Today we are going to share with you the core information about the most popular affiliate traffic sources. Let’s roll!
Once decided to start with affiliate marketing, beginners may be confused by a large number of different types of traffic sources. We have prepared for you useful material that will help you to put everything in order and decide on the choice of traffic sources.
Banner Ads
Ask someone who is not familiar with marketing what online advertising is, and most likely the answer you will hear is that it is banner ads. As a classic old-school traffic source, banner advertising holds a strong place in affiliate marketing.
But first things first. Banner advertising is essentially a hyperlink with an image as the anchor. When a user clicks on a banner, the link takes him to the target site.
There are two main success factors: eye-catching creative (image) and website relevance - it's pretty unreasonable to promote a steakhouse on a vegan website.
Social media paid Ads
Most social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and Twitter provide an opportunity to launch paid ads using its in-house advertising solutions. Famous for complex ads algorithms and outstanding target options, Social media ads is one of the most popular affiliate sources.
Nevertheless, each social network has its own advertisement policies and restrictions, so make sure that the offers you are going to promote comply with these restrictions and rules. Anyway, there are solutions for the promotion of prohibited content, such as cloaking. But be sure, that you have to deal with accounts bans and the whole process of advertising will be more complex in that case.
Most commonly social media ads look like a sort of banner advertisement (it may be an image or a video) with short text content.
Paid Search Engines Ads
Similar to social networks, for example, Google, Bing, and Yandex provide in-house tools to launch paid advertisements based on keywords. Users will see your Ads searching for something relevant to the keywords you’ve chosen. Sounds like a goldmine, but be prepared for high costs for competitive keywords. Additionally, pay attention to rules and restrictions, just like with social media, some services and goods are prohibited from promotion. But it should be noted that there are ways around these limitations too (bringing the same risks of bans).
Native Ads
Native advertising is advertising that is organically embedded in the content of a website, supporting the overall theme and unobtrusively promoting a service or product. This can be either text material, images, or videos. The main advantage of this source of affiliate traffic is that the conversion rate is much higher than that of traditional banners. This efficiency is achieved by the fact that the user does not see aggressive ads that he is tired of, but, for example, recommendation material which is part of the overall content.
Push Ads
Push advertising is a type of advertising in which the user receives advertising content in the form of a regular push notification. An important detail is that the user consents to display this type of advertising. Just remember the last time you visited a site you saw a request from the site to display a notification. This makes push ads quite effective, as your ads will only be seen by those who want to receive them.
Pop Ads
A pop-up is an advertising window or banner that opens on top of a website window. The user needs to close it or click on it to be able to continue using the website.
A pop-under is a window that opens behind the website window. The user will see it as soon as they close the previous browser tab or window.
Pop-up advertising is one of the older advertising formats that has a fairly low cost. However, the low cost in this case also carries a rather low effectiveness. Nevertheless, pop-up advertising has a place in modern affiliate marketing.
SEO
SEO traffic is the traffic that comes from your website. Imagine you have your own website, with content ranked in search engines. Users come to you through search engines looking for specific queries. You, in turn, provide valuable content on your website in which you can advertise products or services.
SEO traffic is considered one of the highest quality sources of traffic, as relevant resources can bring in a huge number of engaged traffic. However, it is worth noting that dealing with SEO traffic requires more effort. Your content has to be of high quality and your site has to be SEO-optimised. Nevertheless, in most cases, it pays off handsomely.
Email traffic is about sending bulk emails with promotional content. To collect email addresses, affiliates may use lead magnets or just buy email bases. A lead magnet is a classic marketing tool allowing the collection of email addresses of users in exchange for valuable content. Additionally, website owners may send email blasts to the website user base (it may work great in case you promote a relevant to the website topic goods or services). For sure, opted-in email bases are more valuable than purchased ones because these contain voluntarily subscribed users. It leads to better overall performance, such as open rate, click rate, bounce rate, etc.
Video
Video content is a great option to promote goods via reviews, comparisons, or recommendations. Also, it may be a pre-roll or post-roll strategy. These are short advertorial videos embedded at the beginning or at the end of the video. Quite often such videos contain promo codes or discounts to make offers more attractive. The main thing of successful video marketing is to promote a good or service valuable to your audience. It is always better to promote sports gear, fitness-related mobile applications, or some sort of lose weight goods on your youtube channel dedicated to fitness than an online casino or investment platform.
We covered the most popular affiliate traffic sources above. We hope it may help rookies to put things together and choose the right source to work with. Already have traffic that you'd like to monetize? Feel free to join Profit Pixels! Our managers will help you to start with the right offers and get maximum from your traffic.
Stay tuned!