Preparing for Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing can be a great source of extra income when you own a website. You sign up with a company that manufactures or sells something, you put ads or links on your website, and whenever someone clicks through from your site to buy something, you get a payment. You don’t have to stock the item, sell the item, ship it, service it, or indeed do anything at all except send buyers to the place where they can buy it.
Sounds like money for jam, but the sad truth is that most affiliate marketing sites don’t make a cent. Want to be the exception?
First, choose an affiliate marketing program that works for your visitors. If you own a golf course or have a website for your golf training courses, then you should consider golf clubs, clothes, and books on golfing — not surfboards, astrology software, or printer ink. Ideally, your affiliate marketing will increase the value of your site to your visitors by giving them easy access to things they’re already interested in buying.
Second, make sure you have a valuable site, apart from the affiliate ads. You may think that choosing a poker affiliate and making a poker-themed site is enough. However, in order to earn with an affiliate site, you have to have traffic. In order to have traffic, you need to have something on your website to bring people there. To draw people who might be interested in your poker affiliate marketing, you must have content on your site that is interesting, informative, and/or enjoyable for people who are interested in poker.
A professionally-built website will always get better results than a mass-produced or homemade one. This is true for the site that brings people to your business, and it will be true for an affiliate marketing site as well. Strong content, attractive design, and clean code improve your site from the point of view of search and conversion. New content on a regular basis will keep the search engines interested in your site and encourage visitors as well.
So you have a well-built site with a content management system that allows you to update your website regularly, you have content that brings people to your website, and you have affiliate ads or links that offer your visitors something they want. Now you have to keep track of what happens at your site and respond to it.
That is, you must notice what your visitors like to read or buy, and provide more of it. You have to notice where your traffic comes from and encourage it.
Let’s go back to our golf example. Imagine you have a golf school here in Jacksonville. Your website brings people who want golf lessons to you. Chances are, people interested in golf lessons will also be interested in golf clubs, shoes, and other golf products. You add a golf gear affiliate marketing program to your website. You notice that your visitors are buying golf shoes through your links. So you add a page on your website that gives useful tips for choosing the right golf shoes. You link from this page to the golf shoes people can buy through the affiliate program.
Your new page adds value for your regular visitors, increases sales for your affiliate program, and increases your visibility and authority in your field.
Follow this process — choose a good affiliate, build a good website, and respond to your affiliate sales — and you’re likely to find that affiliate marketing is a good additional income stream for your business.
Not sure about your website? Take the Oyova 7-Step Website Checkup to be sure your site is doing its job. No website? Call us today and get online — your business needs a website whether you try affiliate marketing or not.
