How to transform a struggling affiliate site into a revenue generating machine with better website traffic.

If you are spending hours on content for your affiliate site, but not seeing a return on your investment, you might be ready to throw in the towel. While lack of success is not uncommon, don’t give up just yet. Your content may be high quality, but it might not be attracting the right audience to generate revenue. You can drive better website traffic to your site and increase conversions.

Your goal needs to be to attract consumers actively seeking the product or service you are promoting. Otherwise known as targeting consumers near the end of the buyer journey or bottom of the funnel, building content for people who are “ready to buy” leads to more conversions. In affiliate marketing, the more conversions you generate the more money you earn.

Here are four ways to begin attracting better website traffic to your affiliate site.

1. Create content around commercial intent keywords

In the past, you might have targeted high volume keywords or long-tail keywords that were easy to rank for. While building content around these keywords may have gotten your first page ranking, the visitors you were attracting may not be ready to make a purchase or take an action.

High volume keywords tend to be broad or general. Someone who searches using these terms is probably at the very beginning of their buyer journey. They’re just gathering information about a topic versus someone who is in market.

You could be generating tons of traffic, but if all your visitors are in the information stage, you’re not going to generate many conversions.

To start driving more conversions, you’ll need to target keywords that buyers are using. That includes keywords like:

• Discount
• Sale
• Best
• Vs
• And more

When it comes to small loans, commercial or buyer intent keywords can be queries like:

• Online payday loan direct lender
• How to apply for small loans
• How to find a small loan lender
• How much do small loans cost
• How to get approved for small loans

Once you start targeting commercial intent keywords, you might see a traffic trends go flat or even decline. These keywords often have fewer searches, but you should also see conversions rise and profits with them. The Google keyword tool is a free tool to help identify these terms. A good paid-for tool is SEMRush.

2. Start paying close attention to your analytics

Start tracking and measuring your site performance if you aren’t already. You can use Google Analytics or the free version of Moz to track top keywords. Track where you’re ranking and make sure that competitors aren’t stealing your market share.

If you do notice that you’ve lost rankings for top keywords, study your competition and determine what you need to do to increase your rank whether that’s updating the length of your copy, changing your keyword usage or altering your meta data.

3. Optimize ad placements

Use a heat map to identify what content and places your audience is clicking. Make sure to place ads or offers where your users click and where their eyes go. The top corners of your page are the most important placements of your site, so make sure you use these areas wisely.

You can also use CTR data to determine what content your audience is clicking on most from the SERP or from the home page of your site. Place ads or offers on these popular pages to convert more visitors.

4. Use content marketing

Paid content marketing campaigns tend to drive top of funnel traffic, but if you’re writing the right articles around commercial queries, a small content marketing campaign can drive more traffic to the right pages of your site. Platforms like Outbrain can help you drive traffic to your blog posts.

There are free content marketing strategies as well. Quora is eating up top placements on the SERP. Users post questions that anyone can answer. Look for your commercial intent queries on Quora. If they exist, answer the questions and link back to your site.

Summary

Are you driving better website traffic to your affiliate site, but still not generating money? It might be the ads or offers you’re promoting. Learn more about the ArrowShade affiliate network, and how we can help boost your affiliate earnings.