Mastering free traffic before spending a dollar on paid traffic

Master free traffic before spending a dollar on paid traffic

I know by this point you’re probably thinking that you want to jumpstart your affiliate marketing business. You probably have heard that many people spend their whole day in pajamas while making thousands of dollars per day. If you want to get from point A, which is your stage, to point B as quickly and as smoothly as possible.

Believe me I’ve been there. I understand where you’re coming from. However, let me tell you if you rush things and you go straight to paid traffic, there’s a high chance you will lose your shirt. No joke. There’s a high chance that after spending all those dollars, you have very little to show for it.

Sadly, this is exactly the kind of situation many newbie affiliate marketers experience. Don’t put yourself in that situation. You have to be disciplined. You have to master free traffic before spending a dime on paid traffic.

After you have mastered how free traffic works and how you’ve optimized your online properties for optimal conversion, then and only then should you go crazy on paid traffic. Knock yourself out. However, prior to that point, I’m telling you if you want to avoid going bankrupt, you need to master free traffic before spending on paid traffic. I don’t want to sound like a broken record but given how high the stakes are, it’s definitely worth it for your sake.

Pay attention to your social media content winners

The first thing that you need to pay attention in optimizing free traffic is to see which of your social media accounts are pumping the most traffic to your blog or website. This is the first order of business. This is how you know if something is working.

It’s not as easy as you think. You may be thinking to yourself when you’re going to Google Analytics that you’re not getting any traffic at all. Well, think again. It may well turn out that you’re getting ten clicks from Facebook, twenty clicks from Twitter, thirty clicks from Instagram and then zero from the other social media platforms.

Most importantly, do not get depressed. It’s very easy to think that if you’re not getting much traffic that you’re wasting your time. Well, when you look at the traffic flow, as slow as they may be, they do indicate winners. Seriously.

First of all, you realize that some of the channels you’re on produce most of your traffic. If you’re on ten channels, there’s a high likelihood that only three or less social media channels produce high-enough traffic. The second thing I need you to realize is that traffic volume is comparative. In other words, you compare all your different channels and you pick the channels that produce the most.

Now, in the example I gave you, it seems depressing because you’re only getting thirty clicks per day from one channel. That is still a winning channel because it beats all your other channels. So, what you’re going to be doing is you’re going to pay attention to the channels that produce the highest amount of traffic in your context.

Again, don’t obsess about the fact that you’re only getting thirty visitors from let’s say Twitter or Facebook. What matters is that when you line all the social media platforms you’re on against each other, some are producing traffic while the vast majority is not. This is good news because now you’re going to be able to focus on the channels that have the highest capability of sending you traffic. However, don’t make any rash decisions just yet.

First, identify the channels that sent you the most traffic.

Second, identify the content that gets clicked the most. For example, if it turns out that you’re getting the most traffic from Facebook, look at the content that you shared on Facebook. Is there any indicator of the content that is being clicked the most? Now that you have identified the specific type of content that’s getting a lot of traffic from Facebook, the next step is to share that content more often on the other platforms.

Now, ask yourself “After I’ve done this, did the nonperforming platforms show any improvement? For example, did the platforms sending you zero traffic start sending you more traffic? Similarly, did lower producing channels start sending a higher traffic volume?

Pay attention to these patterns. Share your winning content in many other channels By this point, you should not rush to cut off certain channels because they’re not producing any traffic or not sending you traffic to your liking.

You should first focus on sharing your most popular content on other social media platforms that you’re not currently on. See if these other channels respond favorably. Give it time The next step is to give yourself about a couple of months to find your very best content, share those on other channels you’re not on as well as give your nonperforming channels a chance to shape up. After three months, you should be in a position to start cutting back and focusing on your winners.

At this point, you already know what your winning pieces of content are. You should already have a clear idea of which themes get the most love from the social media channels you’re promoting to. You also should have a clear idea of which channels tend to be your most consistent producers of traffic. For example, if you’re distributing to twenty, don’t be surprised if only six or less of those channels or platforms produce enough traffic to make the whole thing worthwhile.

At this point, you should cut back your social media channel distribution network to six or less social media platforms. If there are only three producing at a fairly decent level, stick to those three. Whatever the case may be you’re going to start cutting back because you don’t want to spread yourself too thin. You want to direct your efforts to channels that at least produce decent returns.

This is how you maximize your return on effort. Remember the name of the game is to put in as little effort as possible while getting as many dollars out as possible. That’s going to be very hard to do when you’re basically spending all this time, effort and money blasting content to channels that really don’t return enough traffic. Keep in mind that in this context, “enough” is comparative.

You basically are going to line up all the traffic results you get and then you stick to the top twenty percent or top ten percent and cut out all the other channels.

Repurpose your content

By this stage, your sandwich strategy is looking pretty solid! It’s already producing traffic, but to maximize its effectiveness, you need to repurpose your content. For example, if you have a blog, turn your blog posts into narrated videos.

