How to Use Paid Traffic Channels in Affiliate Marketing

Which is better: paid traffic or free traffic?

At a first glance, it may seem like free traffic is better because, well, it’s free! Everyone likes something they don’t have to pay for, but there must be some sort of catch, right?

The issue that comes with optimizing your affiliate marketing content only for free traffic is that it takes a long time before you see real growth.

With so many other content creators publishing similar content on the same topics, it’s no wonder that a steady stream of free traffic can take time to build.

People who favor free traffic are usually investing their time into utilizing the best SEO techniques.

The benefits of utilizing paid traffic marketing channels

After spending a lot of energy crafting great affiliate marketing program, it only makes sense to optimize it for better traffic and more sales through paid marketing channels. Then you can bring what you learn into creating other affiliate content.

Here are a few reasons why you might want to pay more attention to paid marketing.

Faster growth

Like we mentioned above, free traffic through SEO takes a long time to take off. Think about how much competition you have with other long-standing websites who have a stronger domain authority  than you do.

With so many factors involved with getting consistent free traffic, investing in paid traffic methods can help you bypass this stage.

Instead of waiting months, or even years, to see any kind of growth, you can start optimizing your affiliate marketing content today and see growth almost instantly.

When you invest in PPC Ads (or pay-per-click advertising), you’ll have the opportunity to get your affiliate marketing content in front of your target audience with the click of a few buttons.

No need to wait around for your content to rank higher in Google or get engagement on social media. You can see growth today!

Better ad targeting

When you optimize your affiliate marketing content only for SEO, you may attract visitors that aren’t in your target audience.

Let’s say you are writing an affiliate blog post for a calendar scheduling tool you absolutely love.

You publish the blog post and over time, you see more free traffic coming to your blog through automated social media posts and organic Google search. This seems great until you realize that the people who click on your blog post are only in the research phase so they don’t actually click your affiliate link to buy a tool subscription.

Maybe you notice that most of the people who are searching for the calendar scheduling tool are traditional career professionals who work in medical care, but you want to reach stay-at-home moms who need to categorize their to-do list and streamline their calendar.

It’s bringing you more traffic, but it’s not the right kind of traffic.

Instead, you want highly targeted traffic that will not only bring you a one-time affiliate sale but will also turn that visitor into a loyal reader or follower. This is something paid marketing can get you within a very short timeframe.

More likely to convert visitors into sales

What goes into a great piece of affiliate marketing content?

It usually takes a few hours to write a post, one hour to edit and another to design a graphic, and don’t forget about the time you need to spend to promote the content.

Since time is your most valuable resource, you don’t want to spend it on projects that don’t bring you a return. Affiliate  Marketing can be extremely lucrative, but it often takes some experimentation and testing before you are able to see a sizable amount of sales trickle in.

With paid marketing, you can focus on what will best convert your target audience rather than getting caught up in the grind of trying to get eyes on your affiliate marketing content. That part is already taken care of with paid marketing!

More conversions mean more sales. This is even better for  affiliate programs  (like ours among many others!) that give you monthly recurring revenue for the lifetime of any account that is purchased from your affiliate link. That means you could get a check from affiliate programs every month. Talk about truly passive income!

You don’t need to spend a lot

One of the common misconceptions about paid marketing is that you need to put in a large investment of money before you see any kind of return. With many social media and search engine paid marketing channels, you can get started with paid ads using only a few dollars.

You don’t need to dump a ton of money into paid marketing when you first start out. Instead, you can start small and test your ad targeting, messaging, and imagery to make sure it is optimized for your audience.

As you prove which advertisements are worth putting paid marketing dollars behind, you’ll have an easier time converting visitors into qualified leads.

We always recommend starting with split testing  (which tests variations of an ad against each other to see which performs best) when you begin a new paid marketing campaign.

When thinking through your paid marketing strategy, you can save a small percentage of your income to experiment with. If you are a solo entrepreneur or run a small business, don’t worry about putting hundreds or thousands of dollars into paid ads. Even if you use $10 each week for a few months, you’ll learn a lot!