In this review I will be sharing with you 5 of the best free traffic sources for affiliate marketing leads & sales. They are platforms that I personally use every day so I’m happy to recommend them to you because I know they get results.
If you are starting your journey on a tight budget like I initially did then these traffic sources will serve you well. With all of these platforms you can earn affiliate commissions by promoting them even as a free member. Some are one off commissions & others are monthly recurring commissions.
A strategy that I teach my Students is always use a percentage of your promotion to promote traffic sites as every affiliate marketer is always looking for more traffic. Then when some commissions come in reinvest your profits into upgrading.
Then you will earn higher commissions from your referrals, get more benefits & be able to reach a larger audience promoting your offers. This is the key to success, having offers that are high converting & putting those offers in front of more & more prospects every month.
Herculist Review
Herculist Plus – Probably the fastest growing member database of all traffic sites as of writing this post, it has been very popular among Internet marketers and online business owners since 1998. Herculist Plus is a very new and much improved version of Herculist that offers the same great features as the original, but includes many great improvements that will help get the members even more targeted traffic to their offers and earn commissions from their promotions.
As of writing this post Herculist is receiving over 40% of Tier 1 traffic and the members includes buyers.
How do I know it includes buyers? Because I have referred 116 free members & 16 of those have upgraded to a Gold membership. So just from my small statistics roughly 1 in 8 are buyers which is extremely high for a traffic site of this nature with 348,000 members & growing daily.
New feature! HercuMail is the latest feature that has been added to this monster traffic source. It’s a genius way to ensure your offers are seen & your safelist mails don’t go into your prospects Promotions or Spam folders. They have created their own in house inbox that every member is directed to when they login to the site.
Click play on my “Best Free Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing” video below for more details on how HercuMail can work for you.
Herculist Plus has 3 different membership offers: Free, Pro and Gold.
You can stay forever free if you wish to do so, there isn’t any pressure for you to upgrade. The Pro and Gold memberships can be purchased (auto-billed) on a monthly or yearly membership. There is also the option to purchase a lifetime Gold membership inside the members area, which I highly recommend.
I started out as a free member then earned some affiliate commissions (25% as a free member) from promoting the site & reinvested my profits to go Pro & then Gold. The Gold Lifetime membership (currently at $49.50) is a one off payment & not a monthly recurring one.
How Does Herculist Plus Actually Work?
The platform offers several different free and paid ways to advertise your offer. Here’s a breakdown of what you’ll get:
Ad Mailers (Safelist Mailer) – As a free member you can email your offer daily to 1,000 random Herculist Plus members. Pro members can send their ad to the entire database of over 280,000 people every other day and Gold members can email every single day to the full entire member database. As of writing this post Herculist Plus is attracting 10,000 new members every month.
Prime Ads – With Prime Ads you’ll get your offer displayed on the very best “Prime” areas of the Herculist Plus website. This gives you a lot more exposure than for instance text links or banner ads.
The Zone – You can receive instant traffic to your offer by surfing for credits in “The Zone”. It works like other traffic exchanges though you’ll get a shorter time limit depending on your membership level.
HercuBlurb – Get massive traffic by creating and submitting large web based ads to HercuBlurb.
MonsterBlurb – Create your own customised MonsterBlurb splash page. Free and Pro members can have 1 active MonsterBlurb while Gold members can have 10.
Login Ads – With this strategy your ad is seen by every single member who logs into the Herculist membership area. It’s targeted advertising because members that login are active & engaged & serious about earning online.
Solo Ad Specials – Herculist Plus offers Solo Ad Specials where you can send your email solo ad to 25,000+ people who have purchased products and services recently. Great value as you are promoting to a “buyers list”.
Special Advertising Deals – Inside of your Herculist Plus membership area you’ll find really special advertising deals at a really affordable price. Great deals for those on a tight advertising budget & who want to promote to buyers.
I especially like the new video tutorial they provide inside the members area. It’s a 30 minute long video that explains everything you need to know about using Herculist Plus, also how to get the most out of all the advertising tools that are available to you. This helps new members get quickly into action & get results rather than be overwhelmed & procrastinate or not take any action at all.
If you are looking for an affordable way to promote your offers to a fast growing audience including Tier 1 traffic & buyers then I recommend Herculist Plus. Take advantage of the affiliate programme & you can even earn affiliate commissions from your referrals traffic purchases.
