Traffic is an essential resource for making money as an affiliate. Traffic means the visitors or leads you have available to market to. The more traffic you have, the more money you can earn.
In most cases, you want to attract a specific audience online and direct them to a target page, where you either promote an offer or try to build an email list. This is the core principle of traffic generation.
Let's take a deeper look at traffic generation and not only clarify how important traffic is for affiliates, but also what options you have to generate unlimited amounts of traffic online.
How important is traffic for affiliates?
If you want to earn a significant affiliate income, you have to learn how to generate high-quality traffic. Those who struggle to generate traffic also struggle to make money.
Traffic is a necessary resource for online marketing, not just for affiliates. No one on the internet, not even well-known, big brands, would earn money if they didn't generate large amounts of traffic.
No traffic, no money.
In fact, there are unlimited amounts of traffic on the internet. If you don't have any, it's not because there is no traffic, but because you don't know how to generate it. That's exactly why we'll now look at the best traffic strategies that have worked for decades.
Evergreen traffic sources for affiliate marketers
Every affiliate should know the following traffic strategies if they want to promote products successfully. The following sources bring qualified visitors that you can monetize.
- Search engines — combined with a website, search engines are still among the best traffic sources on the internet.
- Video marketing — video is a very powerful and popular medium. It's also great for generating traffic.
- Email marketing — email marketing also belongs to the most effective traffic sources. Billions of emails are sent and received every day.
- Social media — almost every internet user is active on at least one social network. You simply can't ignore this source.
- Paid advertising — investing money in ads is part of every business. Paid ads are the fastest way to generate traffic immediately.
- Communities — using communities to generate traffic is part of my daily routine and that of many other affiliates. This source also brings high-quality visitors.
Let’s look at each source in more detail so you understand how to use them to generate enough traffic for meaningful affiliate income:
1. Search engines
For me, search engines are one of the most important traffic sources for making money as an affiliate. If I had to recommend one traffic source that almost guarantees positive long-term results, it would be search engines.
Nearly all websites receive the majority of their visitors from search engines, especially Google. Websites run by affiliate marketers rely heavily on search engine traffic because they are built this way.
Now, you might think that since AI chatbots are rising and many intent-driven users are switching to AI for instant answers, no one will need search engines anymore.
This is a short-sighted view. I initially thought the same, but there's one critical thing that guarantees AI cannot easily replace search engines: the need to access original, verifiable, and diverse sources of information.
- Direct access to original sources: research papers, government reports, PDFs, and niche websites. AI can reference them but cannot always provide the raw source.
- Multiple perspectives: to verify credibility or explore alternative viewpoints. Search engines let users compare different sources, something AI summaries can't fully replace.
- Real-time or constantly updated data: live news, stock prices, and newly published studies require searching the web directly.
- Context-specific searches: sometimes you need information that is hyper-specific to a local market, industry, or obscure topic that AI models may not have up-to-date knowledge about.
People like to have multiple views on many things, especially when it comes to gaining information. We naturally compare perspectives, weigh evidence, and question credibility before forming conclusions.
This is something AI alone struggles to provide consistently.
In short, AI is an incredible tool for speed, summarization, and guidance, but search engines remain irreplaceable for research, verification, and exploration. They complement each other rather than compete — AI can guide you, but search engines let you dig deeper and find the original answers.
AI can summarize, explain, and even generate content, but it doesn't replace the discovery process itself. Often, you need:
I earn most of my money from visitors on my websites that come from search engines. The advantage is that search engines are now smart enough to understand what users true intent is, what they are really looking for and often show them perfect results.
This means the traffic quality is so high that you can make money with it. Niche sites are especially strong traffic magnets and attract high-quality visitors via search engines. The downside is that you first have to build a website with valuable, useful content.
Search engine traffic is about niche traffic. Generalist websites are dying out. Specialize in niches, and search engines will work best for you.
Search engine marketing works like this, as you can see in the following image:
Read my skeptical and honest article on the future of SEO and whether it's dying. Get a better understanding of what's actually happening and what the future could look like for website owners who rely on search engine traffic. Learn how to protect against the loss of search engine traffic.
2. Video marketing
Video marketing can also generate a lot of high-quality traffic. With YouTube alone, you could reach enough potential buyers using a niche channel and its videos.
Video consumption has skyrocketed in recent years. People love consuming video content for entertainment and education.
Using cidweomarketing for building affiliate trafic in high quality is very simalr to what you do when building traffic using niche sites.
- Find a niche with a strong buyer audience and lucrative products to sell.
- Create niche content that is valuable to viewers and attracts users who match the affiliate offer.
- Publish content on video platforms so that it becomes findable by the target audience.
- Redirect traffic to the affiliate offer using a strong call to action in the video and link.
Success in video marketing lies in the details and practice. Mastering video marketing and getting consistent results takes months. There are no shortcuts. It's about practicing, learning, and improving the strategy.
3. Email marketing
Have you heard people say you can make money at the push of a button? That's exactly what's possible with email marketing. Building your own email list is a must for any online business. Anyone with a big list has a very valuable asset.