Maybe you can narrate it or you can turn it into a slide show. Perhaps you can hire a voice-over artist from places like Fiverr. Whatever the case may be you already have the script. These are blog posts. You just need to turn them into video that people would want to watch.

Pay attention to your competitors’ videos on YouTube and see how they present similar information to yours. Come up with something similar. There are all sorts of slide show programs out there that make it easy for affiliate marketers to turn text to video. You might want to consider those.

Text to pictures

Another approach you could take is to turn your blog posts and their data into pictures. These can be memes. Whatever the case may be these pictures really summarize the substance of your content. They really bring it home. They’re hard hitting. They’re easy to share. They also are quite illustrative. Whatever the case may be you might want to turn your text into pictures.

Text to infographics

Another approach you could take is to zero in one set of data in your among your most popular content and turn into an infographic.

Turn your text into questions

Finally, you can look through your winning content and strip them down into quick blurbs. Each blurb is a short question and a very short answer. You can then tweet out these out. These are easy to tweet. In fact, Twitter is very friendly to question-based content.

Share your repurposed content

Now that you have repurposed your content into video, pictures, infographics or short question-and-answer format, share your material. At this point, you’re already automating your publishing on the social media platforms you’re sticking to after cutting off other platforms.

Now, you’re going to be sandwiching more of your stuff. At this point, since you’ve repurposed a significant amount of your most popular content, you should then include this in your content rotation. You then take off a significant amount of your third-party content and you share more of your stuff.

This is how you pull a lot more traffic to your website because now, instead of people just clicking on your blog post, they can click on your video link to YouTube.

Then from YouTube, they can click on the description to go to your site. They can also click on your pictures on Twitter or the link that accompanies your pictures on Facebook. They can click on the info graphics you shared on Pinterest. Whatever the case may be your target audience can find more ways to go to your website because you have a lot more content.

The best part to all of this is that your repurposed content is essentially taking the content that you worked so hard to create and coming up with different versions of them. You don’t have to start from scratch.

You don’t have to research again. You just take material you already have and just convert into a different form. This different form can then be content, which then draws more traffic.

Pump traffic from as many free sources as possible Now that you have figured out your social media top three to five sources of traffic, and you have committed to only sourcing traffic from these places, the next step is to take your repurposed content as well as your regular content and try to get as much traffic from as many free sources as possible.

Please note that repurposing your content is an important step because only until you’ve done that will you be able to go to free sources of traffic. For example, Quora uses a question-and-answer format.

It’s very hard for you to get traffic from Quora if you did not repurpose your content into a series of questions and answers. With that out of the way, try to pump traffic from as many free sources as possible by going to the following places: Quora, Reddit, social media, YouTube and do blog outreach. How does blog outreach work? Do a search for the topic of your blog posts.

You should be able to see all sorts of articles. Now, using a tool like ahrefs.com, you should be able to see the websites thinking to the articles or blog posts that are similar to your content. These third-party sites have published a link to content that is very similar to yours. Just make sure that your content truly blows away this similar content.

There should not even be a comparison. Just by looking at your content, it’s obvious that it is several degrees superior to the similar content. Get the backlinks of that similar content and reach out to those places that link to that similar content to also link to your site. In other words, include your superior content in their list of links or in their blog features of whatever they use to link to content similar to yours.

Please note that this is not easy. It also takes a lot of time. Do blog outreach maybe an hour or two every day. As long as you’re consistent with it, you should be able to see results, but please don’t expect overnight results. That’s just not going to happen. This is a long-term thing. However, if you want to get high-quality search engine traffic, blog outreach must be part of your free traffic daily campaign.

Cross reference your traffic to conversions.

I have some bad news for you. At the end of day, it isn’t traffic that puts food on your table. You might be in a situation where you’re getting a lot of traffic from social media. You might be getting a lot of traffic from Reddit and other places.

That’s great and everything but, ultimately, until and unless those visitors convert into buyers, e-mail or zip code submitters or ad clickers on pay-per-click ads, that traffic is worthless.

I’m sure you already know that. You’re going to have to look at your traffic statistics as well as your most popular content and figure out where your conversations come from.

Which websites send traffic that convert it? Ideally, which content accounts for most of your conversions? You always have to cross reference to conversions because the name of the game here is to create more content that converts and focus more of your promotion efforts on websites that sent the converting traffic. Focus on sources that produce the most conversions

To recap, by this point, you have cut off low-performing social media traffic sources. Also, you are focusing on traffic that pulls in the most traffic and also converts the most traffic. You’re going to be making some hard decisions here.

At the end of the day, you’re just going to focus on the top three or the top five that work. You’re going to zero in on a very narrow range of content topics that work. Drop everything else. You’re going to then optimize the things that work and forget about the things that don’t work.

Remember this is all about maximizing return on effort.