How To Build an
Affiliate Website
Bu definition an affiliate
website is a website that promotes a products or service that the
website owner does not provide directly but refers the visitor to
another website. This allows companies like ebay or amazon to
promote products on millions of websites other than their own and
affiliates to get paid for sending visitors directly to buy those
products.
There are 2 primary
approaches to building affiliate websites:
In either case, the first
thing you need is a website or at least a blog. Of course a blog
will have much less flexibility than a website but it will be
much easier to use.
I usually refer all newbies to
free blogs to do affiliate marketing for several reasons none of
them being the fact that we lose a potential hosting customer in
the process. But I know, 100% of them will fail and they will ask
for tens of hours of support and cancel within a month or two. So
for us, it does not make sense to support affiliate markets but I
am always happy to have lengthy discussions with them and give
them my expert opinions.
I have made millions
in sales with affiliate marketing and that has resulted in
well over $100,000.00 in earnings in just a few years so I do
know a little about how it all works. And that is why I am
confident that anyone new will likely not be successful.
The sad truth is that 5% of
the affiliate marketers make 95% of the money. That sounds a bit
like the US economy, the top 5% make 95% of the money. Maybe it
is not that offset but you get the idea. Only a few people make
serious money in affiliate marketing for one big reason, it is
hard to do.
Another reason I suggest free
blogs to affiliate marketers is because they are free as opposed
to hosting at a company like pageBuzz.com which requires a
monthly fee. Most affiliate websites can take a year before they
see any traffic, so with free blogs even if you give up, the
blogs stays up and can potentially make money.
Where as after a few months of
paying pageBuzz $20 a month and not making money, most people
quit, cancel the website ad stop paying. That is because they are
unwilling to spend money to make money.
The real key to affiliate
marketing is website traffic. If you get traffic you make money.
If you don;t get traffic, you don't make money.
But enough about whether you
will make money or not and lets talk about how you can make money,
building an affiliate website.
The most common
method of affiliate marketing is by using banners or ads on
existing pages.
Of course, this requires you
to have a website in the first place. But that website can be
anything.
a personal website
with vacation photos
a blog about your
favorite subject
a political
website or opinion blog
an ecommerce
website
any page, blog or
website can be used
All you have to do is sign up
at one of the reputable affiliate marketing companies like cj.com,
linksare.com or sharasale.com and select one of the merchants and
choose one of their banners or text ads. Simply copy and paste
the html code they give you into a place on your pages and when
people see the ad, click and buy you get paid.
Of course you will want to
choose products that appeal to your market. For example if you
blog about pets, choose a pet food supplier or pet related
products.
Or you could use something
more general like walmart or target that have everything and
appeal to everyone, expect that people don't have a reason to
click over to walmart unless you are advertising a sale or a
product that will motivate them to leave your website.
And there is the downside of
affiliate marketing. You need to send away visitors to make money.
For this reason, you should
never add affiliate products to an ecommerce website because the
last thing you want to do is send your customers to someone else.
The whole point of affiliate
marketing is to drive traffic to a website to generate sales, so
you don't want to drive traffic away from your own products.
Even in a blog, if you want
traffic, how productive is it to have users leaving your pages to
go buy products?
I guess you have to evaluate
whether you make enough money or not to sacrifice the blog for
the affiliate income.
That bring me to
the second model of affiliate websites, using their content.
Most retailers will provide
datafeeds of their products with descriptions and the locations
of photos. Those datafeeds or databases can be converted into
websites or shopping sites that can direct users directly to the
merchants product pages.
If you have a merchant with 10,000
products you can build a website with 10,000 product pages
relatively quickly using their data and some ecommerce
programming or datafeed parsers.
If you compare that with the
few pages you have on the blog you can imagine that the 10,000
page website will have much more punch for the money. But of
course, that requires you to have a little better understanding
of websites and website programming.
You also have to look at what
you can expect from organic traffic on datafeed type websites, it
can be very low. So to get enough traffic to make money you need
several websites.
At my peak I have over
500 affiliate websites offering products from over 400
different merchants. Some of the websites had as many as 10
million pages and they entire group of websites took up the
resources of 5 dedicated web servers. The cost of just the
domain name renewals was over $5000.00 per year add the
servers, bandwidth and the time it took to build 500 websites
and maintain them and you get a basic picture of affiliate
marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a grind,
a load of work no matter how you approach it.
If you use a blog, you have to
add to it daily, keep working it and creating new content to keep
visitors coming back. If you use the affiliates content, then you
have to build loads of websites and maintain them.
The worst part about using an
affiliates content is the time it takes to build a 10,000 page or
a 10,000,000 page website. It can take several days and when you
get it done, they affiliate changes the products and prices.
I would often get complaints
from the merchants that the price I advertised was wrong even
though the data was only a week or 2 old. They expected me to
update the site that took 3 days to build even though I was not
making any money at all. Then the next month, they were
deactivated, so all the traffic I did send was dead ended and
never had a chance to buy anything.
Add that on top of merchants
website that were not tracking sales properly, were not cross
browser compatible of just did not lad fast enough and only a
fraction of traffic actually will convert into sales.
To me, it make more sense to
run your own store than to try to make money in affiliate
marketing because at least you have control of the sale.
But affiliate websites are
great tools for merchants if not the website owners. Merchants
get loads of traffic and sales for tiny percentages of the gross.
While affiliate marketers get paid pennies for breaking their
backs to send them that traffic and if the merchant gets a bug up
their ass, they kick you out and all the work you did has to be
redone and all the banners or pages removed.
It is a never ending cycle of
work to be an affiliate marketer using websites. One that most
people will not survive but those that do, can make good money at
it if they work hard enough.
The one thing I can
tell you is that you wont get rich quick and it wont come without
very hard work and in most cases spending large amounts of cash
and money to make anything substantial.
Now there is a certain amount
of gambling and sometimes that is the thrill of affiliate
marketing.
I had one website that sold
workout equipment and in 1 year it generated 1 sale. That sale
earned me almost $800 in commission which was great. And if that
had been 4 or 5 or 10 sales it could have been $8,000.00. But it
was just one and it could have just as easily been zero sales.
So there is always hope that
there is money around the corner. Unfortunately it is a bit like
fishing and sometimes you make money and sometimes you don't.
Don't learn the hard way and
spend a load of money on marketing and website resources before
you understand what you are doing. Learn first, spend later.
Any type of affiliate
marketing today takes time and effort and become increasingly
more difficult as the Internet gets bigger and bigger and more
crowded. With hundreds of thousands of people trying to sell the
same products the waters are over fished and there is little to
catch.
So be careful what you
spend and learn as much as you can before you get started.
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