Hey guys. I’ve been doing this affiliate marketing thing for two years now and I must say I have uncovered some great and not so great paid traffic sources that I would like to share with you in this post.

I want to focus on the good ones and point you in the right direction from jump, but I’ll also tell you which traffic sources you should avoid like the plague. 😀

If you are an affiliate marketer like myself, then you should already know that to make money with affiliate marketing you need traffic and a lot of it.

If you are promoting an affiliate product but don’t yet have a strategy to follow then I recommend that you read the following resources to guide you:

• 10 Step Blueprint For A Profitable Affiliate Marketing Campaign
• Clickbank Affiliate Marketing Strategy

If you landed on this page with not a clue of what affiliate marketing is, then here’s a quick tutorial.

Affiliate marketing is basically recommending a third party’s product or service to potential buyers, promoting the purchase of the product or service and in return receiving a commission as the referrer of that buyer.

The process involves four main parties – the affiliate, the affiliate network, the advertiser, and the buyer.

The affiliate is in charge of the basic running and maintenance of a website. He/she is the one who receives the commission once a purchase of the affiliate product is made.

The advertiser pays to post advertisements on the affiliate website. In this way, the advertiser can be the owner of the affiliate product.

The affiliate network hosts the affiliate product and the buyer makes a purchase through a link on the affiliate website generating a commission for the affiliate.

I hope that does not confuse you, but as a beginner, I would strongly recommend that you read this post for a more in depth understanding of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is an ideal way of promoting a business owner’s product or service because it allows them to gain access to a targeted audience without doing all the hard work.

The affiliate is the one who has to think about the traffic source to promote the product on and find creative ways of advertising the product or service. It therefore becomes cost efficient to the business owner since he/she only pays the affiliate after someone has visited their website and converted into a sale or lead.

Crash course in affiliate marketing over 😃. Let’s move on to the traffic sources that I would highly recommend you use, to promote your affiliate products.

Paid Traffic Sources for Affiliates

There is a long way to generate affiliate sales and conversions and then there is a short way.

Although the short (and fastest) way to generate affiliate conversions is through paid traffic sources, I strongly recommend that you start implementing sustainable affiliate marketing strategies with long term objectives in mind.

Such strategies include starting an affiliate blog or website or building an email list which are two fundamental assets in any online business.

When you start an affiliate blog or website, your focus will be on optimising that blog for the search engines which can take time. This however can help you leverage free and organic traffic which means that you have the potential to earn money from affiliate sales, without exhausting any advertising dollars. 

If however, you prefer to skip the SEO optimisation phase, you can buy traffic from an outside source or traffic network to increase the number of visitors to your website.

As an advertiser, a traffic network can help you market your content on numerous target sites at the same time. The following list of paid traffic networks will help you get started.

Google/Bing Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Google and Bing are among the top search engines, used by the online audience. Whenever someone is searching for a product, service or general information about a topic, they usually go to Google or Bing as their starting point.

As an affiliate you can tap into the power of these search engines by purchasing leading placements that will give you access to immediate targeted traffic.

For example, if you are promoting a singing course as an affiliate, you can use Google or Bing PPC to target people who are searching for keywords that are relevant to acquiring knowledge through a singing course.

Therefore when you place an advertisement on Google or Bing, and you pay (bid) for your keyword ‘best singing course’, your ad may show up as the top search result on either search engine for someone who is searching for “best singing course”.

When the user clicks on your ad and provided you have set up your campaign correctly, the user will be redirected to the affiliate product’s website. If a purchase is made, you will earn the commission.

When using PPC campaigns, there are a number of factors that you must consider as the affiliate.

• Whether your ad is visible to your target audience is dependent on how much you are willing to pay for your keyword to win the advertiser’s auction. Google and Bing use bids to determine how high your ads appear in the search results, so if your keyword bid is lower amongst other bidders, your ad will not achieve a favourable position in the search results.
• When you use PPC campaigns you only pay if someone clicks on your ad. Therefore pay attention to the ad copy you use in your ad. Make sure that it is relevant to the product or offer to avoid generating wasted clicks that do not lead to purchases. A great hack to qualify a click is to include the price of the product in the ad. This qualifies the user because it means that they have already considered the price before the click and so have a higher intent to purchase the product at the stated price. Below is an example of an affiliate’s ad where he places the price in the ad.

• To ensure that your ad is relevant to your affiliate product and to help you put your ad in front of people who are ready to buy, use buyer-intent keywords. Buyer-intent keywords are keywords that show that the user has a higher probability of buying the product because they are specifically searching for the exact product. For example buyer-intent keywords are “Canon MG3022 Printer” or “JBL Flip 4 Portable Bluetooth Speaker”. Therefore to improve your click-through rates, include as many buyer-intent keywords in your campaigns.

Before you set up your Google or Bing PPC campaign, conduct some market research to identify how other affiliates are designing their landing pages, the type of ad copy they’re using in their ads, the potential keywords that they are including in their campaigns to display their ads.

