How to Send Traffic to Offers with Bite-Sized Affiliate Marketing
You cannot sell anything unless people know it is there. This goes for affiliate products as well as your own. So, in order to make affiliate marketing commissions, you need to show your promotions to someone. You do that by “sending traffic” as it is called, and here we’ll discuss the power and profit potential of bite-sized affiliate marketing.
First, let’s define what I am referring to as bite-sized affiliate marketing:
Bite-sized affiliate marketing is an approach to affiliate marketing that focuses on small, easily consumable pieces of content that promote affiliate products or services. This strategy is designed to appeal to busy consumers who prefer short, quick information and offers. The goal is to engage and convert customers through concise, impactful content that directs them to make a purchase or take action. Key elements of bite-sized affiliate marketing include:
- Short-Form Content: Using brief and focused content formats such as social media posts, videos, or blog snippets that highlight the benefits of a product or service.
- Visuals: Incorporating eye-catching images or graphics to grab the attention of the audience quickly and enhance the message.
- Clear Calls to Action (CTA): Directing viewers to take specific actions, such as clicking on an affiliate link or making a purchase.
- Targeted Messaging: Creating content tailored to the interests and preferences of a specific audience segment, making the promotions more relevant and appealing.
- Consistent Posting: Regularly sharing bite-sized content to maintain audience engagement and keep affiliate products top of mind.
- Mobile Optimization: Ensuring that content is optimized for mobile devices, as many people consume content on their phones and tablets.
- Tracking and Analytics: Monitoring the performance of bite-sized content and affiliate links to assess effectiveness and optimize strategies.
By focusing on delivering affiliate promotions in small, digestible formats, bite-sized affiliate marketing can effectively capture the attention of modern consumers and drive conversions.
Whether you only have a little spare time per day, or affiliate marketing is just a side-hustle, you must spend time sending traffic to your offers, preferably daily.
To do this every day, planning is crucial. This is especially if you only have small time-bites during the day. And you also want to do other things with your affiliate marketing business. So, let us look at how best to plan this, where to send your traffic and what means you can use to get the job done.
Planning Gets the Job Done in the Least Amount of Time
Imagine a plot of land around a newly built house. There is nothing on it right now. Just raw soil. Your job is to turn it into a beautiful garden with trees, flowers, bushes, a deck and a lawn. You close your eyes and pick a task at random. You picked “lawn,” great.
So, you sow grass seeds all over the plot. Next, you pick a new task at random. Trees. Perfect. You dig a few holes in your freshly sown area thereby wasting some of the expensive seeds and you plant the trees.
Next, you sow flowers and plant bushes. This looks great. Now what? Ah, the deck. In front of the house would be a great spot for a deck. But oops! One of the trees has to be removed and the flowers must be dug up again. And now it all looks like a chaotic mess.
It will take a long time now to make this look like a pretty garden. Why? Because you started by doing, not by planning. Planning is important to get things as right as they can be from the beginning. And this will save you time.
When you set out to plan your traffic, choose one method only. You can either do short videos, write short articles or use Pinterest. Only one of them. Not all three. Which of those can you imagine yourself doing daily?
It’s okay that you do not know much about that traffic source yet. And that you have never used it before. Once you have made up your mind, you can find tutorials and get better daily at using your chosen traffic source. Before you start planning, you need to decide where to send your traffic.
Where to Send Your Traffic
Maybe you think this is obvious. You want to make money by promoting an affiliate product. Obviously, you send traffic to the offer, right? Maybe. Maybe there is a better place.
When you create content, whether a video, an article or a pin on Pinterest, and you send it to your offer, a visitor will see this offer.
He will either buy it or not buy it.
If he chooses not to buy, that is it. You have lost your chance to make the commission. But what if you could contact him again and tell him more about the product? Maybe what he saw first just did not catch his interest.
Now that you tell him more, he is starting to think. “Hmmm… Maybe I should go back and check this again.” He returns, but once again he decides to leave empty-handed. So you send him another email. This time he is passionate about what you have to say.
He goes back and buys your affiliate product. If you send traffic to a spot where you can gather the name and email address of your visitor, that visitor is not lost if he does not buy on his first visit.
Your best choice would therefore be to send traffic to that place. That takes some planning of its own. Because you would need to give people a reason to sign up for your email list. That reason often comes in form of a free gift. The gift can be a short eBook, a checklist, a video, a cheat sheet, a spreadsheet…
Anything short that can help your visitor, and which is also related to the product you are promoting. You will thus need to plan this gift, plan a series of welcome emails to go out, get an autoresponder service (this one is my favorite [your affiliate link]) and build this funnel first. Then you can go on to send traffic to your free gift or to your affiliate products, if you decide not to create an email list.
