The first thing that most aspiring affiliate marketers do at the start of their online business is to create a marketing website. It can a traditional website or a blog site. But the preferred choice of most is the blog site because of its interactive medium. Your visitors/readers are able to offer their comments and be seen by other readers/visitor too, this flexibility and highly interactive come of communication is the foundation of internet marketing which is to build bonds and foster relationships with your reader/visitor.
This concept of information marketing is what works best on the on the internet as your potential customers are not able to see your products on display publicly as you would find in a conventional store. To sell to customers on the internet, you would have to build a bond with them for them to trust you and like you before you are able to recommend a solution or product/service to them for consideration. This concept is termed as permission based marketing.
It is with this permission that was granted by the visitor/reader that you will be able to send them sales email as well as content of value periodically. The products/service that you recommend can be created or produced by you or like in most cases is the inventory of an affiliate partner. The affiliate partner is a company that offers affiliate programs to individuals to market and sell their products/services. The affiliates earn a commission for every sale that they make through their affiliate product link.
The advantage of being on an affiliate program is that the company does all the heavy lifting. The company handles the buying and storing of the inventory. They will also handle the packaging and delivery of the product that are sold by the affiliates and also follow up with the customers for any sales and service issues. As an affiliate, your job is done as soon as the payment is transacted. This is why the majority of internet marketers do affiliate marketing.
Let us now take a look the 7 steps to create a marketing website for an affiliate marketing business.
- Choosing Your Market/Niche
The online business model works a little differently that an offline conventional business where you would just need to get a store and stock it with your inventory to sell. You can even have 200 different types of unrelated items to sell in your store. You can have alcoholic beverages on one shelf and infant formula milk on another. Your customer would not be confused by all the unrelated items as they are able to pick out specifically whatever that they need from the items on display. This works in the same way for big online retail giants such as Amazon.
However as an affiliate marketer, your customers are people who are looking for specialized information of a certain problem or concern before deciding to buy. For example, a person search the internet for information on Keto Diet as he wants to lose weight would enter the keywords “Keto diet for weight loss” into the Google search box. Google will then provide him with a list of recommended sites to view. The searcher then browses through the list and decide which site to check out. This is called information based marketing.
So in order for you to sell to a potential customer online, you will need to know the profile of your customer. What I have described in the above paragraph is your typical customer as an affiliate marketer. You are technically an information marketer. Taking the above Keto Diet example, as an information marketer you have to be very knowledgeable about Keto Diet and weight loss in general. The searcher goes on the internet to seek professional information on specifically his area of concern. The algorithm system in Google will pick out a list of sites with related keywords and provide it to the searcher. It would be ridiculous or rather impossible for Google to provide him with a list of sites for a search on Keto Diet that had included sites for pet grooming and tennis.
You have to understand the concerns and the needs of your customers. So in choosing a market or niche you would need to be specific and it has to be something that you have a lot of interest in and are passionate about. You will also need to bear in mind that you will be doing a lot of writing and talking on this specific niche for as long as you want to sell the product online. Changing to a different niche 1 or 2 years after you have started would mean that all your effort for the past 1 to 2 years would have been wasted.
- Setting Up Your Blog Site/Website
It is important that you should invest in your business. To create a marketing website and build a business is an investment that would provide you with the yield or rewards later. You should cultivate this mind-set from the start if you want to see your business grow and produce the intended results. I would recommend that you get a paid domain for your website or blog site. It is a relatively small investment of around $10/- for a domain name but this provides you with the peace of mind that all the hard work of several years building website would not just disappear or are missing some parts.
In saying that you should invest in your business and pay for the services that you need does not mean that I am telling you to think big as you will be earning big money rather it is about safety and prudency of your business. BlueHost and NameCheap are but 2 of many domain name and hosting service providers on the internet. WordPress is able to assist you with your website building platform. It is user friendly and would be able to get the job done quite easily. I have included this comprehensive video by my friend Wes McDowel for your easy reference.
- Finding Your Product
The rule of thumb in looking for a popular product is that it must be related to your niche and also financially viable. You need to do a little research in looking for a product to market or promote on your site. The affiliate programs offers you an easy way to look for the products that are related to your niche or market. There are 2 types of products that you can choose to market which is a physical product or a digital product.
