While a lot of affiliate marketers can operate without
setting up a website, the benefits of doing so will become immediately
apparent. First, having your own website establishes your credibility on the
subject, and further lends authority to the product you are promoting.
While you can strictly use AdWords and other contextual
advertising methods, having your own website is a way to add other income
streams, organize and consolidate your affiliate product offerings and add
other types of advertising and monetization schemes to your site.
Setting up a website is not that difficult nor is it very
expensive any more. If you decide to go with your own website, there are a few
things you should know in order to get started.
Get your own domain name. A domain name is a unique name
that identifies your website. It transforms an IP address (100.99.103.44) to
something memorable – www.yourdomain.com.
Having your own domain name adds to the authority of what
you’re writing, should be easy to remember and gives you a platform from which
to write. Registering a domain name nowadays costs only about $8 to $10. Some
of the best registrars include:
Godaddy.com
Namecheap.com
Internic.com
Next, you will want to get webhosting. This is also very
inexpensive. A full featured webhosting plan will cost you only about $5.00 to
$10.00 per month.
Godaddy.com
Hostgator.com
Dreamhost.com
Get an easy to use website platform. You don’t need to be an
HTML or Dreamweaver expert to set up a really nice site.
The platform of choice these days is WordPress, which is
very simple to setup by using Fantastico
and Cpanel, and there are tons of
very nice themes out there for you to use. Two other easy to use content
systems are Drupal and Joomla.
All three of these will build out a full site for you that
has an admin interface that is easy to learn and use. Through the use of one of these platforms, you can
accomplish a number of essential things to the success of your affiliate sales:
Affiliate link cloaking: It would be nice to think that everybody
is honest. However, this is not the case. As a result, you need to cloak your
affiliate link so that when a person clicks through your link and buys the
product, the commission goes to you.
Especially with an affiliate network like Clickbank, it is
very important to cloak your original link with an ironclad decoy link that
keeps the commission protected.
It will take a link that looks like a mish-mash of letters
and dots and like this: http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net
and turn it into something like this:
http://yourdomain.com/product.html.
It makes it both easier to read and keeps your affiliate information secret and
intact.
Pre-selling: This affords you the opportunity to write or
have written articles that are keyword optimized (which means that they are
designed to rank highly in the search engines for specific words), traffic
magnets that affords visitors the opportunity to learn more about a specific product
and get more exposure that leads to eventual conversion. Pre-selling is an art
that happens over time.
Ad Tracking & Analytics: While Google AdWords offers
excellent ad tracking features, having a person visit your website further
refines the analytics you can look at.
As a visitor explores your entire website, you are gaining
valuable information about what pages they visited how long they stayed on
specific pages, what links they clicked and the like. All of this information
can help you refine what is on your website.
For instance, say a person arrives at your home page, goes
to a page on a specific product and then goes through a link on that page to
another page on your site and stays there for a long time.
If this happens over and over, you have just gained valuable
information about what has caught people’s interest. In that way, you can offer
more of the same that is on the second page so that people are likely to return
and be re-exposed to you, your products and your site.
Blogging About Specific Topics Related To Your Affiliate
Product: With a website built on the WordPress platform, you can set up certain
programs called plug-ins that automatically optimize your website.
What this means is that Google and the other search engine
spiders will love to stop by your site and add pages to their search index.
As you get more pages into the search engines, you will rank
higher. What this means is that you will have more and more visibility and in
turn more traffic will visit your site over time.
Learning about keyword research and search engine
optimization or SEO is one of the things that every affiliate should learn.
The more you know, the better your site will become, and the
better your site, the more sales you will make.
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