Traffic from Short Videos
If you like to create videos, short videos are perfect for bite-sized affiliate marketing. They take the shortest amount of time to script, create, edit and share. Plus, they get a lot more views, often, than longer videos. Consumers love short videos because they can flip through them and consume a lot.
You can make the short videos (vertical, by the way) in three ways:
- You can record them.
- You can use a text to video service.
- You can create them manually with pictures and text on Canva.
For all three methods, you can choose to let your channel be faceless or you can show your face. Creating a video takes four steps:
- Scripting (making a story board).
- Recording or creating it.
- Editing the video.
- Sharing it with a good title and description.
You can share those videos on several platforms for free…
- YouTube, under 60 seconds marked as #shorts
- TikTok
While you can use the same video in all those places, pick one media as your main one, and use a structure that work best for this media.
There are subtle differences between them.
Traffic from Short Articles
What if you could write an article in 15 minutes? If you aim for short, you can. Just do an atomic article (under 300 words) which you can use on Medium, LinkedIn, on Twitter or Bluesky. Once again, you must plan this.
Come up with the topic in one time-bite. Outline in another. Write in a third. Edit in a fourth. Publish in a fifth. For a short article like this, you need to focus on one small part of the problem at a time.
For example, if you have noticed that your audience struggle with balcony gardening during the hard winters. Then one part of the problem is moving the plants indoors. Another part can be isolating the balcony. A third part can be having the wrong plants.
Make the part of the problem atomic. As small as possible. And then add three minor sub-points and a conclusion. This will give you five parts of the atomic article, which roughly corresponds to 50 words for each area. With an outline, you can quickly write 50 words at a time, and perhaps even the whole article in a 15-minute timeslot.
With practice, you can even combine several parts in each timeslot. Maybe it will be coming up with the topic and outlining it, both within 15 minutes. Maybe you can edit and publish in one 15-minute timeslot.
Short reads are popular on those platforms. You can get lots of free traffic either to your opt-in form or affiliate products this way. And you can share the same atomic article on Medium, LinkedIn and a personal blog. But let us move on the perhaps the best traffic source of them all, depending on your niche.
The Perfect Bite-Sized Traffic Source
Pinterest is perfect for affiliate traffic. By design, that platform wants its users to leave. They love great pins that inspire users to click the link and visit a blog or article. Plus, it is easy to split this task into several small ones. Sadly, Pinterest does not work for all niches.
You can easily find out if it works for yours, though. Since Pinterest is also a search engine, you can do a search for a keyword, a word that symbolizes your niche. If you get fitting results, you will likely be successful when you use Pinterest.
You should get a good course about Pinterest as soon as possible. This is a powerful platform, but it has traps. There are things you must not do, and they do not always tell you about them.
Marketers who have pinned (which the activity is called when people share on Pinterest) for years, know these traps and can share them in courses. (use your affiliate link here) Basically, it all comes down to this system:
1. Create a Pinterest business account for your chosen topic and audience.
2. Pick the spot you want to send traffic to.
3. Create a few boards about topics people search for on Pinterest.
4. Create a vertical image on Canva (your affiliate link). Use their handy Pinterest template.
5. Share the image on one of your Pinterest boards with a headline, a description and a link.
6. Do this daily.
This simple system works. You do not need to do more than this the way Pinterest works right now. You do not need to follow others to get followers back. This system will work even without any followers at all. Make sure to read the rules though so you do not get your account banned.
Keep Doing What You Are Doing
Once you find a traffic system that works for you, keep using it. Use it every day, preferably. And in case you wonder why you cannot spread out right away and go all in on all the traffic sources, here is why. It will also explain why you should keep doing what you are doing to grow your online business.
Imagine a small stone lying outside. A raindrop hits the stone. What happens? Nothing much. The raindrop slides down the rounded corners and reaches the ground. End of story.
Now, take the same stone and let it lie there under falling rain drops for centuries. What happens now? One drop alone does nothing. But when it keeps dripping, eventually, the water will create a hole in the stone.
Can you imagine what would happen if you moved the rain around? In other words, if you focused on all these traffic methods to begin with. If you moved the rain to fall in seven different places, it would take seven times as long for the hole in the stone to appear.
Six times out of seven, the rain would just fall to the ground. Only one time out of seven, it would hit the stone. This is why you should start with one traffic source, use it daily and once this runs smoothly and you have the energy, you can start a second.
I’m bestselling USA Today and Wall Street Journal author, publisher, and entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and my goal is to connect with you if you have more than just a passing interest in getting started with an online business. I most recently released Really Simple SEO Tips and Keywords for Beginners and this is an excellent place to begin. Please take a look while it’s still at its introductory pricing.
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