Click here to join Herculist Plus, it’s free!
Free Advertising For You Review
FreeAdvertisingForYou (FAFY) – This platform is one of my favourite traffic sites for generating leads & sales. As of writing this post you will be receiving 75% of a combination of Tier 1 & 2 traffic that includes buyers. Jason Wise is the owner & he is a very successful affiliate marketer so he understands your needs as a member helping you to build your online business.
Click play on my “Best Free Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing” video below where I cover the 10 free advertising methods you’ll get with FAFY.
Let me share with you 3 of the huge benefits of joining FAFY as a free member.
1) You are immediately given $300 of free advertising so you can start receiving traffic as soon as your ads are set up. It’s completely beginner friendly & Jason has personally created video tutorials to show you how to set up each of the 10 advertising methods.
2) Upgade to Pro Membership at no cost. All you have to do is follow Jason’s instructions, surf the site & once you achieve Pro status you are Pro for life. This gives you more benefits & more traffic to generate leads & sales faster.
3) Sign up for the twice weekly Newsletter Promo Code. Within the newsletter, which is emailed out into your inbox on Tuesdays & Saturdays, is a Promo Code that gives you credits that you can exchange for traffic. Sometimes I use mine immediately or I may let my credits build up & use them for more targeted traffic. They can be used for each of the 10 advertising methods such as banner ads, login ads, solo ads etc.
Click play on my “Best Free Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing” video below to see how this works & how you can get automated 24/7 traffic without surfing the FAFY site.
Here are some more benefits to being a FAFY member.
When you log in for 30 consecutive days you’ll get 246,000 ad credits, 1 x Sign In Sponsor Ad (these really work well) & 100 full page ads.
Earn Daily, Weekly and Monthly Prizes.
They have a 1K Club (for active members) which gets you even more traffic & benefits.
A Splash Page Builder.
Earn affiliate commissions referring others to FAFY even as a free member.
Option to transfer credits to your referrals to help them succeed faster.
Excellent support from Jason Wise the owner. He replies to all his members personally.
Jason regularly has some amazing deals.
FAFY has 2 paid upgrade options with it’s Gold & Diamond memberships. These are one off payments to upgrade & not monthly recurring payments. Jason will occasionally run a special discounted offer for you to upgrade when you login. Upgrading is optional & you can stay a free member for life if you choose to do so.
Click here to set up your free account. I use FAFY everyday & can recommend it as one of my best free traffic sources for affiliate marketing leads & sales.
Wealthy Affiliate Review
Wealthy Affiliate is my next free recommendation as it comes with free 8 figure earner training, huge community support from 1,000’s of extremely experienced affiliate marketers & it can be used to succeed in any niche. You have plenty of options here, especially suited for beginners. Set up a blog or blogs, or you can create websites in any niche or multiple niches to earn affiliate commissions from.
The 8 figure earner training will teach you how to get ranked in the top search engines, sell known branded products from your site & you can build your own email list/customer database plus such a lot more. Wealthy Affiliate has members earning everything from a part time monthly extra income to 7 figures a year & everything in between.
A platform that is suited perfectly to your own individual needs. They also have a very lucrative affiliate programme which includes a chance to get an all expenses paid trip to their annual convention in Las Vegas & meet the owners (Kyle & Carson) plus meet WA’s top earners.
Just referring 2 Pro members will get you your WA membership for free. It’s a great way to help people earn a living through affiliate marketing & earn a growing monthly recurring income yourself.
How Does Wealthy Affiliate Help Me Earn Money? – It’s a training course & community that promises to teach you how to make money online with affiliate marketing. The image below is from their free training on how they teach you to earn.

I really like the way that the owners Kyle & Carson are hands on in both the community & delivering some of the training content. The step by step system, which is perfect for beginners, starts with 10 tutorials to set up your first niche site or blog. These are the training tutorials that I initially followed to learn how to set up this blog that you are reading now.
I like that they cater to the different learning styles. So each training module has both written content with images & a video tutorial to ensure your learning is easy & simple to follow & apply whatever your learning style maybe.
Click play on my “Best Free Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing” video below where I take you into the Wealthy Affiliate members area & show you the quality of training you’ll receive, even as a free member. These same tutorials apply to setting up either a niche website or a blog.
