It is impossible to attract traffic without any form of investment. It’s either money or the webmaster’s time and effort.
Often webmasters combine paid and free ways to attract an audience, but in order not to make sure you won’t waste precious time, it is important to choose the sources carefully. What works with one offer may not work with another. You need to clearly understand what is the target audience you are looking for and what methods are suitable for this.
Next, we’ll take a look at the best free traffic sources for affiliate marketing, specifically, highlight the top 10+. We’ll go over each method and determine which offers each one suits best.
Read about the best traffic sources here.
Table of contents
Features of free traffic for affiliate marketing
Attracting an audience without any financial investments is a great option for webmasters who do not have a very large advertising budget, but do have plenty of free time. You’ll need to make an effort to earn a profit, and it’ll take months for you to see the results of your labor. Yes, paid methods work well, but that shouldn’t stop rookies from trying to earn some money without having to invest any. After all, you gotta start with something.
Advantages of free traffic:
- income increases over time;
- high conversion rates;
- many different audiences can be attracted.
Increased income
Most of the free methods involve projects that require long-term development, for example, pages or channels in social networks. They will eventually bring a profit, but you need to get lots of subscribers. And promoting your page/group/channel on various websites is a tedious task, even if you financially invest in it. But over time, you start getting more traffic, people show up thanks to recommendations or just from search queries, therefore, the affiliate marketer’s income grows.
High conversion rates
Most of the methods are based on attracting and retaining an audience on a specific resource (website, social media page, Youtube channel). If you have your own website or blog, you users will trust you more than ordinary ads, especially if your content is high-quality and useful. This allows you to get higher conversion rates than many paid sources can provide.
A wide range of TA
Using your own website or social media account, you can attract almost any target audience. All sorts of people from all countries use the Internet and social media.
Top 10+ best free sources of traffic for affiliate marketing
There are 2 methods for attracting users without having to make financial investments:
- Create your own platforms on different websites.There you can advertise any offer as you see fit. Examples: your own website, a Vkontakte or Facebook group, a Telegram or Youtube channel.
- Attract the attention of visitors from various other resources (blogs, groups in social networks and forums).
Webmasters also use email ads, but these methods are classified as spam
Your own website
In our opinion, this is the most effective method. But it is only relatively free. If you have the ability to invest money into the content and into its promotion, it is preferable to do so. You’ll also need to pay for the domain and hosting.
You know perfectly well the interests of the audience, after all, it was drawn by the content that you post. On your website you can advertise any offer, endlessly experiment with the position of the banner or widget. You can attract users using your site in any country, this method works all over the world.
How much time is needed to get a result
There are no exact numbers, it all depends on the quality of the content and your position in search engine queries. But even at the initial stages you can get leads and later their number will increase.
How to attract interested users
The essence of the method is to attract traffic through search engines (SEO-optimization). The content should be unique and contain keywords that users type into search engines. To find out which phrases are most often searched for, use YandexWordstat or GoogleTrends – the best free options for this purpose.
SEO does not require any investments if you create the content yourself. To make the website grow in terms of popularity even faster, you can purchase links from other resources.
Affiliate marketers also use doorways for promotional purposes. These are websites that are designed to redirect visitors to another resource. Doorways used to be filled with meaningless content that was geared towards a group of specific keywords. They were of no use to the user, but they helped the affiliate marketers climb to the top of search queries. People saw doorways among the search results, clicked on them, and were sent directly to the pre-landing page or to another resource.
Nowadays it’s almost impossible to use this method – search engines have long figured out how to combat such websites. Many use “half-doorways” – websites tailored to a very small group of requests. For example, a site about some popular model of wireless headphones. If you have high-quality content that you can create yourself, and perform some SEO optimization tasks, such a site can reach the TOP, people will come to it looking for information about these headphones. All that remains is to place affiliate links on it.
What niches are suitable for driving traffic from your own website:
- goods;
- gambling;
- betting;
- cryptocurrencies;
- adult;
- dating;
- nutra.
When choosing a niche, shift towards those that are similar to the content you can produce on your own, or at least those where you will be able to assess the quality of what you buy (if you decide to order, for example, articles).
Blogging
The method is similar to the previous one, here you also need to create content and attract potential leads with useful information. But since you don’t create your own website, you do not pay for the domain and hosting.
Blogger.com is a great example of a platform that you can create and popularize your blog on. For Russian-speaking users – Yandex Zen.
How to make money
There are 3 ways to drive traffic using a blog:
- Recommend white-hat offers to your readers through native ads (not directly).
