Do you want to learn how to go about creating a website for affiliate marketing? Here is everything you will need to know!
Online business is getting more and more popular every day. It is comforting to have an extra source of income that is separate from your normal job. In the online business space, affiliate marketing has the potential to make you a life-changing amount of money if you do it well.
If you are interested in venturing into affiliate marketing, one of the first steps you need to take is getting a website for your business. Affiliate marketing websites require a number of things to be successful, which is what the focus of this article will be.
WEBSITE OR BLOG?
The terms website, site and blog are used interchangeably. That is mostly ok if you understand the differences between them and recognize the uses and benefits of each one.
You need to decide whether you need a website or a blog for your business. A website is usually more static. Each page is created once and hardly ever changes. The most common use of websites is for e-commerce.
A blog, on the other hand, has much more fluidity to it. It has content that is constantly updated, thus making everything consistently fresh and original. Blogs have many different sections which can be used to address many different interests in the same niche.
Blog encourage engagement and communication between the author (you) and your readers. This is done by constantly providing fresh actionable and original content that your readers will be looking for and expecting. They will ask questions and leave their thoughts and opinions on your comments section.
This back and forth between you and your audience is the real life blood of your business.
So while we can use the words interchangeably, what you need for your affiliate marketing business is really a blog over a static website.
AFFILIATE MARKETING SITES NEED CONTENT
One of the greatest requirements of affiliate marketing sites is content. This is where you need to put in the most work. You need original content to attract new visitors, and once they are there they need to see that your site consistently has new, original and helpful content so that they can stay.
Good content is what gets you views and keeps users on your site. Ideally, what you want is for your affiliate marketing site to become an authority in your niche, so that everyone comes to you when they need any information regarding that niche.
Your affiliate marketing blog content can be text content like blog posts or review articles. You can also have video content or infographics. You can even take things a notch higher and have a combination of different types of content. The most important thing to remember is that all your content must be original, high quality, and of value to your users.
As I mentioned in the section above, top-notch content will create repeat visitors that will engage you in the comments section. Once this starts happening to your blog, you will know that your content is good and that you are moving in the right direction.
AFFILIATE MARKETING SITES NEED TO BE OPTIMIZED
Once you have your site up, you need to optimize it. Optimization is what gets the word out there that you exist, and Let’s people find you. A big part of this is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Good SEO is essential to the success of your affiliate marketing site. SEO involves everything you can do to increase your traffic quantity and quality through organic search engine results, including:
1. Effective keyword research. Keywords are words or phrases in your content that search engines pick up to help make people find your site more easily. Keyword research involves finding out what keywords your potential users are searching for in search engines and using this information to your advantage by placing those keywords in your content. This way, your site ranks highly for those keywords and you get discovered more easily. I discuss keyword selection in more depth in this article!
2. Use of appropriate tags. Tags are simple texts that describe what the content of a web page is about. Your tags may or may not appear on the page itself. For example, in blogs, tags appear on the page, but Meta tags only appear on the page’s code. These tags tell search engines what the page is about for easier ranking. The image below shows the correct use of tags. It helps draw in readers from the search results!
3. Use of optimized images. Optimized images, first, have to be of the lowest file size possible while remaining of the highest quality achievable. Next, they need to help your site rank higher on Google image searches. You can do this by choosing the right file name, image scale, image size, and making sure your image is related to the topic at hand.
I want to share this video with you that explains SEO at a very high level. It is an old video but still absolutely relevant today. Check it out below:
You need your website to stand out to search engines if you want to be found more easily. This building of trust will mean that your site will be among the first to show up in search results. It will also mean that your posts will get shown to potential readers, increasing user interaction with your site.
I need to make one important point here though. While I emphasize SEO in order to get your posts ranked and found by your readers, I want to make sure that you write your posts for the readers and not the search engines. New bloggers will select keywords that are complete nonsense or grammatically incorrect and try to actually write content around those keywords.
Let me give you a quick example. I just did a quick keyword search on the term “self-sufficiency”. One of the keywords that came back is “definition not self-sufficient” . This is a low competition keyword and new marketers may be tempted to try to write content for it. Don’t!
it is low competition because the phrase makes no sense. Writing content around this type of keyword is done in an attempt to “game” the search engines. This type of content cannot be of high quality and will not help your business.
The next thing I want to caution against is keyword stuffing. It used to be that bloggers would stuff their chosen keyword into a post 5 or 10 times. This leads to unnatural writing, and content that is difficult to read. Google does not reward posts and articles that are keyword stuffed. You only need to use your keyword in the title, and in the first paragraph. If you can fit it naturally in the body one more time than you can do so. But do not force it!
CONSIDER SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT
You need to diversify traffic sources for your affiliate website. Social media is a good potential source of traffic and user engagement that you absolutely need to take advantage of in your affiliate marketing business. Creating social media engagement with your affiliate marketing website will get people talking about your site.
The more people talk about you, the more views and users you get, and this translates to more revenue. You need to make sure that there is a constant buzz about your site on social media. This builds your brand recognition, making people trust you and your products even more.
But social engagement is tricky. I am still learning how to do it efficiently. There are so many platforms that you can get bogged down into trying to use every single one of them. Social media marketing can be a huge time suck and none of us have time to spare or waste.
So here is what I suggest. Pick two platforms that you want to use and focus on them 100%.
1. Learn all you need to in order to successfully attract and engage an audience.
2. Create a schedule – make sure you limit the time you spend on social media. It is extremely easy to get pulled into rabbit holes and look up 2 hours later realizing you have not done anything productive.
3. Keep track of your progress. make sure to use the analytics that are available to you on all of these social network platforms. Are you reaching the people you intend to reach? Are they reading your content? Are they beneficial to your business? The answers to these questions will help you tweak your approach, or abandon the platform completely in favor of a new one.
FINAL THOUGHTS
It is fundamentally important to have an affiliate marketing website/blog for your business if you want to make it in the affiliate marketing space. Creating a website for affiliate marketing involves a series of strategic steps that you need to take to make your site easily discoverable. You need to check off all these steps off your list because once you do, you will be that much closer to achieving success.
Again I use the words website and blog interchangeably in this post but you know that you really need a blog.
Do you need help setting up your blog for affiliate marketing? Check out the video below on how to create an affiliate marketing WordPress Blog in less than one minute!
You can use the same tool right now to create your first affiliate marketing site for free!
I also wrote a comprehensive review that will outline all the tools and support you will receive. This training will absolutely sky-rocket your business. I know because I use it too!
CLICK HERE FOR A REVIEW OF MY #1 RECOMMENDED AFFILIATE MARKETING TRAINING RESOURCE!
I hope you found this post to be helpful. Please leave me your Q’ s and comments in the comment section below.
Do you have any advice on creating a website for affiliate marketing?
To your affiliate success!
Mike
Very helpful, thankyou.
You mentioned things I hadn’t even thought of yet as just starting with affiliate marketing.
Glad to hear you are starting in affiliate marketing- Great choice 🙂 Keep at it and you will be rewarded. make sure to look through the blog for more helpful info! Good luck to you!
I like your recommendation to pick two platforms and focus on them 100%. Too often, I have tried to focus my efforts everywhere and I ended up getting nowhere.
Melinda, I learned that the hard way! I tried to make sure that I engaged on 5 platforms simultaneously and found that I was overwhelmed. What is worse, I realized that I was not doing a good job at all. So I regrouped and picked 2. That immediately improved my performance on social media and my engagement went up significantly. Glad you found the article helpful!