Traffic Sources Based On Experience

There are a ton of different traffic sources out there you can run your affiliate marketing campaigns on and one of the easiest things you can do is completely overwhelm yourself by trying to run campaigns at all of them at the same time. I think it’s really important that you choose a traffic source, test a spread of campaigns on that traffic source, optimize your campaigns, and then scale until you hit a ceiling. If you simply setup campaigns on a bunch of different traffic sources all at once you are going to spread yourself too thin. So, what traffic sources do I suggest focusing on based on your experience as an affiliate marketer?

I’ve broken down your possible experience level into four different levels. Those levels are Freshmen, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior. Here is an explanation of each level and one traffic source I suggest based on that level. Remember, these are simply my suggestions based on my experiences working with my publishers. You should look into different traffic sources on your own, but these are the ones I suggest.

Freshmen (“Newbie”)

There is a pretty large learning curve when you first start affiliate marketing. You will lose money at first and I think it is important that you learn as much as you can while losing as little as possible, which I am sure most people would agree with. The main concepts with any affiliate campaign are setting up, optimizing, and scaling. The traffic source that I think makes this the easiest and has the lowest barrier of entry is 7Search.

Setting up a 7Search campaign is really simple and the minimum deposit to get started is just $25. They have a great keyword tool that makes it easy to find keywords that you can get traffic from. By starting out using a search PPC ad network you are assuring you will get traffic to your affiliate links no matter what (well, as long as you’re spending money). Also, 7Search has a cool feature that will let you blacklist bad performing sources so you can optimize your campaign.

If you’re brand new to affiliate marketing I suggest “getting your feet wet” with 7Search. Once you have some experience setting up a campaign and you have a few profitable 7Search campaigns running then I suggest you give Plenty of Fish Ads a try.

Sophomore

Two of the most “affiliate friendly” ad networks are 7Search and Plenty of Fish (POF). One of the main reasons I like to use both of them is that you can easily create a campaign by direct linking using your affiliate link. Most traffic sources are getting strict and disapproving direct affiliate links, but 7Search and POF welcome them. So, within a few minutes you can have some traffic going to your affiliate link.

With POF Ads you are advertising on the Plenty of Fish dating website. They have millions of users from throughout the world. Before you get started advertising, I suggest signing up at POF.com and taking a look around. You will see banner advertisements throughout the website. By far, the best offers to promote on Plenty of Fish are dating campaigns. Once you’ve taken a look through POF you can sign up for their advertising service at ads.pof.com.

POF Campaign Articles

Plenty of Fish ads use banners to drive traffic to your links. You bid on that traffic using a CPM model. Basically, with CPM you are bidding per 1,000 impressions. It’s a bit different than the PPC model 7Search has, but it’s easy to get the hang of. You want to aim for a 0.1% CTR or as close to it as you can get it. At a 0.1% CTR your CPM bid is essentially a CPC bid.

You can get quite a bit more traffic from POF than 7Search and the quality of the traffic seems to be much better. You can scale your campaigns bigger and make more money as well. POF is a great traffic source for a moderately experienced affiliate marketer. Once you have a grasp of the CPM bidding platform and have some successful POF campaigns going I would suggest doing some research on PPV traffic.

Junior

One type of traffic that I have seen great results with for years now is PPV traffic and the source that I have seen the most consistent results with is LeadImpact. LeadImpact is a PPV network that serves ads through pop ups which are displayed to users who install their adware. I have more information on how PPV works in my LeadImpact review. The reason I like LeadImpact over similar networks is that they are pretty quick to respond to questions, have a moderate minimum deposit, decent traffic volume, and pretty good quality. You can get their traffic to convert and it’s easy to scale not only on LeadImpact, but by copying your campaign over to other PPV networks you can get extra traffic that way as well.

PPV traffic is fun to work with and can be very profitable if done right. You’re paying for every single view and your CPM will end up being a lot more than what you’d pay on POF, but you’re guaranteeing yourself “clicks” and with a good offer or landing page, you can see a great ROI.

Senior (“Super Affiliate”)

If you have mastered the methods listed above then I suggest making way to into the king of traffic, media buying. I have discussed media buying before and although I do not have a lot of experience with it myself, I have helped guide my publishers into producing some very successful media buy campaigns. You can do your own media buy on basically any website, but the network that I suggest for running your initial campaigns through is SiteScout. The minimum deposit to get started is just $500 and they have a very large inventory of websites you can run traffic on using a ton of different banner placements. If you’re at this stage of your affiliate marketing career you should already have done some research on media buying, but I suggest signing up at SiteScout and giving it a try!

Based on your experience in affiliate marketing, those 4 different traffic sources should help get you driving some traffic you will be comfortable with. Each traffic source is a different “traffic method” for the most part. 7Search is Search PPC, POF is considered Social or Banner Display traffic, LeadImpact is PPV or Pop Ups, and SiteScout is specifically Banner Display. Being able to work with a range of traffic sources and methods is what is going to allow you to make the most money possible and the ability to do that is completely dependent on your experience.

So, setup some campaigns, run some traffic, and let’s make some money!