How to create a website for affiliate marketing

How to create a website for affiliate marketing

If you want to turn your website or blog into a website that earns you passive income, you may be considering creating an affiliate website. 

There are some things you should know before you begin the journey of building an affiliate website, though. Additionally, there are factors you should consider and things that you need to plan and strategize before launching your website. 

In this article, we are exploring all of these factors. 

What is an affiliate marketing website?

People make money all of the time using affiliate marketing, but what is it? To put it simply, it’s a way for you to earn commissions based on recommended products or services. Essentially, you will be hosting products to links, services, businesses and more on your website, and any time those links are used, you will earn a bit of money.

But you can’t just post up as many links as you can obtain. Affiliate marketing websites work best when they have some kind of niche or focus to operate from. 

Having a focus, such as digital services, will ensure that the people visiting your website have an interest in particular digital tools, supplies, information, and more. What this means is that whatever products or services you post, you’re more likely to have people clicking them to find out more information. This, in turn, generates more conversions. 

How do affiliate links work?

Affiliate links are pretty straightforward. For almost every product you use, it can be found on websites like Fiverr, Amazon, WordPress, Sephora, and more. All have the option to promote affiliate links to products. 

In either case, putting affiliate links on your website can help to generate passive income. Once they’re in place, you don’t have to do anything more. 

How to create a website for affiliate marketing

Many new affiliates try to make money with their website before they really understand how to do so. This can be disastrous and can completely spoil any future attempts to make this business model work. 

Here’s a step-by-step process on how to build an affiliate website and make it work:

Choosing a niche

A niche, by definition of its adjective form, is a particular thing related to products, services, and interests that appeal to a small, specialized group of people within a population. 

When you’re trying to choose a niche for your website to focus on, you want to choose something you are familiar with. Not only that, you want to choose something that you’re particularly passionate about and are familiar with. 

That’s because visitors to your site are looking for advice, more often than not. They want to read advice, ideas, and suggestions from someone that is an expert in the field. But finding a broad subject as a niche isn’t enough. 

The broader the subject, the more competition you will encounter for traffic and affiliate revenue. Try to narrow your topic down within reason. Do you talk about digital marketing? Focus on specific aspects, like design and copywriting. 

Once you’ve chosen your niche, you can use that to figure out how to name your domain. Make sure to search the web to be sure the name hasn’t been used already. This can create unneeded legal problems down the line. 

Building a website or repurposing what you have

Once you’ve chosen your niche and are sure it’s something you can profit off of, it’s time to prepare your website. First, there are structural factors you should consider for your site. 

• About Us Page: Make your affiliate website into something identifiable. People are more likely to trust and follow suggestions of people that they can see and know a bit about. 

• Contact Section: This section is fairly straightforward. It should include contact information that you want your readers to have access to, such as the brand or company email or phone number. 

• Disclaimers: Since you’re using the website to generate income through affiliate links, you’ll want a disclaimer page or section available for your readers to understand the how and why of it. 

• Privacy Policy Page: If your website collects information about your user, you need to let them know. Tell them what information is collected and how it is used. 

• Custom 404 Pages: Is your website down for maintenance? Has a page been removed? Having custom 404 pages can improve the user experience on your site. Fiverr can be helpful if you want to customize your website. 

• Advertisements: If you want to take your website revenue to the next level, you can sell advertising space on your website. These can be banners, icons, and more. Provide any advertising parties with your website’s average monthly views, demographics, and a contact form.

• Terms of Service Page: This page will limit your liability in the event of information being misused on or through your website. It’s also a good place to detail a user’s responsibilities regarding copyrights, trademarks and more.

Content creation

A huge step that many excited would-be affiliates miss when starting their affiliate marketing website is generating and maintaining compelling content. You can’t just jump right into linking products and making money, after all. 

To correctly build an affiliate marketing website, you need to have a following of loyal readers. People that trust your opinions and expertise are more likely to frequently visit your website, and will be more likely to purchase items you suggest for their wants and needs.

The content you present on your website needs to be informational, helpful, and valuable to your readers and the niche they belong to. The most important thing you can do to raise your credibility with your readers is researching the topic before posting an article, buying guide, opinion piece or other content types on that topic. 

