So, now that you have your affiliate website built and ready to go live, stop and ask yourself: Have I thought about how I am going to drive traffic to it? It would be simply awful after all that blood, sweat and tears, to make your site go live on the internet but nobody showed up. So how do you get traffic to come and visit? What works, and what doesn’t work? Take a look at these ways of getting eyeballs on your site:
Unqualified Traffic. You could just get a huge number of people to come to your site. There are websites where you can buy cheap general traffic by the thousands. The only problem with that is that you have no idea what their real interests are, so it is very likely that you will get only one or two clicks on your links per ten thousand visitors. Why? Because these general visitors are not qualified – meaning that they have done had to do anything that would indicate an interest in what your site is about. What that means is that someone who really wants to buy books on history gets taken to your golf clubs affiliate site, and they immediately click away because they don’t find anything that interests them there.
Qualified Traffic. What you really need to come to your website is a large amount of qualified traffic. The term ‘qualified’ just means that they have already done something to show that they are interested in what your site is about. This could be somebody who clicks on an advert that says ‘Buy Golf Clubs’, because this would show their interest in golf. If you think of ‘qualifying’ your traffic as a process where you filter out the people who are not interested in your site, before they get to your site, then you’ll be on the right track.
Why qualify traffic? It helps to keep your conversion percentage high if the only people who actually land on your website are interested in it to begin with. As sometimes you’ll be wanting to show your conversion percentages to other marketers and prospective clients, you’ll want to keep it looking good. But the main reason you want to qualify your traffic is every time you have to pay for a traffic method, you don’t want to be paying for dud traffic that isn’t interested in your site. You only want to be paying for traffic that is interested in your site, and the more interested (or ‘qualified’) the better.
How much should I pay? It all depends on how much you’ll make when someone clicks on one of your affiliate links and makes a purchase. If you track your website statistics (and yes, you will want to do this) and you know that on average, one out of every one hundred visitors to your site will actually buy something, and each time this happens you will earn $10 commission, then you know that the maximum you can spend on traffic will be $10 per 100 visitors. If you can get 1000 qualified visitors for $10, then on average you will spend $10 and turnover $100, leaving $90 profit.
So now you have a better idea of how to get traffic to your affiliate site – a lot depends on your conversion percentages and the amount of commission you make on each sale. It is possible to generate free traffic to your site, but you’ll end up paying with your time instead of money. Paid traffic is faster and more effective, and provided you track your stats, you can stay within any budget.