- Collect incorrect, low-quality leads and get banned.
- Sell your project to another affiliate marketer.
To make money with the help of a blog, you need to work actively and write at least 3 articles per week. How quickly your project develops depends on the niche you choose and on how interesting the content is to the user.
Any country that has relevant sites where people can post freely are suitable for blogging.
What niches are suitable for driving traffic from a blog
White-hat offers are suitable when using this method. If you promote gambling or adult offers, you’ll get banned. Technically, you can promote such offers but there is a high risk of being blocked.
Guest posting
Another option where you create the content yourself. You post content on other website and leave a subtle link to your own. You can try to promote an offer in those posts but such content is unlikely to pass moderation.
How to make money
The audience on these sites may seem similar, but they each have different reasons for visiting the website. To promote offers successfully, you need to select the right target audience.
You can only post content that is relevant to the topic of the website. In the link, it is best to refer to a reliable source of information that has been prepared in advance on your own site. Otherwise, you run the risk of it being deleted by the website’s moderators.
This method works regardless of GEO, but the articles need to be of high quality.
What niches are suitable for driving traffic from guest posting
We recommend you use this way to attract users to white-hat offers only.
Social media
Facebook alone has 2.5 billion monthly active users. Social networks are a source of any traffic; any offer can be advertised here. But you need to choose a social network where you’re sure you’ll find your audience.
This method has its disadvantages. To promote the project you need to invest a lot of effort and even then you need to look out for the social network’s moderators. Violating the rules of the social network will result in your group/channel being banned. All your effort will be for nothing.
However, if you “color within the lines”, social media can become a constant source of traffic.
Facebook is in the top 5 most visited resources in the world. The Facebook mobile application is used by over 1 billion people. Here you can find absolutely any target audience. Regardless of the GEO. This social network is an ideal option if you combine paid and free promotion methods.
Here you can find your users regardless of the GEO. Create a thematic page and fill it with content.
This social network is great for promoting commodity offers, but technically you can promote any sort of offer. When creating content, take a look at which posts get censored, sometimes this might interest your TA even more. It all depends on the type of people you’re aiming your content at.
Instagram is filled with a predominantly young audience, accustomed to high-quality visual design. Take a look at the accounts of your competitors and think about how you can stand out from all of them.
You can learn more about traffic arbitrage on Instagram in this article.
Twitter has 1.3 billion registered users. More than 100 million people are active every month. The social network is popular all over the world.
The local users are responsive to offers that promise a profit. The audience is mostly solvent, but it will be harder to create content for this social network. Twitter is popular all over the world.
Vkontakte
Especially popular in the CIS countries. This social network works just like Facebook: you make content, interact with potential subscribers and eventually get a profit.
People of different ages are registered on VKontakte, but mainly young residents of the CIS countries. Number of active users: 97 million per month. The social network accounts for 77% of the entire mobile audience of the Russian segment of the Internet.
ОК
Another Russian social network, the audience is older compared to VK. Monthly traffic – 42 million people. At the time of this writing, Odnoklassniki.ru was 67th in the Alexa ranking.
Attracting potential leads works the same way as with VK.
TikTok
TikTok is youngest social network on this list, but it’s already setting traffic records. This is a video platform with the maximum length of the videos being 60 seconds.
The audience here is mostly young, like middle school-high school, so it responds well to viral content. Or you can bet on a more serious audience. There is much less of it, but the conversion rate will be higher.
How to make money off social media
After choosing an affiliate program select the social network with the most suitable audience for it. First, popularize your account and then use it to promote offers. It is best to create profiles on different social networks and advertise one on the other. You can also try mutual advertising – negotiate with the owners of other pages to promote each other.
Social media is usually a good place to promote entertaining content, so dating and gambling offers can find a good response here. Use mass following, mass liking and other ways of attracting attention. Comments on other popular pages are also a good promotion method.
Messengers
The concept is just like the one with social media: create a channel, fill it with content, popularize it, promote the offer. Or contact a potential customer directly. Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber, FB Messenger have one distinct advantage – the ability to communicate with your audience directly. This works well if you’re offering a discount or a gift, or revealing details about a promotion.
This method suits all offers, but if you advertise something illegal too persistently, you can run into your account being blocked.
It takes some time to develop a channel, but you can get your first leads already in the first stages of development especially if you also employ send-outs and newsletter. You can find any target audience in instant messengers. .
This is a popular website with visual content where we can place promotional pictures. You can use before/after photos or other engaging pictures for weight loss products and other nutra offers.
