One of my subscribers asked me a very important question about affiliate marketing, and I want to share it with you because I think you need to know the answer too.
This is a really good lesson about getting traffic, growing an online business, and making passive income through affiliate marketing.
And it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing it, because this is something everybody needs to learn.
So, Tariq asked me what I think the best traffic method for affiliate marketing is.
So, it’s a great question and a totally valid one. Now unfortunately, Tariq doesn’t have a website. So he needs to get that fixed that immediately.
Table of Contents:
Dangerously High-Risk / Low-Reward
- The biggest mistake almost every newbie makes
- Gives you zero control over your business
- Gets you hooked on a high-risk, low-reward method
If you don’t have a website, then you don’t really have real control over your business. I mean, it’s great for those shady marketers who tell you to promote their products, but it’s not good for you.
I want to give you a warning about something.
It’s a really bad practice I’m seeing a lot of good, honest, and hard working people are falling for. Some marketers will give you a ready-made landing page to send traffic to. On the surface it looks good. But the opt-in form is for their email list, not yours.
That means you’re building someone else’s business, and not your own.
Even though it feels like you are being productive, you’re actually missing out.
What’s really going on here; those marketers know the lifetime value of every customer. They’ll give you a commission, one time. And they’ll have a lifetime asset, and a stronger business. One that you’ve helped build for them.
While all you’ll get is a one time commission.
And that’s the reason why I don’t run an affiliate program at the moment. And yeah, I could probably double or triple my revenue, if I recruited affiliate marketers.
But I want you to focus on building your own assets first, before you start building mine or anyone else’s. I just want to see you succeed, and do things properly so you have long term success. And when you have an asset, you have predictable, reliable, and consistent revenue.
Why Your Strategy Doesn’t Work
Listen, I know Tariq wants me to tell him that there’s a single website out there that he can post his affiliate link on to get a flood of free traffic. But it doesn’t work like that.
Nobody wants to deal with that. It’s spammy, and it doesn’t provide any real value to anyone.
Think about it.
It’s like walking up to a stranger and asking them to buy something. It just doesn’t work.
And if you do that, you’re missing out on loads of revenue too. Because you’re only able to ask them to buy one time before you’re either blocked or banned.
So you only have one chance to make a sale. So I’ve got something a lot better for you, that’s going to let you make a lot more money, not just once, but repeatedly. And as often as you like.
Ok, what is it?
The Do It For Real Method
Well, it kinda feels like I need to find new ways to explain the only process that always works. And listen, nothing worth having ever came easy, alright?
So we have to roll up our sleeves and get to work.
Ok, so the method I want to share with you is called the Do It For Real method.
And the Do It For Real method is the only method that has been consistently proven to work. Let me tell you how to do it.
The good news is, this works for every niche.
Mapping The Customer Journey
Let’s imagine you’re promoting an affiliate offer that teaches people how to choose the right type of tropical fish, ok? What you need to do is work backwards from there. So you map out all the steps a customer needs to take before they realise they need that product.
Now, for each one of these steps, you have to create or provide helpful content to moves them towards the next step. So let’s start at the beginning of the steps.
A customer might use google to search for “types of fish tanks”.
What you need to do is create content that teaches them the difference between fish tanks.
So you’d write an article, or get someone else to write it for you, or shoot a youtube video, that explains the difference between a marine tank and a tropical tank.
Once they know THAT, you have to give them a reason to move to the next step.
This is where you ask them to join your email list, so they can get more value from you. It’s important that you own the landing page, and it’s not another marketers. That’s a recipe for disaster because you’re not really building a business of your own, you’re only building an asset for somebody else.
Now, once the customer is on your email list, you can move them to the next step, which is to buy the thing you’re promoting.
But, the cool thing is, if they don’t buy from you that time, that’s ok.
You can promote stuff to them as much as you like. Listen, the truth is, most people won’t buy the first time they see an offer. They need multiple touch points. And that’s what we’re doing here.
We’re creating multiple touch points that build trust.
And this kind of system can be automated too, so it becomes passive income. All you have to do is drive traffic to your content. And thankfully, that’s pretty easy.
So how do you get traffic?
How To Get Affiliate Traffic
The best way is to leverage it from other websites.
