Do you want to learn how to build your first affiliate marketing website? Well, you’ve come to the right place! There are other money making methods such as stocks, investing in bitcoin, drop shipping, online surveys, etc.
But,in my opinion, affiliate marketing is one of the easiest online business to start. It doesn’t require a lot of capital and the risk is extremely low.
In fact, you might have stumbled upon an affiliate website without even knowing it. Many companies offer their own affiliate programs to help generate additional traffic to their website.
In a nutshell, you as the affiliate marketer, drives traffic to the companies that you are affiliated with. When your referrals make a purchase, you’ll earn a commission. They track who sent the referral through the use of affiliate links.
Since you’re here, you’re probably interested in learning how to build your first affiliate marketing website. So allow me to go over a few more details and show you how to get started today.
What Exactly Is An Affiliate Marketing Website?
It’s a website that you own, but you don’t necessarily sell anything. Instead, you promote products that don’t belong to you.
You earn money by inserting affiliate links (provided by your affiliate program) into articles that promote the product or service.
For example, an article that reviews a protein shake can have an affiliate link that directs the visitors to the store that sells the protein shake. The affiliate link is basically your personal identification that allows the vendor to track who referred the customer.
Most affiliate marketers promote products and services through blogging. There are also people who promote affiliate products through YouTube videos.
There are 2 benefits to blogging on your affiliate marketing website:
- Provides information that the customer is seeking (Google loves text-based content).
- If your article ranks well, you will get free targeted traffic directly from search engines.
However, if you’ve decided that affiliate marketing is not for you. You can always convert your website into an eCommerce store.
An eCommerce store is very similar to affiliate marketing except there are actual products listed on your website that they can purchase instead of having to navigate to the actual retailer.
Both are great ways to make money online, so it is entirely up to you to decide which path you would like to take.
Affiliate Marketing Disclosure
#1. Affiliate marketing is NOT one of those get-rich-quick schemes that you’ve probably seen a million times online when searching for ways to make money online. It’s a real business, so expect to give it time to grow! There are people who work from home and makes more money than the average person who works at a regular 9 to 5 job.
#2. Most people FAIL in affiliate marketing. It’s not because affiliate marketing doesn’t work, its because they give up too quickly. If you want to succeed, you must understand that it will NOT get you rich overnight.
#3. Do NOT quit your current job right away. That is not smart especially if you have bills to pay for. I don’t want anyone to come back to me complaining about bankruptcy and losing their properties after quitting their jobs.
#4. As an affiliate marketer, you have the luxury to work on your schedule as well as the location. What do you think about making money and not having to wake up early in the morning to drive to work? What about not having to be stuck in the 5’o clock traffic?
#5. Affiliate marketers don’t have to deal with shipping products and customer service. All you have to do is pick up your computer and promote products and services.
#6. An affiliate marketing website with decent traffic can easily earn money through passive methods such as Google AdSense. However, this is a method that I don’t recommend. You’ve worked so hard to generate traffic, why send them away for a few dollars?
How To Build Your First Affiliate Marketing Website Today
Step #1. Choosing a niche topic. Most people are overwhelmed by this process because it’s going to be THE TOPIC that your website is going to be about.
When choosing a niche, it’s highly recommended to choose something you have a passion for. However, you also want to make sure the niche you choose is popular!
Even if you are passionate about your niche, you will find it very difficult to make money if very few people search for it.
You can learn more about finding a profitable niche by clicking here.
Step #2. Choosing your domain name. This is another important step that you must not take lightly. This is the identity of your website. If you look at your browser bar, you will see that my domain name is smartaffiliatehub. You want to choose a domain name that is relevant to your niche. Learn how to choose a domain name for your website.
There are many domain service providers that you can purchase your domain from such as GoDaddy and CheapDomain. However, most of these will offer you a discounted price for the first time, but it does go up over time.
Also, if you want additional like spam protection and secure sockets layer (SSL), there will be an additional charge.
If you want to create a website like mine, I would recommend getting your domain through Wealthy Affiliate. The domain price is not as cheap as GoDaddy or CheapDomain from the start, but it does include hosting and it comes at a flat annual fee (does NOT go up in price).
If you would like to run multiple websites, as a premium member on Wealthy Affiliate ($49.00 per month), you can host up to 50 websites on their server with no additional charges. In addition, all of your purchased domains will have FREE secure sockets layer (SSL) for a lifetime.