Then, you want to repeat the process as much as reasonably possible. Produce as much quality content as you can, and your website will see more and more traffic as a result. 

The importance of email lists and email newsletters

Emailing is still a great way to reach people, especially while you’re creating and maintaining your affiliate marketing website. The intervals your subscribers should receive emails from your brand can be weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. Additionally, some may want to receive an email with every new post. 

Email lists help you to expand your reach organically. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is to add a pop-up to your website that encourages a free subscription to your mailing list. 

For every dollar spent on an emailing list or pop-up, most sites receive a return of $38. That’s a 3,800% return and makes it well worth your time, effort, and money to invest in. 

Some tips to keep in mind for your emailing list include:

1. Use or include bold calls to action with every message, either as the subject of the email or throughout the message itself.
2. Make sure to share your more recent social media posts, blog posts, and any relevant appearances.
3. Regularly review, optimize, and improve your templates and content. This is crucial, as it grabs and keeps the interest.

Create value before trying to profit 

By taking the time to do all of the above before trying to focus on making money, you’re sure to have greater success in the long-run. Some affiliates, programs, and networks won’t even allow you to link to them if you do not have established content and traffic. 

You don’t need a massive amount of content, though. You typically need steady numbers in the traffic department, but you don’t need thousands of blog posts to be established. If you have ten strong posts on your website and have more scheduled regularly, that’s usually enough to meet that requirement. 

Costs of creating an affiliate website

Many people don’t start an affiliate website for the same reason they don’t start a public blog – it can cost money. But how much does it really cost to build a website, and is there enough of a return on it to justify it?

Choosing a web hosting platform and domain name

If you need to set up a website, there are tons of recommended hosting providers with different price points and features. These platforms are cost-effective and will provide you with easy-to-use tools to get your website up and running. 

Additionally, these hosting providers have options available for securing your website. Certain plans will provide your website with an SSL certificate, which will increase your readers’ trust and confidence in you and your website. It will also help to keep your website in the top results of relevant Google searches.

Your domain name is the URL for your website. Choosing a great hosting provider and selecting a certain plan type will allow you to customize your domain name so that it represents your brand, idea, or niche plainly and easily in the URL bar. 

Earning brackets in affiliate marketing websites

One thing to concern yourself with when it comes to running a website for affiliate marketing is that the money may not be consistent, no matter how long you work at it and how much you perfect your site and other factors.

The affiliate industry is volatile and unstable in nature. You might have a particularly popular post one week that generates thousands of dollars, and the next week you may only make a few hundred. 

The revenue you make doesn’t matter nearly as much as the profit you make. This may sound strange at first, but it’s true and important. Boasting the revenue you make means nothing if you spend everything to get it. 

You don’t want to spend the same amount of money working on your site as you are making from operating it. You want a wide profit margin, and it may take a while to truly become established in your niche to reach an earning bracket that is stable. 

Tracking insights and results

Particularly for WordPress websites, there are plugins available to help you track your performance with affiliate products. 

With these tracking plugins, you can track a plethora of data regarding how your website is interacted with. This includes the amount of traffic your affiliate links experience. 

Why track the insights of your links?

When you track your affiliate links, you can begin learning and understanding which products are performing the best for your particular audience. This can help you advertise better products in the future, ones that your audience is more likely to purchase.

More than that, you can use these insights to improve your website’s overall content. Providing your readers with better content that’s more geared to what they want or need will increase their trust and loyalty in you and your website. Trust and loyalty usually equates to repeat customers, and that means steady or increasing income.

How to create a website for affiliate marketing – final thoughts 

If you follow the above instructions, tips, and general information, you’ll have a successful affiliate marketing website up and running in no time at all. It may not generate consistent income, especially not at first. But if you keep at it, it’s a great way to supplement your income, and maybe one day become your primary source of income.

Remember that you may not immediately see results and that you should start by building a following that values your opinion and expertise for the best possible results. Create content, invest in your mailing list, and keep up to date on affiliate products.

In some time, you’ll be the one showing how to create an affiliate website that’s successful and brings value to its owner.