You may be researching affiliate marketing for the first time, or, you could already have started a site but aren’t happy with conversions. Wherever you are in your journey to making an income online, you need some help. It’s one thing to create an affiliate marketing site, but it’s quite another to build one that will actually make money. The best part, however, is that you can make a site yourself that is built for conversions. It doesn’t take any particular expertise, but you do need a roadmap that will help you get to where you need to go. In this article, I will go over the best ways to create a website for affiliate marketing that is built to make you money.
There are a number of website builders to choose from these days. Wix is becoming increasingly popular as an example. But, WordPress is the ultimate choice when it comes to building an affiliate marketing website. It is open source and the people that work on it are very passionate about the project.
There are thousands of themes to choose from that will allow you to create a site without any programming knowledge at all. Many of those themes are free, but since we are focuses on conversions, I want to steer you away from using a free theme. A paid theme will be more streamlined as it will have been built by professionals that won’t have bloated code that may slow your site down.Which one is best is always up for debate and really depends on the type of site you plan to build. There are some that work best for DIY and home improvement types of sites that won’t work as well if you tried to use it for a fashion blog, for example.
If you don’t have any programming experience then you will need to use plugins to perform certain tasks. The best free WordPress plugins will help you do things that will help your site rank and convert. For example, a caching plugin will allow your posts to be “saved” at the host so it loads faster for a visitor. Site speed is crucial for getting ranked in the search engines like Google and this will play a big part on how much money you can make. Look for other plugins that help speed up your site like image compressors and lazy loaders. Buttons are known to convert far better than text, so a plugin that allows you to create a call to action button is essential.
If you just put your affiliate link in a body of text, it is less likely to be clicked. Remember that people skim the page to get to the information they are looking for and could overlook the link. A button catches the reader’s attention and they will usually click the link. A geolocalizer is also going to help immensely with conversions. If you are primarily using Amazon to make money, then using one of these plugins will direct the user to their closest Amazon store. Since your traffic can be coming from all over the world, you won’t lose the cookie if they are not in the US if you have signed up for other international Amazon affiliate programs.
No matter how much time you spend optimizing your site, if you are on a poor host, then you will have trouble ranking. A cheap host will not offer much in the way of security for one thing and that can have you lose your site to hackers.Another point is that they use shared servers and that can really slow your site down. Paying more for a host that offers the best uptime and the fastest load time is going to pay off in higher rankings so it is worth the money. Uptime refers to the time that your site is active. Sometimes hosts go down as their server has problems. These problems can be if the power goes out in the area where the server is located or even if there are technical problems on the host’s back end.
Some downtime is inevitable, but a good host should have your site up in minutes if it goes down rather than hours like some lesser hosts provide. Load time is as the name suggests. It is how long it takes for the server to respond to the request to load the page. If the host has a small server and a lot of sites hostes on it, then this slows down the load time and your site will be slow no matter how well you tries to speed it up. If your site is slow to load, people will hit the back button. This means lower conversions and an eventual drop in the rankings as this is a signal for Google that your site is poorly set up and they don’t want users going to it anymore.
If you have a few different types of content on your site, then interlinking within each category is the best way to help Google understand your site. It also makes it very easy for a user to navigate so they can spend more time on your site. The more time spent on site generally equates to higher conversions. Siloing means that you place links to other posts on your site within the same category and avoid linking out to other categories that are not directly related to this particular post. If you are linking out to a different category then this can confuse the Google AI when your page is crawl. Make sure that your menu clearly has your categories displayed and each of the posts are under the correct category so users can find the information they need.
This may sound like a lot of steps, but it is all fairly easy to do. If you have the patience then you can set this all up yourself and be on your way to a passive income once everything is set up properly.
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