You can do affiliate marketing without paid ads and you can be successful at it. Traffic sources for affiliate marketing can either be free or paid.
If you don’t have a fairly large budget to risk on paid ads campaigns, going for free traffic would be your best option.
Paid ads will get you in front of your audience very quickly, but it’s a risky business that needs a great deal of caution.
Free traffic on the other hand is a slow burn, but it can get you a ton of consistent traffic without you needing to pay a dime for ads.
In this guide, I will provide you with the best traffic sources to make money from affiliate marketing without paid ads. Some of them are the free affiliate marketing traffic sources I make use of.
Best Traffic Sources To Earn From Affiliate Marketing Without Paid Ads
1. Use the LeadsLeap platform
Leadsleap is an all-in-one online marketing system with built-in free traffic for its members. The platform has all the tools you need to succeed online as an affiliate marketer and it provides its members a free lifetime membership to access and utilize these tools.
The marketing tools you will get for free on LeadsLeap will cost you over a hundred dollars per month if they were to be purchased separately from other platforms.
There are 4 ways you can get quality traffic and leads for your affiliate offers using LeadsLeap. I will discuss the two ways that get me the best results.
i. Search engine traffic
Leadsleap has a search engine optimized Social Review Directly which search engines like Google love and reviews written via this platform are often ranked high on Google.
To tap into this awesome free traffic source, all you need to do is write a short review on the product you are promoting via Leadsleap Social Review Directory and include your affiliate link to it.
ii. Advertise to LeadsLeap members for free
LeadsLeap is a platform that is used mostly by online business owners who need marketing tools, training, and resources to grow their online business. If you have a Biz opp, software, MMO, or crypto offer to promote, you can advertise to LeadsLeap members for free and earn commissions by doing so.
Note: LeadsLeap has a pro plan that costs $27 per month. This premium plan gives its members some special benefits.
The pro plan is for those who want limitless access to the marketing tools available on the platform, and going pro gives you more free ad privileges.
With the free plan, you can set up 4 free ads to advertise to LeadsLeap members, while you are allowed to set up 10 ads with the pro plan. Also, free traffic is been earned by free members, while pro members get free traffic to their links on complete autopilot.
This method is easier and more effective than classified ads. It’s a great way of doing affiliate marketing with free ads.
2. SEO traffic to your website
You can indeed promote affiliate links without a website, but having a website that generates free search engine traffic is essential for generating passive affiliate commissions without paying for ads.
With a self-hosted WordPress website or blog, you can create and publish quality content that will bring organic traffic from search engines like Google and Microsoft.
There are two ways you can go about it.
i. Create an automated affiliate website with free traffic
This is a much simpler solution, especially for those who don’t like the idea of creating affiliate marketing content. This method involves automatically generating content that can bring in quality organic traffic by ethically turning videos from YouTube into a niche WordPress website.
You don’t need to have any technical skills to do this because there is a type of software designed to build this type of website from scratch to finish.
ii. Create an affiliate marketing blog
This method is great for you if you like to write and even if you don’t know how to write, an AI content writer like Articleforge can help you write search-engine-optimized blog posts very fast.
Getting started with a self-hosted blog is the best approach because it gives you complete control over your business and Bluehost provides quality hosting at a very low price.
But if you don’t have a budget for hosting, you can utilize a free affiliate marketing blog.
Below are a couple of article types that can bring quality traffic to your blog.
Product reviews
You can write honest reviews on products you have made use of or gotten enough information about and urge your audience to purchase if the product is a good one.
How-to-guide
With how-to guides, you write informative posts on how to solve a particular problem and recommend products that can help your readers get the type of results they are looking for easily.
3. Email marketing
Chances are you will never have a reason to run paid ads campaigns if you can build a large email list of an engaged audience. With email marketing, you can provide value and promote offers by sending automated or broadcast emails to your list.
