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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A landing page software, such as Convertri, is well worth the investment if you’re serious about your affiliate marketing business. But you’ll also need an email autoresponder. Aweber offers a free trial period and up to 500 subscribers for free, so it’s a good idea to get an account if you don’t have one. An email autoresponder gives you the ability to place a form on a website or landing page and automate delivery of messages to your subscribers as they enter their details into one of your forms.

How To Get Leads For Affiliate Marketing: Landing Pages Vs. Websites

There’s a few ways you can drive traffic for your affiliate offers. With a blog website, you drive traffic organically from the search engines. With a landing page, you need to source traffic to get people to it. This is often done using paid advertising. Platforms such as Google Adwords, Bing, YouTube, Facebook etc. can be used to build advertising campaigns which send targeted traffic towards your landing pages.

You can then test several landing pages to see which one out performs the others. This is known as split testing and can be easily done with a landing page software such as Convertri. Here’s an example of two similar landing pages which can be split tested to see which one performs the best over say, 1000 visitors on each.

Using a landing page can be a much better way to get leads if you have a marketing budget to drive traffic. It allows you to test and optimise your lead generation very quickly. You can also scale up once you have a good landing page which performs well and gives you cheap leads. If you don’t have a marketing budget, you can create content on a website and drive traffic organically.

You can of course send organic traffic to a landing page too, although organic traffic can’t be turned on and off nor scaled. It can also take some time before your content starts to create organic traffic for you. See also how long does organic traffic take. How long it takes to get traffic to a website will depend on your niche and content.

How To Get Leads For Affiliate Marketing – Organic Traffic

To build organic traffic can take months or even years. Plus much of your traffic won’t even convert into leads either! To get the most out of content creation, you should first identify your perfect target audience.

This is the small section of the online marketplace who would be most interested in your products/service. This is also true when you’re running paid advertising, and sending it to a landing page. Identifying your target audience will save you a heap of wasted time or marketing budget. By getting the right people to your website in the first instance, you increase your chances of them signing up for your offer and becoming a lead.

So if you’re a content creator, this means creating content which will attract your target audience, or “customer avatar”. To do this bloggers will often target long tail keywords which have low SEO difficulty. This gives them more chance to rank their content and get free traffic. In a particular competitive niche, it’s much more difficult to get traffic to your blog for free. So by finding those longer tail keywords and writing articles for them, you have more chance of ranking for those particular searches.

How To Get Leads For Affiliate Marketing – Multiple Opt Ins

Many website owners will place multiple opt in offers on their website, to help encourage more of their visitors to take a particular action, and become a lead. You can place popup opt in forms, static forms, drop downs and other offers on your site.

Include banners which lead visitors to external landing pages. The more offers you have the more likely a visitor will take some action and become a lead. Despite most people feeling than pop ups are annoying, they clearly work for thousands of website owners. Otherwise they wouldn’t use them on their sites!

Here’s a peek inside Aweber’s form generation tool (see image below). You can see there’s many types of forms you can use including popups and drop down forms. There’s also a number of other plugins which you can use to create drop down banners on your website. I use Icegram Engage on this site and you will probably have seen my drop down banner at the top of the screen – offering a free webinar.

How To Get Leads For Affiliate Marketing – eBooks

eBooks are one of the simplest ways to get leads for affiliate marketing. A good eBook should align with your affiliate products in some way and offer huge value to anyone who downloads it. Many bloggers and website owners use ebooks to help them build their email lists into the tens and hundreds of thousands.

To use an eBook on your website, you will first need to create a pdf version of your book and a cover. You can outsource cover design (and even the eBook itself if you wish), using sites such as Fiverr.com or Upwork.com. I used Fiverr.com a few times for the designing of several ebooks.

Here’s an ebook I use to encourage my website visitors to join my email list:

If you click on the book, you’ll be taken to a lead capture page where you can sign up for the free downloadable book.

Use A Valuable Offer

Of course it also helps a great deal if you have a valuable offer to give your website or landing page visitors. With the right offer (and the right target audience), you’ll get more leads, even with less traffic. On my website I offer a bunch of free stuff you can access (related to the niche of online business). Here, you can access a free 90 minute webinar, in which an 8 figure  earning online entrepreneur, (and one of my own personal mentors), explains the best ways to earn online:

Or, access a free video series which explains some of the best online business models you can use, including print on demand, affiliate marketing and direct selling/drop shipping.

Using the right affiliate program for your niche is a massive bonus, especially if the program you promote has a bunch of useful lead magnets which you can use to build your affiliate business. The most lucrative affiliate programs aren’t just the ones which cost the most, but the ones which help you the most in collecting leads and making the sale with their marketing materials.

Landing Page Titles, CTA (Call To Action) & Design

The fastest way to get leads is to pay for them. Set up an advertising campaign on a paid marketing platform using one of the following:

• Google Adwords
• Bing
• Yahoo
• YouTube
• Facebook
• etc.

There’s multiple paid ad platforms you can use to find your target audience and target a well designed offer towards them. Send them to a landing page and collect leads by delivering a valuable offer to their inbox.

Still, this can take some work to get right, and not all offers will convert the same. To make your landing page more efficient, you can test and measure different pages to see which works the best. Focus on the benefits not the features of your offer. Avoid titles and descriptions of what your offer is, and focus instead on what your offer can do for your visitors.

Your visitors only care about one thing: WIIFM – “What’s In It For Me”. A good landing page title describes the meaning of what you’ll get quickly and succinctly.

Cross test landing pages to find the best performing one. Do the same with your advertising campaigns.

Using Social Media Platforms For Lead Gen

You can also find a bunch of free lead generation tactics. These are typically much slower than paid marketing methods but they can work if you are persistent and consistent with them. Organic marketing through blogging is one which has been mentioned already, but you can also use Facebook, Twitter, Quora.com and other social media sites for promotion of your offers.

Here’s one example using Facebook. Set up your Facebook profile to showcase your offer. Place a clear call to action on your profile picture and a link to your offer. Then find Facebook groups where your target audience is likely to be hanging out.

Join those groups and spend some time each day interacting with people in the groups. Don’t spam, but connect with and ask and answer questions in the chat. Over time, and with consistent effort, people will find your Facebook profile from your chat input. They will see your offer and some will sign up. For more on this and other social media strategies for lead generation see this post.

Summary

Lead generation is a good idea for affiliates because it lets them control their traffic. To get traffic is either expensive of time consuming or both. But with your own email list, you have more control. A lead can stay on your list for years too, which isn’t possible on a website. Most website visitors are gone in a few minutes, never to return.

By building an email list, you can connect frequently with your subscribers and build trust too. Most people don’t buy immediately from a website, especially if it’s their first visit. They need multiple point of contact with you before they will buy. These are known as “touch points” and it usually takes between 6-8 touch points before someone will buy from you, depending on your product and niche.

There’s various ways to collect emails and you need both targeted traffic and an enticing offer to be successful. You also need to communicate the benefit of your offer in an enticing way which speaks to the needs of your visitors. Getting to know who your target audience is will help you to do this. See also the customer avatar worksheet pdf.

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