Before you start building an affiliate website, it’s best practice to take the time to map out the best route to get to where you want to be going.
1. Select the niche – Decide on the market you wish to target. Don’t just think about getting in to those “Hot Niche” markets such as dietary supplements or free trials. You really want to position yourself to build an increasing and lasting income, which, like any real world business, takes time and effort.
2. Get into a market which you know something about. Any lack of knowledge about a subject will soon become apparent and may impede conversions. Follow your passion! Keep an eye out for hot new trends and then monetize them. Keep an eye on trending subjects in Google Trends, Twitter and FB hash tags and follow them. Become the key influencer or key player in your selected market and become the ‘go to’ website.
3. Identify your customer and understand their needs. Know your target demographic from information provided by the Merchant / Advertiser or your own market research. Look closely at the basics such as gender, age, income, along with details like whether or not they have children, their religion, ethnicity, hobbies etc. and their geographical data. This kind of information is invaluable and can really help you begin to develop a clearer snapshot of your particular customer. Structure your marketing to provide for your customers wants and needs.
4. Decide on what type of website to build. Focus on providing your followers with high quality entertaining and problem solving websites or a combination thereof which gives them what they want. These can be broken into a few basic structures.
- A problem solving resource that addresses the immediate problem a customer has.
- An entertaining website which keeps them amused and engaged in the selling process.
- A combination between problem solving and the amusement kind of website.
Find the right synergy and you are on the road to a successful site.
5. Choose the promotional methods. Find which methods you are going to use to promote your product or service within your niche market. Which kind are better suited?
- Content publishing
- Coupons and deals
- Data Feeds and CSE’s
- Display (including retargeting)
- Email (including remarketing)
- Mobile and Pay Per Call
- Loyalty and Incentives
- Search Engine Marketing (Search Engine Optimisation and PPC)
- Social Media
- Video
6. Select a platform – 52 of the top 100 blogs on the internet are WordPress based. WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) largely used for blogs, but it is so much more and can handle anything you need to build. Go with a self-hosted wordpress.org website. There are over 77 million sites which are operating the WordPress platform, and nearly a hundred WP affiliate marketing related plugins available to download on WordPress. It is user friendly and easy to optimize for SEO.
In summary
- Select the niche market
- Identify the target demographic
- Decide on the type of website
- Chose the promotional method you’ll use
- Select the platform
- Go for it