The difference between the 2 products are the commissions that they pay out. If you choose a physical product to market, you will need to find a popular high priced product as physical products tend to have a commissions pay out of between 4 to 10%. The digital products have a higher commissions pay out between 70 to 90%. Do not be swayed by choosing a high ticket product just because of the commissions, rather choose it because it is popular. This means that other affiliate marketers have sold many of the same product and it is well received by the market. There are more than 15,000 affiliate programs available online to choose from. ClickBank, Amazon and CJAffiliate are a few of the well-known brands. All the affiliate programs will come with all the marketing material, tutorials and affiliate support service to help and guide you.
- Setting Up Your Autoresponder
The autoresponder service for the purpose of delivering sales email and content of value to your subscribers. The service is fully automated and once you have set it up will continue to send the series of sales email and follow up messages and help you to build rapport and relationship with your prospects from your subscribers list. These are the people who have permitted you to send them those emails. The series of sales email can be programed on your autoresponder to be sent out at scheduled intervals to your subscribers. You would need this service as it is very time consuming for you to manually send out that many emails to all your subscribers. Getresponse.com and Aweber.com are a couple of popular autoresponder companies.
- Building Your Subscribers List
The subscriber list is compulsory to sustain your business. Running an online business without a subscribers list is akin to an insurance salesman trying to sell insurance without a client base. Your subscribers list is actually your client base. These are people who have agreed to receive your sales emails and product recommendations. You can build your subscribers list by creating a squeeze page or inserting an email capture form on your blog page or website.
The squeeze page or email capture form is the means for you to interest the visitor/reader to provide their email address in exchange for a free e-book or e-zine. This is called an opt-in process. The free e-book and e-zines will usually be provided for you in the affiliate program. The subscribers list would then be stored in your autoresponder database and this is where your communication with them begin. It is highly unlikely that a prospect would buy from you on the first instance so by maintaining and continuing to communicate with them via email, it will eventually foster a relationship in which they would begin to know and trust you.
- Writing Content Of Value To Your Blog Site or Website
To create a marketing website you would also need content. Your website or blog site have to carry content related to your niche so that your visitor is able to know that you are a person with specialized knowledge on the area of concern or problem. This is where you would be able to provide your expert advice, share tips and information of value on the subject matter. Please keep in mind that the information has to help your reader with his concern otherwise he would leave and in the long run, you would end up losing a lot of traffic this way.
You can write articles and come up with content of quality by following this simple guide;
- Your heading/title should no more than 6 to 8 words.
- Your article should be about 2000 words long.
- Your article must have back links to other quality and relevant resource sites.
- Your keywords must be either in the title or first 100 words of your article.
- You should insert infographics and videos in your article.
- Do not use text talk for your post rather write out all words. (Your readers might not take you seriously if you use text talk in your post)
- Generating Traffic To Your Website or Blog Site
To create a marketing website or blog site you would need traffic. It is the lifeblood of your online business. This is where your potential customers would be from. Running a business on the internet without traffic is akin to opening a store in a shopping mall with all doors to the malls locked up. As a result there will be no shoppers coming into the mall and you might as well just close your store. There are 2 methods that you can do this, the free method and the paid method. It is recommended that you have one paid and one free method.
You can generate traffic to your blog /website by using a strategy called the SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The SEO is a tool for you to drive the targeted readers/audience to your blog/website. You need to understand a little bit of how this actually works in order for you to implement the strategy effectively.
The on page SEO works on the concept of keywords and to do this you would need to optimize all your articles, comments, videos and pictures to be in line with the keywords. You can get the keywords related to your topic or niche by using the keyword search free sites available on the internet. The list of keywords would give you a good indication of what long tail keywords to use for your articles, comments
The off page SEO is a strategy is another means that you can use to give your blog site more exposure and help drive up traffic. You can invite experienced bloggers to write guest posts on your website and this would mean a better content for your readers. It will also benefit the guest writer. This method is excellent in keeping the interest up with your readers/visitors. Networking in this way improves your rapport with other bloggers too.
Learning how to create a marketing website and ensuring it succeeds requires you to have the right attitude and mind-set from the onset. You should put in your efforts diligently and consistently for you to attain success. It is the same in the offline conventional business as well. I wish you all the best and I hope that the article was helpful to you. Thank you and God Bless.
. "There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed."-- Ray Goforth
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