An important point to remember is that Google and Bing will charge you less and reward you if you come up with smart targeted advertising. Don’t waste time trying to figure it out on your own. Do your research properly to see how the best performing ads are crafted and do not be afraid to model after them.

Watch the video below to see how to do competitor research for your affiliate campaigns.

Facebook/Instagram Ads

Since Facebook and Instagram are two of the most popular social networks, using the ad platform can lead to increased traffic due to more website clicks, conversions, mobile application installations, and video views.

To get these type of results however, you must know how to use the advertising platform properly. Check out my post for more tips and strategies on how I was able to use this traffic source to generate over $10k in affiliate commissions.  

Facebook and Instagram Ads are complimentary products. Even if you don’t have an Instagram account, you can still create an Instagram Ad using your Facebook account – the option is available in the settings.

Furthermore, the platforms allow you to minimise your marketing costs by targeting your ads to the right people.

For example, if you are promoting a popular Woodworking affiliate product from Clickbank using Facebook and Instagram ads, you can target your ads to people who love woodworking, DIY, carpentry.

The targeting options are so defined that any peculiar niche that you’d like to promote a product in, you can find it. 

Keep in mind that Facebook and Instagram are social network sites where people go to hang out and socialise. As an affiliate it is important to understand how to interrupt your audience so that they pay attention to your ad.

As a result, Facebook and Instagram Ads will ensure that your ads reach only those people who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer and take the action that you desire.

They also allow businesses to reach the targeted traffic through innovative methods such as placing the ad in the news feed or on Instagram stories. The advantage of using this strategy is that the ads don’t look like they are out of place. Users are therefore likely to be more receptive and click on the link to your site.

Before I move on, here are a few tips to accelerate your conversions with Facebook and Instagram ads:

• You probably have heard of the $5/day method. This method only works well, when you create multiple adsets at $5/day. It is very important that when using the Facebook/Instagram ad platform that you split test different interests, ad copy, ad creatives and you can only do that with more than one adset. So do not be fooled by marketers who tell you, you only need “$5 per day” for Facebook/Instagram ads. After spending thousands of dollars on the platform I can tell you that this is not true. What they forget to mention is that you should set up multiple adsets, each at $5/day and test the adsets against each other to see which one performs better.
  
• Think outside the box. Sometimes you may target a specific audience, such as women interested in weight loss and drive the traffic to a weight loss product. When running ads I have learnt that sometimes a niche audience may not work and you may have to look outside of that niche audience to find your target audience. For example, instead of targeting weight loss interests, try targeting interests that women in general have an interest in.
  
• Don’t let your opinion influence your decision. Let the data do the talking. It would be helpful if you understood how to analyse your Facebook/Instagram ads so you can optimise them for better conversions. If you do not yet know how to do this then I recommend taking the Social Traffic Blueprint course which teaches you how to leverage this powerful platform to create revenue in your business.
  
  Don’t be discouraged by the price of the course guys! I took that course and immediately implemented the instructions and within a few months I was able to see a 10x return on my investment.

YouTube Ads

Video marketing ads perform better than other forms of marketing, because they generate more emotional cues and help to engage your audience better. Therefore, consider including video as part of your affiliate marketing strategy to generate an increase of traffic to your affiliate campaign.

As the most popular video sharing platform in the internet marketing space, YouTube offers the best marketing option for your business.

YouTube Ads gives you the opportunity to market your business through video searches or viewership. It doesn’t matter whether the person was looking for your video, if you put your item on YouTube ads, it automatically appears before the viewer’s selected video plays. Interestingly, you only pay for the advert after the person shows genuine interest in your video by clicking it.

When creating a YouTube video, remember that it’s about the quality of the visitors and not the number. Traffic advertising works best when you attract those people that are interested in your product and what your business does.

You can include a call-to-action in the video as a way to drive traffic to your site – always tell the viewer what you do and why they need your services. You can also add a sentence or two in the description box to tell the audience more about you. Don’t forget to include your website’s URL so that interested viewers can immediately visit your website after watching the video.

Solo Ads

Do marketers still use solo ads? Actually yes they do 🤣. So no, solo ads are not dead.

The great thing about solo ads is that it gives you the opportunity to immediately tap into a warm target market using email.

Solo ads are email-based promotions that you purchase from other email list owners. Once you buy it, you can send dedicated messages about your products and services as emails to your target market.

Solo ads networks like Udimi or MLM Leads may not be available for every niche but there are ways that you can connect with list owners to see if they would give you the opportunity of sending an email offer to their audience.

Here are the steps you can take to find a list owner and send a solo ad. Now whilst this is a long process and may result in very little feedback, those who follow the steps consistently and are willing to dig through the dirt can end up finding the gems.

• Step one. Find an email list owner. These persons are usually blog or website owners who have a lead opt in form for capturing emails for persons who are interested in receiving their content. Before you contact the owner, check to see that content is frequently updated just in case the blog is an abandoned blog. Obviously, choose a blog or website that is closely related to your area of specialisation since the email list subscribers are more likely to understand what you are selling and hopefully buy it.

