Affiliate marketing is pretty simple really – you find potential customers, tell them about products that they might like, if they buy said product you earn an affiliate commission. The critical skill with affiliate marketing is generating traffic and directing it toward products or offers that are well suited to the interests of your audience.
There are two broad options:
You can build an affiliate website and help people to find the right products to buy. Or alternatively you can build an email list and promote affiliate offers that way. In this post I am going to discuss the website option – but here is a post about affiliate email.
How To Build An Affiliate Website
Building an affiliate website is similar to building an adsense website, but you need to gear your site more towards products and the actual practice of selling.
Step 1: Pick your product category
Affiliate websites tend to work best when they are centered around a product niche – it’s not the only way, but it’s the way I’m going to recommend here. So first of all, we need to think of a reasonably good niche. It helps if it is something you are pretty interested in and it can be as niche as you like. Here are some examples: Android phones, lingerie, travel accessories…
Step 2: Keyword research
You will be using Google’s keyword tool for this part – check out the page on building an adsense website to see how this all works. The difference this time though is that we are interested in keywords which imply the intent to buy. For instance “samsung desire manual” – bad keyword: “cheap samsung desire” – good keyword.
Step 3: Create a blueprint
Same drill as with the Adsense site here, but this time each page should ideally be focused on a product, split into sensible product categories. You will inevitably have some pages with general shopping / product advice too – for instance “top 10 smart phones” – depending on what keywords look promising.
Step 4: Build some content
Now that you have a blue print you need to start building some content. You will be writing a content page for each group of 1-3 keywords. Write content in a way that makes sense for the keywords – with helpful advice, reviews and tips for the products in question. It is important that you don’t just copy content from elsewhere, you need to add value in some way.
Step 5: SEO and stuff
Do all the normal SEO stuff here, best practice and lots of link building is the order of the day here. As long as you have put plenty of effort into writing great advice and content, you are off to a good start – but you will need to build lots of links and do other good SEO stuff…
Step 6: Monetize
There are lots of companies which offer affiliate programs on their products, and also plenty of affiliate networks which offer commission on product sales. The best option at this stage is to have a look on Google for the right products. Ebay offers an affiliate program which is an excellent option, especially if you are target discounted products.
Step 7: Optimize
A big part of having a successful affiliate website is being able to actually make sales – to do that you are going to need a slick, easy to navigate website, as well as building traffic to it. Google’s analytics program and free website optimizer are must have tools if you want to be able to maximize your return. A few simple tweaks to your site can make a big difference to your bottom line, so once you have some traffic, start thinking about how you can tweak and test your site.
Summary
With affiliate marketing you have 2 key skills to master. The first is SEO – this is essential if you want to actually get some traffic. But equally, you are effectively trying to sell products, so you need to get to grips with optimizing your site at every opportunity to maximize the number of sales you make.
This strategy has the potential to be very effective and I personally know of several people who make a very good full time living from just one or two key affiliate sites. Don’t forget that products don’t have to be small, or even particularly tangible. You could sell anything from small gifts and trinkets to holiday packages or insurance. Just make sure you thoroughly research your niche first and find a product category that you can sell.