Having your own affiliate website seems like the dream business for any would-be entrepreneur.
Promote brands online and make a passive income while you’re watching TV, sleeping, or even sitting on the toilet.
Sounds awesome right? Well, it is.
But before we give you our 5 foolproof steps for building a great affiliate website, let’s first understand what affiliate marketing is.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a business model whereby affiliates promote other brands and earn a commission based on the sales that they generate.
You’ve almost definitely used an affiliate site at some point in your life.
According to Big Commerce, 81% of brands and 84% of publishers leverage the power of affiliate marketing.
Well-known affiliate websites include flight comparison services and hotel comparison sites like Hotels.com.
Smaller, more-niche affiliate websites exist too.
For example, there are hundreds of websites comparing payday loans, VPNs, and even vacuum cleaners.
There are even successful affiliate websites that review sports betting sites like My Betting Sites Australia.
The point is, there are affiliates active in almost every industry. Some industries are more competitive than others and some industries are yet to be explored.
Whether you are looking to enter a competitive market or wanting to increase your online presence in a space that is ripe for the taking, you’ll want to take note of these 5 sure-fire ways to make your new affiliate website successful.
Find your niche
Finding, and understanding your niche is key to building a successful affiliate business.
Imagine that you’re looking for new shoes. You search for ‘Nike sneakers’ and Google gives you a few different options.
nikesneakers.com or hoodiesshoesandotherclothes.com.
Which website would you rather visit?
Most people (and Google for that matter) are going to prefer nikesneakers.com because they’re more likely to have what you’re looking for.
This fictional website is also more likely to be an expert on Nike sneakers because they have chosen a niche and built their whole site around it.
Thus, finding your niche and creating content that fits this niche is important not only from a user perspective but from Google’s point of view too.
You are much more likely to attract visitors and rise to the top of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), if your affiliate site occupies a niche, and will satisfy your users’ intent.
Analyze the competition
Once you have picked a niche (preferably something you know about, or at least the passion to learn about), it’s important to analyze your competitors.
Questions you should ask yourself include: Do any other websites already exist within my niche? What are the strengths and weaknesses of these sites? What keywords are they trying to rank for? What kind of user are they looking to attract?
When you analyze your competitors you should walk away with a few things.
You’ll know how hard it is going to be to beat your competitors (how big is their site, how many pages do they have, how much traffic do they get).
You’ll also get a better idea of what they are doing to be successful (how are they structuring their pages, what are their key pages, do they write articles and blog posts).
And finally, you’ll be able to understand what you can do better than them (can you make a more interesting and useful page, what topics do they NOT cover, how user-friendly is their website).
The quality of your competition will depend on the market that you want to enter and if the competition is high, you can expect to not see results right away. However, understanding how your competitors work will ultimately aid you in beating them in the long-run.
Content is king
We have already alluded to it but knowing your market, and the products that you are promoting, is key to creating a great website that users, and by extension Google, will love.
If you can build an informative, interesting website, that people spend time on, and that helps to satisfy the intent behind your users’ searches, you will not only generate more sales, but your users will send positive signals to Google telling them that your page is worth ranking.
Creating great content is easiest if you are an expert in the field that you are writing about, however, understanding what others think about your content is not always easy.
One useful tool that can help you to understand how good your website is is Google Analytics.
With Google Analytics you can track how long people spend on each page of your website, how many pages they visit, which pages they visit, and what the bounce rate (a bounce is when a user visits your page but leaves without interacting with the content) is for each of your pages.
By knowing which pages your visitors prefer you can edit and create new pages to better satisfy them and create great content.
Become an SEO master
The most technical tip we have is also arguably the most important.
It doesn’t matter what kind of website you want to create, if you are an SEO expert then you will be able to rise to the top of the SERP and generate thousands of sales within your niche.
There are many things that you need to do to optimize your website from an SEO perspective, and they go beyond what this article will discuss, but there are plenty of online resources that can help you to learn the tools of your new trade.
Things to understand and learn more about when you are doing SEO work include keywords, URLs, meta descriptions, title tags, page speed, mobile-friendliness, backlinks, and user experience.
Have passion for your product
There’s not much more to say than that but if you are serious about your website then you will have the best chance of understanding your market, creating great content, learning to become an SEO master, and ultimately making your affiliate website amazing.