Unlike relying on other platforms where you rent your audience for traffic, in email marketing, you own your audience. Your email list is an asset you control — no algorithm changes, platform shutdowns, or policy updates can take it away from you. It's your direct line to people who already trust you and are interested in what you offer.
However, email marketing requires combining it with another traffic source. You first need to build a list of email addresses before you can send emails. People often use traffic from their own website or paid ads for this. Social media is also effective for this purpose.
As soon as you start generating traffic, use an email marketing tool or service and try to get as many leads as possible onto your list. Long term, this effort will definitely pay off!
Use a simple system to build the list.
- Redirect users to a special webpage where they will find the subscription form
- Give them something valuable and relevant in exchange for their subscription
- Make sure they confirm their email address after subscription to ensure you have valid addresses on the list
The user enters their details into the form and, after confirming their email address, is added to the list. From then on, you can send them useful content and also promotional emails.
To avoid burning out your list, apply the 80/20 rule. Send 80% valuable and highly usable emails and only 20% promotional emails. With the latter, you promote products that your list is interested in.
4. Social media
People spend most of their time on social media every day. Whether you like it or not, it's what you'll need to become familiar with if you want to reach many audiences online.
The general rule of thumb for affiliate success is:
Find out where your audience is and present your affiliate offer right where they are.
A simple strategy to generate social media traffic is as follows:
- Identify your target audience: Know who you're speaking to and what content they engage with.
- Create valuable, shareable content: Solve problems, entertain, or educate; content must resonate with your audience.
- Post consistently: Regular posting keeps you visible and builds trust over time. People from your audience see your content regularly and, at some point, start following you if they like your content.
- Use engaging formats: Mix short videos, carousels, images, polls, and stories to maximize reach.
- Optimize for platform discovery: Use relevant hashtags, keywords, and trends.
- Engage actively: Respond to comments, DMs, and engage with other creators to expand reach.
- Include clear CTAs: Always guide viewers to your blog, email list, or offers.
These are the exact steps I take when working with social media. Keep it simple, focus on delivering value to your audience, and engage with them. These are the two key success factors in social media marketing.
You don't need to read 200-page books to learn that.
The most important step is to regularly create and post content for your target audience. That's how traffic on social media is built. However, interacting with the content of others on the same platform can help you become visible and build reach faster.
5. Paid advertising
If you need results fast, paid ads are still the best source for instant visitors, and you can usually influence the quality of the traffic as well.
When starting out, choose smaller advertising platforms instead of the big ones like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. Start with smaller ones and learn how to create campaigns that generate clicks. Then, see what you get from the clicks:
- active users on the target page,
- email subscribers,
- or even sales.
If nothing happens, as is often the case, find out why. Optimize the system, starting with the campaign's targeting. Make sure to filter out people who do not match exactly your ideal criteria. If there is no filtering or targeting on the platform, choose one that does have it.
There are also unreliable advertising providers, so be sure to track the clicks. You want activity on the target page, not just clicks. If there is no activity, change the targeting. If that does not help, change the advertising provider.
Paid ad performance is highly individual. Even when following the same strategies or proven systems, results will vary significantly from person to person. This is because ad performance depends on many variables that are never identical:
- audience targeting,
- budget size,
- offer quality,
- ad creatives,
- timing,
- platform algorithms,
- competition,
- and even external market conditions.
If you want to work with paid ads, my tip is to start with pay-per-click ads. You only pay when someone clicks your ad. That way, you make sure you only pay for results.
If you want to burn money, then paying for impressions is the right choice. That type of advertising is best for building a brand.
6. Communities
I like using communities to generate traffic. There are forums and open or closed communities online where you can participate.
First, you need to define which target audience is relevant for your product, and only then look for a suitable community or group online.
The fastest way is to go to Reddit.com and join the sub-reddits. These are niche communities focused on specific topics. Forget about aggressive advertising after joining, because:
Communities help you build credibility, expertise, and trust. There is no place for spammy ads and links.
Then you interact with other members, help them with your posts, and recommend products if it fits the conversation, or your own content published elsewhere. This traffic source is easy to tap into and brings very high-quality visitors to your target page.
Again, don't take the easy way in any online community by spamming links.
It doesn't work. Your posts will get flagged as spam, and your account will get banned. You must build authority in the community first before you can start promoting, but very slowly and only if relevant to the topic.
Conclusion
Professional affiliate marketers often combine the evergreen traffic methods explained in this article.
This way, there are multiple traffic sources pointing to the same target. This gives you more stable traffic and protects you from losing earnings if a traffic stream dries out.
However, every affiliate should take traffic generation seriously. After all, traffic enables you to earn money. How much you earn depends heavily on the market and the quality of your traffic.
The sad truth is:
Affiliate marketers with lots of traffic make good money, while those without, don't.
Which traffic source makes the most sense for you is your decision. If you want to earn money sustainably, you'll often do well by using your own website or paid ads to generate traffic.
A combination of website and PPC traffic is often my favorite.
You direct paid traffic to specific articles on your site, building credibility and trust. After that, selling or email subscription is far more likely than directing users to the offer after they click on ads.
It's a good idea to combine several traffic sources to create a more stable flow of visitors. That way, you'll still earn money even if one traffic source suddenly disappears for whatever reason.