An email-based affiliate marketing business allows you to get in touch with your leads easily and quickly. There are some key things you need to learn if you wish to make the email strategy work for you.
You can learn all you need to know here.
4. Instagram
Instagram is a social media platform that has over 500 million daily active users. The platform makes money from ads marketers pay for to reach this large engaged audience they have to offer. But you can get traffic from Instagram to your affiliate links without paying for ads.
To get organic traffic for affiliate marketing from Instagram, you need to create a page that is centered on a particular niche, post relevant content, grow your following, and encourage your followers to check out the link in your bio.
Your bio link is where you can post affiliate links for free on Instagram. Unfortunately, Instagram does not like to give out much traffic to marketers for free hence they only allow one bio link per account.
This means that you can only promote one offer at a time with your bio.
To promote multiple affiliate links, you need an external tool called a bio link tool. With this tool, you can create a mini page where you can include links to multiple offers and use the link to this page as your bio link.
You can check out the one I make use of here.
5. Pinterest
Pinterest is a social media platform that is an excellent source of free traffic for affiliate marketing.
A large percentage of Pinterest users use Pinterest to get inspiration for products they want to buy and the inbuilt search engine on the platform has made it easy to search for products.
Affiliate marketers can get free traffic from Pinterest by uploading attractive pins that are click-worthy and properly optimized for the Pinterest search engine.
At the time of writing this post, Pinterest allows the posting of affiliate links directly on pins. This means you can get traffic from Pinterest to your affiliate links without a landing page or blog.
This complete guide will help you learn more about affiliate marketing on Pinterest.
6. Quora
Quora is a question-and-answer forum where anyone can ask a question and get an answer from other members of the community.
To promote affiliate offers without ads with Quora traffic, you need to search for popular questions that match your niche and provide excellent answers to them.
Direct promotion of affiliate links is prohibited on Quora. Affiliate links are seen as spam and your account can be suspended or deleted if you include an affiliate link to a product in your answer.
The way around this is to promote your links indirectly by adding the links to content promoting the products on your blog to your answer or by using a simple landing page as a bridge between Quora and the offer.
7. Facebook
Facebook is another awesome social media for affiliate marketing and there are different ways you can promote your affiliate links for free on Facebook.
i. Facebook profile
If there’s a product you are proud of and you feel comfortable sharing it with your friends, your Facebook profile is a good place to post such a link.
Add a little description about the product so your friends have an idea of what the product is about and who needs it.
ii Facebook group
Most Facebook groups I have visited are spammy and full of noise. There are more marketers in there than there are potential buyers. It’s difficult to get the attention of the right audience while promoting offers to these groups.
The best way to earn with affiliate marketing using Facebook groups is to create your own Facebook group, grow it, and seldom post affiliate links within your content.
With your own Facebook group, you can control the activities going on there and post affiliate links to your audience as much as you like.
8. YouTube
Getting traffic from YouTube is undoubtedly one of the best free traffic methods for affiliate marketing that anyone can implement.
Unlike some other social media platforms, you can get lots of quality traffic to your links with a small number of subscribers.
YouTube has no issues with the posting of naked affiliate links directly on the platform. It’s generous with free traffic and allows you to post a ton of links in the video description of the videos you post.
9. TikTok
TikTok traffic has exploded over the years and it even got more traffic than Google in 2021. You can leverage the massive traffic that TikTok has to offer for the promotion of affiliate links for free.
The platform is a video-sharing social media like YouTube and you may not like the idea of using it if you wish to engage in faceless affiliate links promotion.
The good news is that you can achieve success on TikTok without doing any kind of video that requires you to go in front of a camera. You can learn more about faceless TikTok methods.
Conclusion
You can be a successful affiliate marketer without paid ads, but if you have the budget and knowledge to set up successful paid ads campaigns, paid ads can get you results very fast.
All the traffic sources discussed are quality traffic sources for free traffic but don’t try and use all of them at once. Pick one or a handful of them and put in the work till you see results.