Choosing A Niche – A niche is the type of business you want to get into and can be anything you have a passion for or have vast knowledge about as you will be creating lots of content around it. You’ll enjoy writing about it & it will be a lot more enjoyable if you know a great deal about that subject.
As an example, I am in the make money online niche which I have a passion for & therefore I can share the knowledge & skills I’ve learned on this blog. My full time job is a swim teacher, so at some point in the future I’m considering a niche website related to teaching people how to learn to swim & products that will help people to become more improved swimmers.
Wealthy Affiliate provides a free training on how to find a niche & it will also give you some great tips & techniques to come up with your own niche ideas. The options are endless & there are literally 1,000’s of niches to choose from.
Building Your Website – Now that you have now chosen your niche, what happens next? You will now be building your website which will be the foundation of your new business venture. This is the stage where a lot of people can get scared (don’t worry we all go through this phase) & think “I don’t have any technical skills” so how am I going to build a website that will make me money.
Wealthy Affiliate will hold your hand every single step of the way. The training tutorial inside the free members area shows you how to create your site in just 3 minutes.
Driving Traffic To You Website – An online business isn’t a business without traffic (visitors) & consistent traffic is the only way to build a successful online business. 2 of the largest traffic driving sources behind getting traffic online are Search Engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo. Plus the top social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Tik Tok & Twitter etc. WA is going to teach you how to drive both free & paid traffic to your site & you’ll choose the traffic sources you enjoy working with the most.
Making Your Money – If you have followed me up to here you now have your niche, your website, and your traffic sources & now we’ll discuss the products your customers are going to buy. Did you know that there are well over 500,000,000 products that you can sell and promote as an affiliate marketer online?
These are products that will not just earn you one off commissions but also monthly recurring commissions. Products in a variety of price ranges from low to high ticket commissions.
Let’s not forget email marketing! WA will teach you how to follow up with automated email messages & broadcast messages to boost your sales. Every top Fortune 500 company uses email marketing, it’s one of the easiest ways to earn an income online when you learn how to do it correctly.
In the WA members area there is a superb tool you get access to where you can search for affiliate programmes & products within your niche. It will literally bring you up 1,000’s of options for you to choose from, I was amazed at how powerful & time saving this tool is.
So as you can see from this short review, Wealthy Affiliate is not only a great free traffic source but opens up the doors for you to build a long term & successful business online. The Premium membership will take your affiliate marketing business to a whole new level. I will be writing a more detailed blog post to review WA & in that post I’ll cover what benefits you’ll get as a Premium member.
Click here to join Wealthy Affiliate for free. I personally use the platform myself & I’m a very happy member. I 100% recommend that you add this platform to both your portfolio of free traffic sources & income streams & add some automation to your affiliate marketing business.
Traffic Ad Bar Review
Traffic Ad Bar is my next recommendation as one of the best free traffic sources for affiliate marketing leads & sales. There are multiple reasons why I have been using this traffic exchange for some time now. I started as a free member & when I earned some affiliate commissions I upgraded to receive more traffic.
Traffic Ad Bar can be forever free & you can get great results if you choose to remain a free member. The first benefit they promote is that you’ll generate up to 1,022 visitors to your website every 3 days absolutely free of charge. It’s worth signing up just for getting those visitors to your offers alone!
Click play on my “Best Free Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing” video below to see the 5 main reasons I joined & how Traffic Ad Bar works.
What Exactly Is Traffic Ad Bar? (TAB)
Traffic Ad Bar (TAB) is not like any other traditional traffic exchange where you surf for credits all day & your traffic stops when you immediately run out of credits. With TAB you will get targeted traffic (includes Tier 1 & buyers) coming to your website for the next 3 months for the surfing that you’ll do today.
Nice automated concept! Traffic Ad Bar advertises your website throughout their own advertising network on 1,000’s of external websites, traffic exchanges, social media sites, YouTube & the top search engines such as Google & Bing. This is really appealing as you are leveraging your offers to a huge audience all over the world from just one site & getting some automation thrown in too!
How Does Traffic Ad Bar Actually Work?
You have to click on & watch other members ads (known as surfing) to get traffic to your own website. This is done by surfing for points. The more points you accumulate then the higher you will be on the “Level Ladder” then this automates more traffic that you’ll receive internally from the TAB members & externally all over the internet. There is a great bonus incentive to inspire you to surf for longer. For every 25 sites you surf you will get bonus hits and points to get even more traffic to your offer.