To find niche blogs use this hack – from Google type “url:blog “keyword”” where “keyword” represents the niche that you want Google to search for.

What this does is ask Google to return all blogs that have the keyword in it. So if I want to find travel blogs to start making a list of blog owners then I would type “url:blog “travel”” and my results would look something like this.

• Step two. Create a list of all the blog owners that you want to connect with. List their email address to contact them or find the way that they prefer to be contacted. Usually the blog will have a Contact Me link. Then call or email the owner of that list to ask for permission to email their subscribers. If you do not get a response, move on to the next. If you do get a response, then great.
  
• Step three. Since solo ad lists are for sale, remember to agree on a purchase method – you can either buy according to the number of people that will receive the email or pay depending on the number of clicks the advertisement receives. In some cases the list owner may already have a price list for email submissions which makes it easier for you to decide whether it is within your budget or not.
  
• Step four. After agreeing on the price and payment method, design an email that describes what your business does in a way that appeals to the receiver of the message. Don’t forget to include a link to your affiliate website. Make sure that you instruct the list owner to send the email as constructed to their list. In some cases, some list owners prefer to write the email so that the tone of the message is similar to what their list is accustomed to. It is a good idea to request to see the email before it is sent.
  
• Step five. I would recommend that before the email is sent that you insert a tracking link to track the performance of the email list. That way if there is any disagreement as to whether the list is engaged, you can always show proof using the tracking software. For tracking I recommend Clickmagick.

Watch the video below to learn how to use Clickmagick and how you can use it, to optimise your affiliate marketing campaigns to save you money.

Solo ad providers create their lists by offering free gifts to those people that are interested in exchanging it for their emails.

You can find a reliable solo ad provider by searching the internet or joining an online solo ad community. My favourite solo ad providers are Udimi and MLM Leads. Both offer solo ad services from various vendors all under one roof.

If you’d like to read a review of the solo ad provider you can read more about Udimi here, and MLM Leads here.

Native Ads

Native ads mimic and resemble the advertising platform that they are on. They feel and operate like the host media platform.

A good example of native advertising is news feeds on social media sites. Others include search and promoted listings that appear on top of your search items and content recommendations, which appear at the end of articles – they start with words like “recommended for you”, “suggested post” or “sponsored content”.

Native ads are created by various meta data elements, for example, a thumbnail image, URL content, headlines, and many more. Therefore, ensure that you create quality content if you want your native ad to be ranked first.

It is strongly recommended that before you pay the publisher to host the ad, do your homework on the specific publisher. You want a publisher with high reader statistics and one that focuses on your target market.

Another thing that you should concentrate on is your relationship with the publisher. Establish a good connection with your publisher so that they can tell you when the content is not working, and how you can improve it.

The response rate for native ads is high because people are more likely to open them since they resemble the content on the website that they are visiting. Many of them are well aware that the content is a native advertisement, but they are not bothered because they feel that it is less intrusive. Others click on it because they see it as part of the editorial content.

Bonus: Snap Chat Ads

Although I have not used this platform before for advertising, I am seeing a lot of noise in the marketplace about the effectiveness of this new advertising space.

Especially for low cost ads, an advertising network like Snapchat can be a winner for you, because not many people have directed their attention to it and it is an untapped traffic source.

In today’s marketing arena, most people focus their attention on Facebook and Instagram because of its super powerful ability to drive massive conversions for marketers. If you find that you are not making a dent with Facebook or Instagram Ads or you’ve exhausted it and want to see what else is out there for you, then have a look at SnapChat ads or Snap Ads as they are referred to, and see how it can help your marketing.

According to Adage, Snap Ads have gone from ungodly to very cheap. It says that compared to Facebook and Instagram, Snap Ads had the lowest ad prices, from $2.95 per thousand impressions whereas Facebook cost $5.12 and Instagram cost $4.20.

At the end of the day, to see whether Snap Ads are worth your investment, test the platform with a low budget and compare it to your marketing efforts used on other platforms.

Snap Ads are worth mentioning because a lot of your audience can be found on SnapChat especially if you are promoting an affiliate offer that is targeted to millennials.

To learn more about SnapChat Ads you can visit their website here.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing and paid traffic compliment each other.

I seriously would not recommend using free traffic methods if you want to see quick success with affiliate marketing.

Free traffic methods like revenue-sharing traffic sites, Facebook groups and even forum commenting can take up much of your time and produce very little results.

If you have decided to fit paid traffic into your affiliate marketing arsenal, then using one of the above traffic sources would be immensely useful to you but only if you know how to use it properly.

Therefore take the time to invest in some valuable courses before spending your money.

A few courses that I’d like to mention include:

Social Traffic Blueprint for Facebook and Instagram Ads

Sean Bhageri’s YouTube Traffic Master’s Course for YouTube Ads

Brennan Zimmer’s Bing Ads Beginner’s Guide To PPC Course 

If I’ve missed any traffic source that you are using and you’re getting great results, tell me in the comments.

Cheers