There’s a couple of things you need to do here. The first one is to know where your audience hangs out online. So you need to find niche-relevant groups and communities.
But you can’t just go posting links there. To really make this work, you need to create more content. But that’s pretty quick and easy.
So let me show you what I mean. Here’s a very effective strategy to drive traffic to your content. Go to reddit.Com and find subs that are relevant to your niche. It’s absolutely essential that you read the rules of each sub. If they don’t allow links to websites, just move on and find another one that does.
Ok, let’s go to the computer and I’ll walk you through it.
The first thing that you want to do when you head over to Reddit and type in a few relevant keywords in the search bar.
So I might type in something like aquarium, and it will show me subs, or groups, that are relevant to that keyword.
This sub has got over 300,000 members, and over 1,000 of those are online right now.
It was created in 2009, so it’s got a lot of authority.
Okay. So the first thing that you’ll want to do is head over to the rules section and take a read through these. This is really important. So don’t skip over this.
The rule number 2 it says ‘no spamming advertising or flooding the sub’.
It also goes on to say that if more than 10% of your submissions are a personal blog site or any YouTube video, it is considered advertising and will be removed.
This is a common rule on most subreddits.
What this tells us is, every one in 10 of your posts can promote your personal blog.
That’s fantastic.
So let’s think about the power of that for a second. Because on this sub, we’ve got a thousand people online right now. And sure, a lot of them won’t be browsing the front page of the sub. They’ll be involved in discussions and posting content, and being active in other places.
But a heavy percentage of those 1,000 people who are online right now will see your post.
And not just the people online right now, but the people who come later on in the day, and tomorrow, and next week and next year – because your post is going to live on forever.
Because look at this, if we can structure this content here by ‘Top’, we can choose to see most popular content of all the time, on each subreddit.
Now you can see what type of content performs well, so you know how to get the attention of the community.
The community will then ‘upvote’ or ‘downvote’ each piece of content that’s posted here.
If you’re not familiar with votes and down votes, the more people who upvote your content, the higher your climb in Reddit, the more people who downvote, will… well, just pushes your posts down.
So imagine if you’re content gets this kind of traction. Just imagine how much targeted traffic you’re going to get.
Now to give you the best chances of making that happen, you need to do a couple of things because you can’t just create a new post and start linking to your website.
You have to be a bit strategic about this.
So what I recommend you do; click on ‘New’ and see the latest posts – these don’t have many comments yet, and the engagement is pretty low.
This gives you an opportunity.
What I want you to do next is answer questions on these new posts.
Provide value to the community.
You do this for a couple of reasons; first of all, you get the moderators to recognise your name.
So if there’s any problems with posting or your account, or you run into any issues, you reach out to the moderators. These are just normal people and the only power they have is the ability to stop you from posting, which is quite quite important.
You need to make sure that these guys, or at least a few of them know your name. So when the time comes to promote your stuff, they’re not going to immediately assume that you have some kind of spammer or you’re just there to, to take traffic from the community.
They need to see that you’re a knowledgeable guy, you’re there to assist and benefit the community.
When you answer comments in the ‘New’ section, you’ll stand out more. And that means you have an increased chance of being rewarded Karma.
Karma gives you additional benefits on Reddit. Some subs will only allow you to post links when your Karma increases beyond a certain threshold. And that will vary from sub to sub right across Reddit.
There is no one rule or no one size fits all solution with that.
So what you need to do is increase your Karma, create non-promotional posts, and maybe use the subs as a way to gather data. You can run polls and get a feel for what people really have trouble with, so you can provide them with content that benefits them.
The point is to increase your Karma, so when you do start promoting your website and your links, you have a better chance of being accepted and embraced by the community and the moderators.
Just take a look at how someone else might be using this type of strategy.
Here we have what looks like a regular post, and it just might be.
We can see that a user has created some useful content, and they’re linking to other websites. It’s simple and effective, once you understand the strategy.
And if you stick with THIS strategy, and if you do it right, you will get floods of targeted traffic to your website, all through delivering value.
But this is just the beginning.
If you are serious about growing a popular and profitable business, you’re going to need even more traffic.
You can get the traffic methods I never share anywhere else, when you go here: https://profitcopilot.com/traffic and get them all for free.