To get to the heart of the question, you have to ask a few…
What is a super affiliate? It's an affiliate for any product that drives a lot of sales. How do they drive a lot of sales? They send a lot of quality traffic through their affiliate links. How do they get a lot of traffic? Aha! That's the right question.
Affiliates only get a portion of the sale – so they have to obtain their traffic very cheaply. Usually the site actually selling the product can afford to pay more for their traffic because they have more margin to work with. The affiliate has to get the traffic, pass it over to the sponsor, and wait for a conversion.
This need for cheap traffic is why most affiliates play the SEO game. It's a tricky game, some people get burned every day, and some people make it big. But it's not necessarily how super-affiliates think.
Super-affiliates are usually more creative in obtaining traffic than just SEO. They sprinkle in some strategic pay-per-click campaigns. They send out email – either list rentals or spam. They forge partnerships. They make creative functionality that attracts links and visitors. The more lucrative affiliates will actually advertise on the radio or in newspapers.
Any solid business knows to have more than one source of income. Any good investor knows to diversify the portfolio. Any good strategy for bringing traffic to your web site should include more than just SEO or pay-per-click. Most of these strategies listed below can be tested very cheaply.
Get some traffic!
SEO Pay-per-click
Email (opt-in or spam)
Feeds/RSS (froogle, etc…)
Other paid advertising (myspace, etc…)
Partnerships
Newspaper ads
Radio
Labels: online marketing