Affiliate Traffic: 8+ Best Traffic Sources for Affiliate Marketing (Free & Paid) in 2023

 Affiliate marketing traffic can drive a lot of sales for your product via referrals. A little spend on it can generate a high return on investment. However, ensuring that your referrals come from high-quality, targeted traffic sources is important to maximize the conversion rate. 

In this article, we’ll talk about traffic sources, their types, and the best examples of such sources, whether free or paid, to generate sales via affiliate marketing. 

What is a traffic source?

A traffic source refers to any platform that can send visitors to an affiliate site, landing page, or CPA offer. It is the medium through which people find a website or offer you promote. Monitoring these sources can help you understand what attracts users and focus on doing more of that to keep the traffic coming. It gives you ample information about the target audience to figure out how to convert them best.

A traffic source can be either organic or paid. Organic traffic comes from unpaid sources, practically free traffic. The most popular type of organic traffic is from search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. 

Paid traffic, on the other hand, comes to your website after you pay for advertising promotions on social media, search engines, and blogs.

Paid traffic

Such traffic is easier to get because it involves advertising on sources that are guaranteed to drive views and clicks to your website. For example, if you type a common phrase like “website hosting” into Google, you’ll see several web hosting providers advertising their services before you even see an organic link. 

The downside is that this type of traffic can be costly, especially when you’re targeting highly-competitive keywords and websites.

8 best paid traffic sources for affiliate advertising

Any marketer needs both paid and organic traffic. But the former is the best for driving significant traffic to your product website and getting sales. You can always pay for traffic using the pricing models that are best suited for you: cost-per-click, cost-per-mille, cost-per-action, etc.

1. Push traffic

There are two main types of Push ads: browser notifications sent to people that have signed up and consented to get them (Web Push notification) and ads on a website that incorporates this ad format (In-Page Push). Either way, this type of ad is good at catching viewers’ attention, and you can use creatives and compelling visuals to lure their attention even more.

2. Pop traffic

There are two types of pop traffic: Popups and Popunders. A Popup is when a new advertising window appears on top of a webpage. A Popunder is an ad that loads under the webpage; you can only see it after closing the webpage. Popunder ads are more effective than Popups because the latter causes interruptions while the former doesn’t. It presents a good opportunity for both publishers to monetize their traffic and advertisers to get better results from their marketing spend.

3. Banner ads

This type of ad is a simple clickable banner on a website or between posts on a social media platform. It’s an image with a hyperlink that redirects anyone who clicks on it to an external URL. It is the most common type of ad that you can use anywhere, including on websites, social media, and even email. The key is to design an eye-catching ad using the right mix of images and text. Any text should also be short and go straight to the point. 

4. Native ads

Native advertisements match the look and feel of your website. They resonate with your traffic source’s audience and don’t have the perceived intrusiveness of many other types of ads, making it a win-win for both the publisher and the advertiser.

5. Video marketing

You can use videos to advertise third-party products. Videos are more likely to capture a reader’s attention than images and text, so use the opportunity to impress the reader and clearly state what your product or service offers to them. Note that video ads tend to cost more than other types of ads, so it’s not suitable for beginner affiliates.

6. Paid search ads

You can place ads for your website on search engines like Google and Bing and pay only when someone clicks on it. You can bid for specific keywords, wherein your link will show when a person searches for them. However, bidding for commonly searched terms like “insurance” or “medical services” is fiercely competitive and drives up the price for intending advertisers.

7. Social media ads

You can advertise on popular social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, and LinkedIn. When someone clicks your display ad, they’ll be redirected to your social media page or an external landing page. Billions of people use social media, so it’s a good platform to reach potential customers.

8. URL shortening tools

A URL shortener is a tool that converts a long URL into a shorter one that’ll still take anyone that clicks it to the same webpage. Some of them offer affiliate services such that whenever someone clicks on a shortened link, they’ll first see an ad before going to the intended website. This ad space is a good medium to generate traffic for your own product or landing page.