I’ve taken all kinds of advice on how to setup an affiliate marketing website over the years. It began with the very first online course I took. I was taught how to build websites from scratch. Initially this took quite a long time to get to grips with. I had to buy a domain name, get hosting, transfer the domain name to the hosting, and so on.
Once I had built a few, it was like second nature. However, much of the website building skills I learned have become pretty much obsolete. You don’t need it any more. Anyone can now have an user friendly affiliate website up and running in a few minutes. Just check out the video below by clicking the image.
How To Setup An Affiliate Marketing Website
As you can see, it’s a simple process to set up an affiliate website. What’s not so simple is marketing it. I spent literally years building websites and attempting to market them online with little success. One of the first courses I did was on how to set up niche websites.
If you don’t know about niche websites, they’re basically websites based around a business ‘niche’ of some kind. If you can find a ‘gold nugget’ in the internet world which is both popular but uncompetitive, you might have a chance of ranking your website on Google’s search engine. This means free traffic.
Website Traffic
If you’ve just started looking for how to setup an affiliate marketing website, you might not know how important traffic is. Let me tell you it’s probably the most important thing if you want to make any money from affiliate marketing. Without visitors to your site, you’ll make zero money. Perhaps that’s obvious? It wasn’t to me when I started! I had all kinds of strange ideas that I was going to suddenly make lots of sales, just by having a website that looked pretty!
The truth is no-one will visit your website unless you focus on building traffic to it.
Targeted Traffic
Any old ‘tyre kicking’ traffic is no good either! This was another mistake I made by omission. I figured that an internet business was such a good idea, that anyone coming across my website would immediately agree! So I attempted to get people to my websites by linking on my social media platforms and writing articles. Still no sales. What I didn’t know was that I needed targeted traffic. I needed hungry buyers, not my resentful friends who were fed up of my posting stuff about affiliate marketing!
Over time I realised that it was what I didn’t know which held me back with my affiliate marketing business. So I continued to educate myself with various online business training courses.
How To Set Up An Affiliate Marketing Website – Products
There’s another important element of having a successful affiliate business too. It’s products. Without the right products, you’ll never make any sales. It’s rather like getting the right traffic. Your website traffic must be a good match for your products. Otherwise it’ll be like trying to sell a bath in a car showroom! Imaging going to the garage to get your car fixed, and the mechanic tries to sell you a persian rug! It sounds ridiculous, but that’s exactly what people attempt to do with their websites. They think any traffic will get sales. You have to think about the kind of visitor you want to attract to your website. What are you offering?
Your products not only need to be a good match for your customers, they also need to offer lasting value. Many affiliate products only pay you once. You’ll need a constant flow of new customers all the time with products like these. With the right product range, you can earn commissions from a number of different sources:
- High ticket products – let you earn higher commissions, offset advertising costs (more on this later), and scale up more easily
- Up-sells – let you earn from products sold later to existing customers (not all affiliate programs offer this)
- Subscription products allow you to earn again and again from a single sale. (Memberships, hosting, software are examples of subscription products)
- Multi-tier sales let you earn again from your referrals when they make sales.
How To Setup An Affiliate Marketing Website – Digital Products Vs Physical
There’s all kinds of plug and play business models to choose from these days. But you need to educate yourself about what each one offers. The website isn’t the business, so be wary of the instant website riches “magic bullet”. It would be great if it were true, but the truth is you’ll need to work on your website and yourself to make it profitable.
Physical products like the ones you can find on Amazon for example, pay out much less that their digital counterparts. A typical digital product pays out 40% commissions to its affiliates. Compare this to the chart below which gives typical commissions for physical products on Amazon.
As you can see, your web monetization model will have a huge impact on your income.
Knowing the best business model to choose, and the best traffic generation methods to suit you, can have a massive impact on your internet based business.
Traffic Generation Methods – Marketing
Your marketing strategy will determine to a degree, the speed of your business growth. This also depends on choosing the right business strategy too. Marketing to your website is something you’re going to have to do, if you want to become successful at selling your affiliate products.
The fantasy is that you throw up a website and it just makes money. The reality is that Google will rarely, if ever, rank a website which provides little or no value. New websites in particular are going to have a hard time ranking on the free Google searches and getting traffic.
This means you’ll need to roll your sleeves up and create some content for your site. Or, if you’re too busy and have the cash, I’d recommend using paid advertising, if you want it fast! Paid advertising is quite simply the fastest method of building an online business.
But you’ll need a product ‘suite’ behind your site to recoup your advertising costs. Otherwise many online advertising platforms are too expensive, especially if you’re only making small commissions on your products.
Paid Advertising vs Content Creation
Creating content can be an enjoyable way to build your online presence. You can write content or create videos and upload them to YouTube. Target long tail keywords which you can rank your content for. Checkout my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit for more on this. This takes time and is a longer more time consuming strategy than paid advertising. Plus, you don’t know know how well your content will do and there’s no way of scaling up your work (short of paid advertising). You can create more content, but one piece of content might work better than another. 
Paid advertising on the other hand is much more immediate. You can run a number of campaigns and get immediate results. You can cancel adverts which fail and scale up those which work. Although you’ll need some cash to do this, it’s a much faster way to generate results than content creation. Plus, if you’re working, you can run adverts while you’re at work and make adjustments when you get time. Checkout my ebook The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing.
How To Setup An Affiliate Marketing Website
This article has been about how to setup an affiliate marketing website, even though it’s mostly been the basic strategies which I’ve mentioned. There’s a reason for this. I started years ago by setting up websites with no real understanding of how to generate traffic, collect emails (see list building), and use the best business model for success. I failed again and again because I didn’t understand how much work was involved and the right actions to take. I set up many affiliate websites with the hope that they’d somehow get traffic and make money. It took me a long time to realise how much I didn’t know!
It will pay you dividends to get the right training and education before you set out and build an affiliate marketing website. Get started here with a 7 day video series. If you decide this strategy is right for you, you can have a website built in minutes which has a range of high ticket products within it for you to sell. Follow the video series to learn more, or get started here by purchasing the app. You’ll be able to join an online community of internet business owners and learn from others on the same path as you.