Besides surfing for points you can also earn points by referring new members to Traffic Ad Bar. Plus even if you are a Free member you’ll earn monthly recurring commissions if any of your referrals decide to upgrade at any time. Additional points can be earned by adding the “Ad Bar” to your own website and by clicking on the ad links in the “Daily Update Email”.
It’s really a win-win situation, the more points you accumulate the more traffic you’ll receive to the offers you are promoting in TAB. Banner advertising is also available if you are an upgraded Pro or Platinum member, a great way to generate even more traffic.
What Is The “Level Ladder?”
The Traffic Ad Bar “Level Ladder” has 17 levels & every new member regardless of their membership level starts at Level 1 (the bottom). Over time you work your way up to Level 17 (the top). The “Level Ladder” resets every 3 days according to the amount of points Traffic Ad Bar members have gained over the previous 3 days.
Your goal is to generate as many points as possible to climb the ladder. The higher your website is on the ladder then in turn the more points you receive and the more traffic you will get. By referring others to TAB you’ll get extra points from their surfing activity. So it’s in your best interest to promote TAB, get some referrals & earn some passive traffic.
Every single member who achieves Level 10 gets 1,022 visitors every 3 days. To get the maximum benefit from using Traffic Ad Bar you’ll need to generate enough points so that your website is at least on Level 10 or above.
I’ve been a very happy Traffic Ad Bar member for 2 years & recommend it as one of the best free traffic sources for affiliate marketing leads & sales. It’s beginner friendly with some great features & it’s stood the test of time for the last 10 years.
Click here to join Traffic Ad Bar, it’s free!
Start A YouTube Channel – It’s Free!
YouTube is my final best free traffic source for affiliate marketing leads & sales. As a YouTube creator you can start for free, create published content, automate your leads & sales 24/7, brand yourself, build an email list & leverage your content plus much more. Let’s take a look at some of those benefits individually.
Click here to visit my YouTube channel.
Automation – The image below is a screenshot from the Analytics in my YouTube Studio. You’ll see that I’ve had nearly 300 hours of “Watch time” over a monthly period. This is the key to having an automated business where you can be at your job (I’m a swim teacher), sleeping or spending time with family/friends etc & still generate leads & sales.

Leverage – Your videos can be used to add value to your blog post. You can send them out to your email list to show progress & proof of results. You can add them to your Twitter or social media account to reach a new & larger audience. The options you have are endless, create one piece of content & leverage it out to reach a bigger audience.
Search Engine Ranking – Seen as YouTube is owned by Google then Google are keen to rank your videos to earn themselves more revenue from YouTube ads. Not only can you rank on Page 1 of Google but you can also rank on Page 1 of Bing & Yahoo (the next 2 most visited search engines). This will boost your views, watch time, increase leads/sales & generate you more subscribers. See the screenshot below with 2 of my EasyCash4Ads review videos ranking in the top 2 positions for a review.

TubeBuddy is a free software tool that I use to help with my search engine optimisation & help to rank my videos at the top of YouTube & the top 3 search engines. TubeBuddy has been a valuable asset in helping me build my channel & I also use it to create attractive thumbnails to increase my click through rate.
If you have any questions on any of these free traffic sources then please leave them in the comments below. I personally use each one every single day & they have all contributed in helping me build a solid & growing affiliate marketing business.
To contact me personally here is my personal email address: barrycross1961@gmail.com
Related Posts You Might Like
Mailer Gold Safelist Review https://barrycrossonline.com/mailer-gold-review/
How To Make Money With Warrior Plus https://barrycrossonline.com/how-to-make-money-with-warrior-plus/
***Affiliate Disclosure***
I earn money by participating in affiliate programmes. Many of the links on this blog earn me affiliate commissions. This means I earn money whenever you purchase a product that I link to. When you see links on this blog, please assume that they are affiliate links. At the same time I have to say that my core goal is to always recommend useful and valuable resources and content that empowers and educates affiliate marketers to make money online. Thanks, Barry Cross.
Hi Barry
Hope this finds you well!
I tried to get to Hurculist but it says website is blocked. Any ideas?
Regards Cameron
Hi Cameron,
Doing great thanks! How are you?
Here’s my joining link if you’d like to try again
https://www.herculist.com/members/index.cgi?barrycross
I’ve also emailed you a Herculist joining link with my email
contact information.
Regards, Barry.