How To Build an Affiliate Marketing Website

1.    Choose a niche

2.    Find the affiliate program that works best for you

3.    Affiliate marketing website hosting

4.    Set up themes and plug-ins

5.    Create specific content

6.    Set up analytics 

These are the must-follow steps to build an affiliate marketing website. Let’s take a detailed look at them.

1.          A Niche Choose

 Since affiliate marketing can be so competitive, choosing the right niche is crucial. The right niche should allow you to easily mention products, avoid too much competition and allow you to cultivate a loyal audience.

First, let's talk about why a niche is vital to profitability. Not every topic is a good fit for a product mention, and not all products offer meaningful pay-per-click or affiliate sales.

Brandon Gaille of The Blog Millionaire collected data on which niches were the most profitable for bloggers making more than $2,000 a month. He found that personal finance is the most profitable place.

There are many blogging niches, however. Here are a few more profitable spaces:

·         Health, wellness, and fitness

·         Technology, gaming

·         Finance

·         Travel

·         Pet care

·         Fashion and beauty

·         Dating

 



Second, niche down is also beneficial because it reduces your competition. There are hundreds of more specific niches within each topic. For fitness there is yoga, cross fit and endurance training. For tech, there are phone comparisons, gaming sites, and software branches.

 

The narrower your topic is, the less likely you are to compete with a large number of authoritative sites in that space. This means fewer pages trying to rank for the same keywords and fewer pages writing about the same products as you.

 

Finally, niche down means you can make a stronger connection with your audience. The average visitor won't accept a product recommendation unless they feel the person recommending it really understands all the ins and outs of what they care about.

 

When your affiliate site is embedded far enough, you can be more specific and helpful in your articles, building trust with your audience.

 

The more specific you can get, the better - up to a point. While home workouts for women are narrow enough, home workouts for women using just a jump rope are too specific.

 

There really isn't enough content or audience for this, and the scope of the topic limits the kinds of products you can recommend. Be strategic about the topic you build your affiliate marketing website around.

 

Ultimately, the easiest place for you to create content lies in what you know best. If all your research points you towards starting a crypto currency blog, but you have terrible money and numbers, you better stick with what you know.

2. Find an Affiliate Program Best Suited to You

 

Before you start learning how to create an affiliate marketing website, it's a good idea to take a look at the types of affiliate products and programs in your intended niche.

 

Generally, there are two different ways to find affiliates – through one-time affiliate programs and affiliate networks.

 

When you work with one particular brand, you usually do so through their affiliate program. Each affiliate program may have different terms and payouts.

 

When you're starting out, you'll need to research the brands you want to work with to see if they offer any affiliate programs. For example, if your site is in the travel industry, you may want to become an affiliate site for cheap flights.

 

In contrast, affiliate networks connect you with different merchants and give you a wide variety of products to choose from.

 

Amazon Associates is one of the biggest that allows you to earn commission on any product on Amazon. Similarly, Share Sale is another giant with a 55.7% market share that works with thousands of merchants from various fields.

 

When choosing affiliate partners, it is important to consider affiliate commission rates. Not all branches or product categories are created equal. For example, here's how widely Amazon Affiliate commissions vary by product.



Additionally, it's important to understand how you get paid when researching affiliate programs. Here are the three main ways affiliate programs count referrals:

·         Per-click: When a user clicks on your link, the merchant pays you a small amount.

·         Per-lead: You get a small amount when a user clicks on your link and enters their information on the merchant’s website.

·         Per-sale: You get a payout when a user clicks on your link and purchases from an affiliated merchant.

3.      Hosting an Affiliate Marketing Website

 

Once you know your niche and who you will be working with, it's time to create an affiliate marketing website.

 

First, get a domain name. This is the address that users will use to navigate to your site. For consistent branding and SEO, it should be something relevant to your chosen niche.

 

You'll probably find that the easiest names in the most profitable niches are a bit more expensive or completely biased, so make sure you don't go with something unrelated or hard to remember.

 

Then you will need to find a web host. While your domain name is like the phone number for a book in a library, hosting is like the library that houses the book. All files and data related to your website are stored there.

If that seems like a lot of steps, Blue host offers both in one place along with a simple website builder so you can set up your website in minutes.

4.      Set Up Themes and Plug-ins

 

4.                 When it comes to appearance, you don't have to go overboard on your first affiliate marketing website. This means you don't need to know how to code to create an affiliate marketing website that works for you. It's especially easy if you're using a WordPress website builder.

5.                 WordPress is a content management system (CMS) with hundreds of attractive and easy-to-use themes that make it simple to get your website up and running. If you're not sure which theme to choose, HubSpot has compiled a list of the best themes for affiliate marketing websites.

6.                 Once your site is set up, plugins can help you add and track your affiliate links. A common type of plugin for affiliate marketers is the link masking plugin.

7.                 Affiliate links can be long strings of numbers, which can cause users to distrust the link. Link masking plugins like Pretty Links allow you to first redirect to the page under your URL and then to an external affiliate.

8.                 This means that the links look more credible and helps to balance the internal and external links on each page. This, in turn, will help you rank higher in search engines.



5. Create Niche-Specific Content

Once your website is set up and ready to go, all that's left to do is populate it with content.

 

Here's where you don't want to cut corners. Successful affiliates know that high-quality; niche-specific content is the key to not only getting traffic, but also conversions.

 

Here are the most common content types:

·         Product reviews and comparisons

·         How-to guides and tutorials that feature products and services

·         Reader testimonials

·         Tools or services roundups

Along with these posts designed to include a number of affiliate links, you can write about any useful topic in your niche and add a link or two to affiliate products.

 

To get ideas for quality content for your website, think about what your audience searches for most often on the Internet. In other words, do keyword research.

 

You don't need to invest in powerful software just yet. There are plenty of free keyword research tools to help you find topics with good search volume that aren't too competitive for your new website.

 

Online forums like Quora also provide valuable insight into the questions and problems people often have in your niche. If you run a personal finance blog and search for a broad topic like "credit" and filter by questions, you'll find plenty of good topics worth writing about.

 

 



6. Set Up Analytics

You won't start raking in money right after you learn how to build your affiliate marketing website. Chances are some things will resonate with your audience while others won't.

 

The important thing is to understand which things work and why so you can replicate them.

 

Here are the two most important metrics to measure:

·         Clicks: Indicates how often visitors interact with your links – and which links perform best. To track clicks, you'll either need to set up Google Analytics to measure links using specialized code, or use a plugin like Monster Insights.

·         Earnings Per Click (EPC): This is your earnings divided by the total number of clicks. It will tell you which affiliate partners your audience buys from the most and which link positions are the most successful. From there, you can prioritize the links that bring the most profit.

Final Thoughts: How To Build an Affiliate Marketing Website in 6 Steps

For beginners, building an affiliate marketing website takes some planning and research to make sure you’re picking the right niche for you.

From there, the most important part of building an affiliate site is creating valuable content and tracking your results. With enough patience and attention to strategy, you’re sure to monetize your blog effectively.

If you’re ready to get started with affiliate marketing, set up your website with an intuitive, easy-to-use tool like Bluehost’s Website Builder today.