Get started by filling out the information below:
You can probably find hosting services for fairly cheap, but the speed and security will not be able to compare to what Wealthy Affiliate offers. Check out my article on how to spend less on quality web hosting plus more!
As a bonus, you also get online marketing training with videos as well as tools, resources, classrooms, and the community to help you succeed.
Step #3. Find an affiliate program. You want to choose reputable affiliate programs because you want to get paid on-time right? For beginners, I recommend becoming an Amazon associate because they have a large selection of products that you can promote. You can also refer to my list of affiliate programs that are relevant to your niche by clicking here.
Step #4. Follow these tips before you write reviews for products. A product review must be straightforward and informative. You want your visitors to feel fully informed about the product, so he or she can make an informative decision.
- Use appropriate titles for your product reviews. I would definitely use the name of the product and include the word review as a title. Let explain why! Many consumers do research online before making a purchase, so the usual step they take is searching for the product name with the word review on search engines like Google. When you use the product name along with the word review. You are opening the doors to getting your article indexed on Google.
- You want to be as transparent as possible. Honesty is the key to success, so even though you can potentially make money through an affiliate program for a product. You want to give an unbiased point of view (to the best of your ability)! People are tired of hearing the same old, this is the best, buy it now statement.
- You want to be as thorough as possible! I’ve seen lots of garbage product reviews online. You have to assume that this is your ONE and ONLY shot at getting the attention of your visitors. They will remember your website if you provide a garbage product review (in a bad way). Rest assured, they will not be visiting your website or take you seriously ever again.
Step #5. Find products that are relevant to your niche and write an article about each product. Even though some products can be similar, I always recommend writing separate articles on each product because that creates more content.
It’s easier to promote something that you believe in yourself. If you have the extra money, I would actually buy the product and use it before writing about it.
You see, the goal is not to promote everything you see. Personally, I usually promote something that I also use.
What Your Goals Should Be:
You want to review products that you would recommend to your family and friends. This is why I always ask myself this question: Would I feel comfortable recommending (something) to my (friends or family members)? If the answer is no, then its probably not a good product to promote.
What To Look Out For:
You also want to utilize the resources on Amazon such as popularity. There are millions of products on Amazon, some with lots of reviews and some with zero reviews. I would pay extra attention to the ones that are popular because the ones with very few reviews are usually not good.
However, this doesn’t mean you can’t write reviews on bad products either. I would still write articles on products that I don’t recommend, but I would provide a link that directs back to the recommended product instead of providing an affiliate link to the bad product.
In addition, it doesn’t hurt to do your research on your products. The goal is to find out how popular it is! You can search the name in a Keyword and Niche Research Tool also known as Jaaxy (This comes with your membership at Wealthy Affiliate).
Step #6. Include affiliate links in your product reviews. If you don’t do this, you will NOT make any money. However, keep in mind that not every product review requires an affiliate link.
Remember what we talked about in Step #5? There are product reviews with recommended products and product reviews with bad products.
The ones with the recommended product should ALWAYS include an affiliate link. It can be a simple hyperlink or a picture with a link.
The ones with the bad products should ALSO include a link, but not an affiliate one. Instead, you should provide a hyperlink that directs your visitors back to a recommended product.
In Conclusion
Affiliate marketing can be overwhelming at first, so I recommend taking this slow; step by step. However, I do recommend choosing your niche, purchasing your domain, and setting up your website as soon as possible. Your website gains authority over time, so it doesn’t hurt to get that out of the way as soon as possible.
Success is NOT built overnight. Let’s use a few people, for example, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Albert Einstein. These successful inventors didn’t achieve their success overnight.
As a matter of fact, they’ve gone through countless trials before succeeding. That’s pretty much how it works with affiliate marketing.
You might fail a couple times before you succeed, but if you don’t try, you will never succeed.
Did you know as an affiliate marketer, you have something in common with those successful inventors?
Let me explain, each one of these inventors had a journal similar to what we now use known as a blog. They write their ideas into their journal without knowing whether it will work or not, but they never gave up.
They wouldn’t be a famous figure today if they did right? That’s why the key to success is NOT only the market or the platform you use… its YOU!
I can only recommend so much, but if you’re not willing to try, you will never know whether it works or not.
The good news is, my recommended platform is FREE to try. You won’t have 50 websites, but you do get 2 for free with hosting. On top of that, you also have access to online marketing training and much more!
Interested In Signing Up For Wealthy Affiliate? Click on the banner below to get started!
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