It’s often said that all traffic is good traffic and the best way to generate income from affiliate marketing is simply generating as much traffic for your website or offer as possible. There is some truth in this statement. However, in reality: “all targeted traffic is good traffic and the key to generating income from affiliate marketing”.

Understanding the difference between targeted and untargeted traffic and the relationship of both types of traffic and affiliate profits is important in order to maximize your efforts.

Traffic is considered targeted if they have, in some way, pre-qualified themselves to be at your website.  This could be by clicking on a banner ad, finding you through a search engine, or even through an online newsletter.  Targeted traffic consists of individuals that are not only interested in your niche, but have already taken action to prove this.

An example of untargeted traffic would be a viewer that saw your ad or your website under circumstances in which they have not pre-qualified themselves. If you are using Pay to Click advertising, those who click on your ad do so because they are being paid for doing it.

To further help you understand the difference let’s say you have a website about building bird houses. Would you rather have 100 visitors who were searching on Google for a website about ways to build bird houses, or 1000 visitors that were being paid to visit your website?

The traffic from Google is much higher quality because these visitors have already pre-qualified themselves by taking the first step (which was doing a search with Google).  Higher quality traffic leads to a better conversion rate for your affiliate sales.

If your website has a good content on it, then readers who are genuinely interested in it are much more likely to share it with others using social mediums such as Facebook and Twitter. Targeted traffic has sort of a domino effect in that it will not only increase your conversions, it can also lead to even more traffic which can lead to more backlinks to your site and more direct traffic without you having to do any additional work.

On the other hand, untargeted traffic is not personally invested in your content.  Since they do not really care about your topic or niche, they are much less likely to share it with others, and  will likely not add any additional value to your website.

Understanding the relationship between targeted traffic and generating sales is one of the keys to success as an affiliate marketer. Now that you understand the difference you can direct your marketing toward targeted traffic, instead of being disappointed with a lot of
untargeted traffic.


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Filed under: Affiliate Marketing • Home Business • Internet Home Business • Internet Marketing

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