Add an affiliate link to your image as well as a search phrase, through which users can find your post. You can also do reciprocal repins with other authors to increase your coverage.
You can obtain results here pretty quickly, people from all over the world use the Pinterest.
YouTube
A YouTube channel is a valuable resource, especially if you can promote your affiliate links on it. The average age of the audience is 28, 72% of them are male.
Advantages of YouTube:
- 2 billion active monthly users;
- videos easily get to the top of Google search results;
- very accessible content.
But there are also significant disadvantages. Video content is much more difficult to create than text content. It takes a lot of time to learn how to make high-quality and catchy videos. But if you’re willing to go through all that the rewards are more than worth it.
Theoretically, you can promote any type of offer, but you can get your channel blocked for ads of casinos or other taboo topics. .
Reddit is not very popular in the CIS countries, but its number of active users per month exceeds 1.2 billion. Most of them live in the USA and Canada. The site is ranked the 19th most visited in the world, according to Similarweb. Even Twitter has lower activity.
How to make money off Reddit
All affiliate marketers use social networks to promote offers, but many neglect Reddit, which means the competition there will be less stiff.
This is how the website works: people post content and then others upvote or downvote it. At the top of the ranking are the most popular topics. You don’t even need to create popular topics to make money here, Reddit is used as an Internet forum.
Gaining popularity here takes a long time and demands consistent efforts. You need to constantly be active, post content (preferably original content). These are either pictures (gifs) or text messages; you can even set up an entire blog on the website. News content is also an acceptable choice.
Post content and add links to your site. Reddit is great for entertainment content, so we recommend promoting gambling and dating offers there. But in general, you can promote any affiliate program aimed at America and Canada.
Crowd marketing
One of the most effective free promotion methods. Crowd Marketing is a full-fledged advertising campaign, carried out through replies on forums, comments on social networks and articles on other websites.
How to make money
The concept is simple: leave comments that contain links to your website. And search engines take this for natural activity and popularity, which improves optimization. You also get new target traffic flows – people ready to perform the target action, in other words, potential leads.
The effectiveness of crowd marketing will be the highest when used in conjunction with other tools.
Which niches to promote
Affiliate marketers use crowd marketing to promote all kinds of offers, and there’s also no limitations in terms of GEO – any region has social networks, forums and thematic websites.
Bulletin boards
Free traffic for affiliate marketing is farmed on all websites where there are potential leads.
Advantages of bulletin boards:
- warmed up clients that are already ready to buy something;
- ad placement is free;
- the SEO optimization of such sites is always high and they are at the top of Google’s 1st page.
Choose bulletin boards that are GEO-friendly to your offers. Here’s a list of the best sites:
- A world famous bulletin board. Most users are from the US and Europe.
- Very popular in Russia. If your TA is from that country, this is the perfect platform for you.
- For users from the EU and the CIS countries. Look for the website for a specific country.
Bulletin boards were created to move goods, it’s best to promote this type of offers using this method.
Mail ads
A series of well-written emails will work, with a special focus on getting to know the client. In the mailing list, you need to describe the advantages of the promoted product, warm up the client’s interest in it. But don’t get carried away – no one will read large volumes of text.
This method works with:
- Email;
- messengers;
- SMS text messages.
You can collect databases of phone numbers and emails using special services (for example, TargetHunter). Webmasters usually just buy them. Offer users promotions, gifts and bonuses, you won’t get a reaction to ordinary offers: people are tired of them.
Some mailing services offer a free trial, use it.
This method works in all GEOs. You can promote any type of offer, the main thing is to draw the user’s attention to the product and convince them to perform the target action.
Quora
The largest Q&A website. It’s more suited to paid ads, but if you work hard it can bring free traffic as well.
Answer questions on the topic while advertising your site or product. Helpful answers will be driven to the top and that is the essence of this method. It is against the website’s rules to promote gambling and adult offers, food supplements or weight loss products.
Quora is popular in 250 countries around the world, the majority of registered users live in the USA and India.
Conclusions
Getting traffic for affiliate marketing for free is very possible, especially if you’re willing to put in a lot of effort into it. This option is suitable for rookie webmasters who have a lot of time but not that much money.
Experienced affiliate marketers should also consider creating and promoting their own projects and sites, as this is a source of passive income. After all, that’s what we’re all doing here – looking for a profit.
Some of the methods described are only relatively free, others work better in tandem with paid ones. Which of them to use is up to you.
nice post informative