helpful for the people who haven’t unlocked the ability to put links in their stories. I use the tool elink.io(Its Free). It lets you share links to multiple different landing pages and offers which is great for split testing, while you simultaneously share links to your other social media, and even your website. So now you don’t have to choose between a link to your landing or a link to your YouTube channel, you can have both
  • Tip #3 is to consistently post valuable content to your followers. Now valuable content will be different in each niche, but a good rule of thumb is to post inspiring, helpful, informative or motivational pictures and videos at least once a day. If you’re struggling to come with ideas on what to post just go look at what other influencers in your niche are posting, and post similar content. Of course you’ll want to make it unique, but looking at other accounts is a good way to figure out what type of posts the people in your niche respond to the most. An important thing for to mention here is to avoid making your account a pitch fest. Of course your goal is to get people to click the links in your bio, but if you make every other post about an offer or a link all your going to do is piss people off, and ultimately lose followers. I’ve found that one promotional post per week is the sweet spot to not piss off your followers, but make sure they know you have an offer out there.
Good to share this around here dude, i guess it will really help!
 
I’ve tried a whole bunch of different free traffic sources over the last 2 years of my affiliate marketing journey including : YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, WonderHowTo, Forums, Quora, Google+, StumbleUpon and probably a few others I can’t of at the moment. I’ve had some level of success with almost all of these, but there a few clear winners that will get you the best results for you time.

Personally I’ve had the best success on YouTube, especially when it comes to converting the traffic. I have one gadget based channel that gets me thousands of views per video, another channel that pulls in a couple hundred views per video, and I just started a third YouTube channel this week (that’s how much I love YouTube). This may not seem like a lot of traffic, but just between the two channels that are already established I make anywhere between $1,000 and $3,000 per month.

Some tips that have helped me get the best results on YouTube are uploading consistently, having good channel branding, and putting a lot of effort into SEO.

  • Upload Frequency I recommend uploading as frequently as possible without sacrificing quality, for me that’s once per day on the gadget channel and 3 times per week on my other channel. If you aren’t uploading quality content you can’t expect to get traffic. If you wouldn’t even watch your own video you sure as hell can’t expect some random people on the internet too!
  • Channel Branding The goal with using youtube for affiliate marketing is to become the go to authority figure for all the questions in your niche, and that starts with branding. Branding makes it easy for people to recognize your videos, know exactly what your channel is about, and ultimately helps you make more affiliate marketing sales. So how do you create good channel branding? It's all about consistency and following a theme. You want to make sure your thumbnails include the same logos, colors and even the same text, you want to make sure that you have a good Channel Banner that lets newcomers know exactly what your channel is about and how often you upload, you want to have a good intro and outro for every video, and lastly you want to make sure you have a good Channel trailer that tells everyone exactly what to expect out of your Channel.
  • SEO When you're just starting out on YouTube most of your traffic is going to come from searches, so you need to make sure your SEO game is on point. This means doing keyword research using free tools like keywords everywhere and to tubebuddy, and then including those keywords in a good description, in your title, and of course in your tags as well. I try to make sure my video descriptions are 200–500 words long, and I make sure to transcribe my videos (every little bit helps)
The other free traffic source I’ve a lot of success with is Instagram. I know Instagram is really tough for affiliate marketing due to its lack of analytics and lack of support for clickable links, but it is a lot easier to grow compared to YouTube. Here are three tips that I use to get the best results possible on Instagram.

  • Tip #1 Post links to your landing pages and websites within your stories. Now before you get all like, but I need to have like 10,000 followers to be able do that. Let me give you a simple strategy to get there asap.
    • The strategy I use is one I found from Gary Vee and that’s the $1.80 strategy. This strategy may take a little bit longer than follow unfollow method, the fan page method etc, but it gets high-quality active followers that will convert. Basically with this strategy you search up 10 hashtags in your niche and and leave your 2 cents, AKA a comment on the top 9 posts for each hashtag.
  • Tip #2 Use a tool to put multiple links in your bio. This is especially helpful for the people who haven’t unlocked the ability to put links in their stories. I use the tool elink.io(Its Free). It lets you share links to multiple different landing pages and offers which is great for split testing, while you simultaneously share links to your other social media, and even your website. So now you don’t have to choose between a link to your landing or a link to your YouTube channel, you can have both
  • Tip #3 is to consistently post valuable content to your followers. Now valuable content will be different in each niche, but a good rule of thumb is to post inspiring, helpful, informative or motivational pictures and videos at least once a day. If you’re struggling to come with ideas on what to post just go look at what other influencers in your niche are posting, and post similar content. Of course you’ll want to make it unique, but looking at other accounts is a good way to figure out what type of posts the people in your niche respond to the most. An important thing for to mention here is to avoid making your account a pitch fest. Of course your goal is to get people to click the links in your bio, but if you make every other post about an offer or a link all your going to do is piss people off, and ultimately lose followers. I’ve found that one promotional post per week is the sweet spot to not piss off your followers, but make sure they know you have an offer out there.
Thank you for good tips about Insta. Need to try
 
