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Become a Marketing Mogul: How to Create an Affiliate Website

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Ever wanted to stay at home but still earn a regular income?

While there are many options to achieve this, nothing is as big as affiliate marketing. The industry continues to grow and will be worth $8 billion by 2022 (Statista). The best part is that anyone can get into it.

That said, it is an online business. You need to learn how to create an affiliate website, and then you need to know how to maintain it.

If you don’t know where to start, don’t fret. We’ve got you covered. Read on below to learn how to build an affiliate website:

Pick a Niche

Before you even begin working on the site or picking a template, pick up a sheet of paper and list down a few niches you want to focus on.

Every guide in the universe will tell you to focus on a particular niche instead of trying to market everything under the sun.

Very few have the resources and power to focus on marketing various products while still dedicating time to blog and provide helpful information to visitors.

Picture a situation where a customer visits your site and buys a product on Amazon because they liked your review. They’ll likely come back hoping for a review for a related product. Imagine the disappointment they’ll feel if your following review doesn’t match those expectations.

If your affiliate site focuses on showcasing video games, focus entirely on video games. If you want to build your site on marketing cookbooks, then stick with cookbooks and a few related items.

Find an Affiliate Program

Before building your affiliate website, one final step is to know which program you’re going to focus on.

It comes as no surprise that the most popular program is Amazon Associates. You can earn between 4-8.5% in sales commissions, and the system is easy for beginners to master. It’s also a lucrative market, given how there are over 310 million customers worldwide.

But what if you don’t want to work with Amazon?

Other top choices include ClickBank, Rakuten, and ShareASale. Rakuten, in fact, works best for people who want to market and earn commissions for products on Best Buy, Walmart, and Lacoste.

Start With WordPress

You’ve picked a niche and a program to work with. Now it’s time to build your site. The most important tip here is to avoid using a free affiliate website builder and stick with a premium CMS (content management system) like WordPress.

WordPress, on paper, is free to use. You can download it and fiddle with the dashboard to get familiar with it. However, this is only a front-end tool to build your site.

You still need to work on your site’s name and design. This brings us to the three stepping stones of a WordPress site: domain, hosting, and theme.

Domain, Hosting, Theme

web design

A domain is like a person’s name. It’s an intangible string of characters that help identify a website from others. Google.com or YouTube.com are examples of domain names.

On the other hand, hosting refers to where you store your website. If you have a high-end server computer that you can keep running 24/7 throughout the year, you can host your website independently. Most people don’t do this and instead pay for hosting services.

This means they’ll pay a fee to use a company’s servers to keep their site up and running.

Last but not least is picking a theme. Themes are pre-made designs you can apply to your website, giving it a basic look and style. It’ll be up to you to further customize it and make it look exactly the way you want.

Upgrade Your Site

WordPress offers a few free starting templates, but you don’t get to do much with them. You don’t get to organize your posts according to categories, you don’t get to play around with your own design choices, and you can’t filter anything like comments or widgets.

This is why you should upgrade your site, and yes, this does cost a bit.

You’ll want higher hosting privileges to enable unlimited video posting. This is crucial because affiliate marketers perform better when using video content to market a product.

You’ll want to pay for the license of a theme plugin like Divi or Elementor. Using a drag-and-drop system allows you to fully customize how your site looks and behaves. You can still tweak the aesthetics of your site even further with a bit of coding.

However, plugins are the most critical tools to invest in when upgrading your affiliate website.

Important Plugins

Plugins are like accessories to a car – they aren’t necessary on day one, but sooner or later, you’ll appreciate the benefits they bring to the table.

Some plugins, like Yoast SEO, allow you to monitor all your new blog posts and check how optimized the content is before you post it. Other plugins help you link your site’s content to social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook.

You’ll also want AdSanity to manage all the advertisements running on your site and ThirstyAffiliate for your affiliate links in blog posts and reviews. Google Analytics and SEMRush are also essential tools of the trade.

Buy and Review Products

Now you have to fill up your affiliate website with content.

Affiliate marketing thrives on reviews. Buy the product, record a video of yourself unboxing and testing the product, then post that video on YouTube and on your affiliate website. Make sure to put the video up with a written review because this not only engages visitors but it also helps with your SEO efforts.

Make sure to add affiliate links in your review. This ensures that people who read your post or watched the video can click on it, head straight to the product page, and buy it. The moment they complete the transaction or action – like subscribing – you’ll earn a commission.

Keep on doing this, and make sure to follow a strict schedule. Learning how to make an affiliate website also involves staying consistent and timely. Avid followers will notice what day and time you tend to post new content on your site.

Discover More Tips on How to Create an Affiliate Website Today!

With these steps, you should be able to master how to create an affiliate website. There is a learning curve, particularly with SEO and getting familiar with WordPress, but with perseverance, anyone can get the hang of it and find success.

But why stop there?

Explore our site to discover more tips to improve your affiliate website, draw more traffic, and increase your sales. We’ve got more useful guides for you to check out, such as this one showcasing the best digital marketing tips.

HubSpot