When it comes to building a strong affiliate marketing ecosystem, one of the first areas that people tend to turn to is website content. Compared to an approach such as blogging, which is more wide-ranging in its approach, this has the benefit that it can also be used to create more sales-orientated content.
Targeting specific keywords and providing your visitors with the information they are looking for is key here. Much like affiliate blogging, the quality of the content that you produce is critical. The tone that you set and the calls to action that you use, however, need to be carefully tailored to your audience.
Understanding Your Market and What They Are Searching For
You’ve picked your product, you think you can produce content about it with some level of expertise and you want to give it a try. The next thing you need to think about, before creating any content, is who your market is likely to be. This is going to define the type of website you create and what you put on it.
For example, if you are using Amazon’s affiliate program, you may want to focus on specific areas such as fashion or electrical products. Your website, therefore, might be focused on a particular gender and age or businesses that are looking to buy computer hardware. If your affiliate focuses on wellbeing, you may be targeting people with a specific health condition or who have certain health goals.
Find the Right Affiliate Niche
The more focused you can be on your website, the easier it is to not only create valuable content but attract the right kind of potential customers. Honing in on a particular niche reduces the amount of competition you are likely to face for ranking on search engines like Google.
For example, a general health-based website can be extremely difficult to rank for. Narrowing it down to something like health solutions for a certain age group or health condition will give you a greater chance of being visible online. Of course, the niche you choose also needs to relate strongly to the affiliate program or programs you select.
The more time you take over this decision, the more likely you are to get things right the first time.
Do Your Keyword Research
Every niche market has keywords associated with it and doing your research in this area is critical because you want to include them in your content. Again, short keywords (such as health, fashion, or smartphones) can be difficult to rank for in competitive areas.
Focus on longer tail keywords of three or four words or more that relate to your product and you are likely to have more chance of getting to page one.
Hosting Plans: Where to Start for Affiliate Marketing
Beginner affiliate marketers often fret about the right hosting plan. There are several options here.
The first is shared hosting which means you share a space with a lot of other businesses. The upside is that this is very cheap, costing just a few pounds or dollars a month. The downside is that you have less bandwidth and if the server gets busy it can slow download times and even prevent your site from being seen. If you generate high volumes of traffic it can also be problematic.
Private hosting means that you have the server to yourself with all the security and bandwidth that you need. The downside is that it costs a lot more. It’s a hosting solution that you might use if you are getting thousands of people a day visiting your site.
Most affiliate sites will start as shared hosting because it’s the cheapest. The good news is that you can later upgrade if you attract the kind of high volumes of traffic that means you can make a good return on investment.
Create an Attractive Website
One of the big mistakes that novice affiliate marketers make is not creating an attractive looking website that impresses visitors. If it looks ultra-cheap and is poorly laid out, visitors are likely to view it as spam and won’t engage, no matter how great your other content is.
In short, you need to create a site that looks professional and sends the right message. The content you provide needs to be well-written – try to avoid over salesy blocks of text or pushing ‘buy’ buttons every other paragraph. Keep it informative and relevant.
Download Speed
If you want your affiliate website to succeed, then you need to pay attention to how it performs. There is no harm in going for off-the-shelf themes but they are often weighed down by too much code which can affect download speed.
With a platform like WordPress, it’s easy to try out different themes and some plugins show you how fast these download on both mobile and desktop. This can involve a bit of experimentation but is particularly important once your site begins to get more traffic.
Build Great Content for Your Affiliate Website
It’s a good idea to mix up your content and include assets like video and images to break up your pages. Our top tip, however, is to keep it as simple as possible.
Have a focus for each page and make sure you keep your language clear and concise. Shorter sentences and paragraphs work better than long, tedious content that is difficult to read.
Be Mobile Ready
Why is this important? You’ll find nowadays that most websites are not viewed on desktops but mobile devices including smartphones and tablets. Most themes should be mobile-ready – it means they render clearly on smaller devices. Whatever theme you choose it is worth checking how it looks on mobile before you decide to build your content.
A site can appear great on a desktop but once you view it on a phone it can become complicated to navigate. Always veer towards optimising mobile rather than desktop if you want your affiliate website to be accessible to the majority of people.
Measure Performance
Finally, another area that beginner affiliate marketers neglect is measuring performance. The good news is there are plenty of tools out there nowadays which help you to track who’s visiting your site and what they are doing while on it.
Learn the ins and outs of website metrics as they can show you which pages work and which don’t, allowing you to make changes that enhance performance and conversions.
Learn How to Create an Affiliate Website
It’s pretty easy nowadays to create a website in a few minutes. When you’re developing one for affiliate marketing, however, there’s a lot more to learn.
If you want to know how to make the most of your online presence and superpower your website, something like the Master Affiliate Profits affiliate stacking ecosystem course can not only increase your knowledge and skill but also prevents you from making the kind of mistakes that beginners often suffer from.
Find out more here.
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