Thank You for Your time and effort posting this, I will use this to get to the next level.
Very much appreciated!
 
The problem with some of the free traffic sources that you have mentioned is that many of the cpa networks do not even allow the traffic sources for their offers. Only Youtube and Instagram seem to be the sources that networks allow these days unless and until you are running paid ads via fb...but I agree with your take on the angle of promotion as that is the right way an affiliate should approach a traffic source.
 
Just to add a nice little nugget to this great piece of information you've provided. We've seen a drastic increase in click throughs to our site and product pages via our bio link on Instagram < -- example - using a service called LinkIn.Bio from Later.com

Here's a helpful video explaining what it does and how it works.

Overall, the service is well worth it! It basically creates a mirror of your instagram feed but with the images with links to the individual products/blog you'd like them to link to so the user clicks it and it takes them directly to it.

I'd say it's among the best growth hacks for instagram I've seen in 2018! lol

Good luck!
 
Thanks for the posts,never really understood the $1.80 strategy by Gary .That said on my part I have been using free traffic and the problem that makes people not so successful with it is how they approach it.Free traffic can be pretty powerful If worked on properly.1.Lead with value ,every other marketer trying to make a Buck is spamming people with their offers so you do it a little different and start with value instead. 2.It takes a lot of effort to make it work.If its uploading videos you got to be consistent ,If its Blog posts the same,posts on Instagram ,Fb all demand consistency which is something most people don't want to commit to. 3. For Free traffic its more of a quantity strategy than quality(Don't get me wrong Quality also matters a lot). 4.Its going to take time.
 
Sounds good about Free Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing as most of the people look to be into Affiliate Marketing with huge traffic.

So this thread is good to know the best Free Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing strategy.
 
How do you guys define "good" contents? I have only few products and am lacking reasonable way to create good contents because me myself is not the proper user.
 
My opinion free traffic its very stressful and it takes too much time i will go in paid traffic .The thing its that what i will earn with free traffic i will invest in paid traffic
 
The problem with some of the free traffic sources that you have mentioned is that many of the cpa networks do not even allow the traffic sources for their offers. Only Youtube and Instagram seem to be the sources that networks allow these days unless and until you are running paid ads via fb...but I agree with your take on the angle of promotion as that is the right way an affiliate should approach a traffic source.

Don't send traffic directly to your offer, send it to a lander or site. That usually works but you always have to check the terms of the offer, of course.
 
How do you guys define "good" contents? I have only few products and am lacking reasonable way to create good contents because me myself is not the proper user.

It provides value to the reader. No keyword stuffing, no nonsense spun or copied content. Well-written topics that deliver on what the title promises.

My opinion free traffic its very stressful and it takes too much time i will go in paid traffic .The thing its that what i will earn with free traffic i will invest in paid traffic

Yup, you either pay with time or money. Most people who start with free traffic use the proceeds for paid traffic.
 
I really have to disagree with the 'free' word used here.
Creating traffic based on content or linking development takes work.

Work is not 'free' --that is if you place value on your time.

I have made money off domains that I have spent no money buying ads for but I did have to constantly spend my time on the traffic marketing part of things -- as well as design, API development and copywriting.

This is called *bootstrapping* as in coming up from nothing

Or, more commonly Growth Hacking
Growth Hacking: 43 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Website
 
Great post and great information too. Your post is a good example of what content should be like. Informing people on what they want to read so they can then implement your methods.
 
One of the best Free traffic sources I use is APSense. It a social network website that has a community of like minded entrepreneurs. Catchin newbies and networking with them is a great way to get them inside your network opportunities
 
We can make millions of dollars on focusing on target traffic that can convert.
Google rankings
YouTube
Forums that help newbies
Quora answer and guide people to do thing that help them
Paid Traffic like search, contextual ads etc.
 
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