Affiliate Marketing Basics: Driving traffic

Driving traffic to your blog or website can be done in many ways. Image: Burning Image / Flickr / CC-BY

When you are getting started in affiliate marketing, driving traffic to your website is your biggest challenge. Traffic coming to your website increases the likelihood that your offers will be viewed and clicked. There are two major categories of traffic — organic and paid. Both types of traffic are valuable, but they are very different.

Driving organic traffic to your website

Organic traffic is traffic that has not been paid for. Organic traffic is more difficult to drive to your website, but is more valuable. When visitors find your website through search engine results, social networks and referrals, that is considered “organic” traffic. Driving organic traffic to your affiliate marketing website means creating content that is unique, interesting and targeted to the audience that you want to attract. Paying attention to the details of your website will help drive that traffic. For example:

• Keywords. The words and phrases that people looking for your website would type into a search engine. You should include your keywords in your page titles and your post text.
• Meta information. This is the information that search engines use first to categorize and display your website, such as the tags and title.
• Uniqueness of information. If the information on your website is different from the other things on the internet, it can be ranked much higher. This means content should not be copied and pasted from other sources. Instead, you should find, use, or write your own unique content.

Links, both internal to your website and from external sources, help people organically find your website. With unique and interesting content, you are more likely to get links from other websites. You should also link your pages together to help search engine crawlers and visitors find new things in your site.

Paid Traffic

There are times when organic traffic needs a helping hand. You can pay to get your website out in front of more people, but there are lots of options to consider.

• Banners and badges. These are the graphic advertisements you will see on the sidebar, top and bottom of other websites. There are several advertisement-serving services that can help you get your ads out to others.
• Paid search advertising. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing offer sponsored search engine results. You can pay to be included in these results. The better quality your website, the less you will pay for these sponsored results.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of ways to drive traffic to your website. However, understanding the difference between organic and paid traffic can help you improve your affiliate results.