Typically, affiliates will run paid ads to send targeted visitors to a landing page where they collect emails; following up with an email marketing campaign. But what if you don’t have a marketing budget to run paid ads? Can you use your time instead for free lead generation strategies? The answer is yes you can and there’s a few lead generation strategies you can use absolutely free, or at very minimal cost.

Here’s some of my favourites.

Free Leads For Affiliate Marketing – Blogging

Blogging is one of the best ways to generate free leads for affiliate marketing. By creating a lot of content on a website, you can attract the attention of the SERPS (- search engine results pages) with your articles. This is often done by bloggers through creating content which attracts their target audience.

The target audience of a blog is a small “slice” of the marketplace. It’s those people who are most interested in what you’re selling. By finding long tail keywords in your niche, which have low competition on the SERPS, you stand a greater chance of ranking your content. If you manage it you can get free traffic from the search engines. Find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty by using Google’s keyword planner and looking for long chains of keywords within your niche. Then compare the relative competitiveness on Google with a simple keyword phrase search.

Long tail keywords are good for a couple of reasons. They are less difficult to rank on Google for and they are super targeted, usually. This means traffic is more likely to want something specific, whereas short tail keywords are typically more general and therefore less targeted.

Free Leads For Affiliate Marketing – Lead Capture From Your Blog

Of course to get people onto your email list, you need to capture their email address. This can be done with a simple opt in form and a benefit driven giveaway offer. Use Aweber, or some other email autoresponder to collect emails from your website. Make sure there’s a very clear benefit driven offer which will benefit your subscriber if they were to sign up.

Without a clear benefit to signing up, website visitors will be more reluctant to give up their email address and sign up to your list.  So make sure you have something of value to give to your subscribers in the way of information. Good offers might include PDF downloads, video series information, eBooks and webinars, for example. Make it immediately apparent the benefit of your offer. Don’t talk about it’s features but succinctly state what they will get from accessing it.

Ideally use multiple lead capture options on your website. You can use a free plugin which I use called Icegram Engage. This plugin lets you place a drop down banner on your site. Having multiple options to opt in to your email list gives you more opportunity to get more visitors on to your email list. Aweber also gives you multiple options for your forms including popups, drop downs and static forms for your website.

Free Leads For Affiliate Marketing – Quora

Quora.com is a question and answer website where people ask questions and have answers posted by experts in their fields. It’s a great source for traffic to your website or landing page if you have one. With a lot of content on your website, you can use Quora.com to link through to your appropriate content from questions you have answered.

The more questions you answer, the more likely you’ll get traffic coming to your website. You can also set up your Quora profile so that people can see your offer and click through to a website where they can sign up to your offer. Here’s an image of my Quora profile:

Using Facebook To Send Traffic & Collect Leads

Once you have a website or landing page set up with a lead capture form, you can use any number of social media platforms to drive traffic to your form. You can even set up a free website using free web platforms such as Weebly.com to set up your form using Aweber. Here’s a strategy using Facebook. First set up your Facebook profile such that you showcase your lead magnet offer. Here’s an example of one I did to promote my lead magnet from my FB profile page:

Once set up, you can drive traffic by finding people who are in your target audience through joining multiple groups. So for example, if you are selling some kind of Yoga related product, you might want to join Yoga related groups.

You can find groups on Facebook on the left hand column. Just type the keyword of the groups most appropriate for your particular affiliate offer. Join the groups and interact with people, commenting and joining in the chat. With regular interaction in a group, you will over time attract people to your profile picture. You’ll need to put in some consistent effort with this strategy, but it can bring in a nice stream of traffic to your lead generation offer.

YouTube – For Free Leads

YouTube is the second most used search engine on the internet after Google. It has masses of traffic and is less competitive than Google in terms of content. So it makes sense to use YouTube if you’re looking for free leads.

To get traffic and leads from YouTube, you’ll need to be a regular content creator. Create and post videos in your niche on a regular basis over several months. Over time, you can build up your subscriber base and your videos will start to get noticed. As with blogging, video blogging can be a long road, but ultimately you can attain free traffic if you are persistent with this strategy and upload a lot of content.

Link your videos back to your blog and lead capture forms.

Summary

There’s a downside to generating free leads for affiliate marketing. It takes time and a lot of effort to use these tactics and you cannot control your traffic. Even with a lot of work, your traffic will be sporadic. Some days you might get a bunch of leads and the next you might get nothing. In the beginning, using these tactics will be slow and you can easily get demoralised with it, thinking that it might not be working.

Content generation does work and you will start to see traffic after putting some work and commitment in. Stick with it long enough and you’ll start to see passive traffic. If you have traffic coming in from Facebook, YouTube, Quora.com and from the SERPS, it can mount up! This is where it gets quite exciting. Many of my sales have come in through organic traffic from content generation. you just need to stick with the strategy and be patient!

If you’re not so patient, you’re much better off using paid traffic. Send paid advertising campaigns to a landing page and test and measure. For more on this topic checkout how to get leads for affiliate marketing.

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