Building an Affiliate Website
There are two main approaches to making/building an Affiliate website -
- Content rich authority site
- Mini/Micro site (1-5 pages)
The choice really depends on the niche you choose to target. In general the broader the niche the larger the site.
If you are concentrating on a single affiliate product/service then the micro site is probably the best.
If you have multiple products/services in mind then the content rich approach is probably best.
However that is not the determining factor! The most important factor is getting traffic to the site.
For most sites traffic will come from the search engines and they offer two types of traffic -Paid (Google Adwords) and free (organic).
Paid traffic can be used for any size of site, however I don't recommend that you use paid traffic if you are just starting out as it can be very expensive unless you know what you are doing.
Free/organic traffic takes longer to get, and in general, it is easier to get if the site has more content.
As all sites start out small then another approach is to create a mini site and then expand it if it is doing ok to an authority site, and drop it if not.
The mini site can be set up as a one page review site or sales letter and you can drive traffic to it using paid or organic search traffic.
Dan brock's lazy super affiliate course takes you through this approach using Amazon and physical products, and is a very good introduction into affiliate marketing and niche selection.
Like all of the affiliate books and courses I've read it doesn't go into great detail of the physical web building.
It does however use my preferred method- WordPress, and you can find out more detail of how to build WordPress websites site
100s of Mini Affiliate Sites
Some books on affiliate marketing go for quantity over quality and advocate building 100s of mini sites.
The idea of building 100s is that each one will only earn a few dollars, and so to earn a decent income you will need to scale up the sites.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the mini site approach. I do have a problem with building 100s of them.
I think that mini sites are a good way of evaluating a niche before expanding it into a proper site or abandoning it.
Web Hosting for Affiliate Sites
Because you will most likely be creating more than one site you will need a hosting account that supports multiple site/domain hosting. I use:
both support multiple sites/domains on a single hosting account.
Turnkey Affiliate Websites
Ready made/Turnkey websites are being offered for sale on the web that incorporate affiliate programs and usually Google Adsense ads and require zero knowledge of web technology.
If you are tempted by these then please read the Ready Made Turnkey Websites article first.
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