Is Your Traffic as Hot as This News?

6 March 2023
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Affiliate marketing is tightly linked to news breaks and major events: the affiliate marketing field is full of cases with huge profits at major sporting events. You’ve probably heard about how much money great iGaming offers on the World Cup or e-commerce on the holidays or Black Friday can make.

In our article on event marketing, we also looked at real-time marketing as a promoting approach that combines working with spontaneously occurring traffic and adapting to an evolving context in real time. It’s mostly about hot news and news breaks. News traffic is considered by many affiliates to be of low quality and is bypassed because of restrictions on monetizing the offers and problems with conversion. This type of traffic is also disliked for its cold audience and the additional need to “warm up” users who have only come to satisfy their information hunger. However, let’s not forget about the diversification of traffic sources, and we are eager to explore this new direction, despite the potential difficulties. In this article, we deal with news traffic, teaser wall, their nuances, and features.

Is Your Traffic as Hot as This News?

News traffic as it is

News traffic in affiliate marketing is about making money from users who are addicted to news but don’t have an ad blocker. If we consider the classic affiliate approach, news traffic comprises users who came to the site from teaser ads on teaser walls. 

There is another side to working with hot news traffic — sites created specifically to receive a stream of visitors due to reaching the top of the rankings for situational queries. For instance, an environmental disaster in Ohio or a famous rapper couple breaking up — news sites try to make money as quickly as possible from the news break. 

The purpose of news traffic is different for the webmaster and the affiliate. The webmaster drives search traffic for teaser walls or uses ads designed as news on significant portals and aggregators. The webmaster’s goal is to attract visitors to his news site. And the affiliate buys news traffic to get paid for each click on the ad unit. He publishes ads on all the sites whose audience comes to read the latest news.

Is Your Traffic as Hot as This News?

What is a teaser wall?

The teaser wall in affiliate marketing is an independent site with the most current and intriguing news about celebrities, political events, and serious incidents. Roughly speaking, it is like an ordinary news site that does not publish serious material about the rise in inflation, but articles from the tabloids, which arouse the audience’s keen interest. 

The main difference between a teaser wall and an ordinary news site is that it is full of teasers with different offers. When users read the text, they see advertisements for anything: male enhancement, gadgets, magic diet pills.

Is Your Traffic as Hot as This News?

News content 

The main content of such projects is short news with catchy headlines. They often use clickbait to attract the audience’s attention. For example, the headline leaves an ambiguous hint and provokes the user to click on it to find out more.

The headlines are often created in such a way that the facts are taken out of context. And it turns out that the original enticing idea was really just a play on words. For the owners of teaser walls and regular websites, it is important to interest as many users as possible in order to get a good volume of traffic.

If a user clicks through to the site from a search engine and becomes interested in the content, the likelihood of moving on to the next project in the chain or to the offender’s landing page increases significantly. 

However, it’s hard to imagine that a person will run to the offer after viewing the news, but that’s exactly how this strategy works. News traffic is well monetized by wow-effect offers. Especially if the customer is a person who is unaware of the charms of a marketplace.

Is Your Traffic as Hot as This News?

The specifics of news traffic

  • The main feature of news traffic is the lack of stability. Statistics can change drastically in a short period of time. If an affiliate keeps a close eye on the situation and adds relevant advertising, they can get the traffic before the carriage turns into a pumpkin. 
  • Search engines and social networks are the main sources of visitors to news sites. Competition on Google and Bing is off the charts, so the cream is skimmed off by the project that publishes the hottest news first. 
  • The lifespan of the news is no more than a few days, so during this time, you need to maximize traffic and work on the next hot news items. The more events you manage to cover, the greater the potential reach. Therefore, you need to make sure that you always have copywriters who can create content on short notice. 
  • The buying power depends on the topic of the project. The news resource can be sharpened under different niches and collect leads on thematic offers. For example, if you create a news project for the products of a major smartphone manufacturer and promptly highlight the announcement of new models, it is quite possible to collect pre-orders for affiliate links and earn a percentage of each order.
  • You need to find your segment and work with it on an ongoing basis. If you are going to cover all topics, prepare a minimum of three zeros in dollars. Finding a ready-made template for your website or teaser wall is not a big deal, but it will take a lot of money to support the project. 
  • If you hope to create a website with a regular audience, it is better to abandon the idea. Usually, users who are interested in the news have long made a list of trusted sources and use them on a regular basis. They can get to your site only from the search engines if you can quickly bring the news to the top of the search results.
  • Any source of traffic will work for a teaser wall, but experienced affiliates prefer to buy traffic from the teaser and push ad networks.
  • From a marketing point of view, news traffic is a cold audience. Users who have come to satisfy their information hunger are not interested in any products or services. And if you were able to attract people’s attention with a teaser and get them to click, first you need to “warm up” the interest of the audience with pre-landing pages. And then send them to the offer’s landing page.

Final thoughts

If you’re just about to enter the news niche, ignore the common myth that there’s no money in it and the big aggregators have squeezed everything they can out of it. Affiliates who don’t use cookie-cutter approaches can definitely make money. The main thing is to pay attention to the peculiarities of news traffic and be vigilant — news breaks appear at lightning speed, and you will have to become “the fastest gun in the West” in order to succeed with this source of traffic.

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