Blueprint to Start Your Affiliate Marketing Website [1.4]
Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the fourth
lesson in our affiliate marketing basics module. In this lesson, I'm going to give you
a high-level blueprint to start your first affiliate website. And this lesson will give you a good idea
of the skills, techniques and strategies you'll learn throughout this course. But first, let's recap some key principles
we've covered in the previous 3 lessons which are going to play into your strategy. So, at a high level, your affiliate site is going
to be made up of primarily blog posts. And the types of content you'll create
will mostly be informational pieces. For example, how-to articles and
comparisons of different products. And within the content, you'll add your
affiliate links to products you recommend. Now, when someone clicks on one of these
links and makes a purchase you're going to be compensated by the affiliate
merchant or partner. Now, not only will your content convert visitors
into revenue, but it's going to attract visitors to your website, too. And the marketing method we'll use to get
traffic to your affiliate site is search engine optimization because the traffic
is free, consistent and passive.
Best of all, SEO traffic will help you generate
consistent revenue that compounds over time. Now, there are actually quite a few steps
to get to the point of generating consistent traffic and revenue. But to give you a high-level overview,
we can break down the process into four macro steps. Finding a niche; planning your website;
building your website; and getting traffic to it. So let's go through these phases at
a high level, starting with finding a niche. When you're starting an affiliate site,
especially if you're relatively inexperienced, it's beneficial to start with
a heavy focus on a niche. For example, it would probably be better
to start a barbeque recipes site rather than a generic one on all types of recipes. And that's because broader topics tend
to have more competition and as a result, it'll be tough for you to get traffic to your site.
And without traffic, there is no revenue. Now, this is just one small example of the things
you'll need to consider when choosing a niche. There are other things to evaluate like
breadth of the topic, personal interest, commerciality, and more. We'll go through some techniques in module 2
to do this and I'll give you a checklist which will give you the best chance at creating
a successful affiliate website. Alright, the next stage is
planning your affiliate site.
This is where you'll be creating
the blueprint for your affiliate website. And there are two things in
particular that you'll need to plan. #1. You'll want to plan your content strategy. And this is a super-important step
because it's foundational to both traffic and conversions. Now, the majority of the planning will be
done through an SEO technique called keyword research, which is a process
to understand the queries people use to search for products, services, and
general information in search engines.
And the second thing you'll need to
plan is your site or content structure. And by structure, I'm mostly talking about
grouping which is done with internal links. We'll cover all of this in
great detail in module 3. Now, after you've finished planning
your site, you'll need to build it out. This includes making a website and
setting up tools for things like tracking. Now, the most time-consuming and
important part of this stage is creating content. Because content is what will help you to rank
in search engines and it's what your visitors will use to make buying decisions. We have an entire module dedicated to
content creation where we'll talk about the content creation process, the types of
content you should create, and I'll also give you templates you can follow for
various affiliate type content. Now, getting traffic through SEO is
much more challenging than just writing good stuff. A key ingredient to rank high in Google
and attract a ton of visitors to your site will be backlinks. We'll talk about some basic strategies that
any beginner can implement which should help power your pages to rank for their
target queries and hopefully put some money in your pocket.
So now that you have a high-level overview of
what building your affiliate site will look like, let's get our hands dirty and move on
to the second module, where we'll dig deep into finding niches, qualifying them,
and choosing one that'll be right for you..
