Affiliate earning websites are websites set up specifically to generate an income through affiliate sales. Anyone can earn with affiliate marketing even without their own product or anything to sell.
This is done by joining an affiliate program, getting a unique identifying link, (known as an affiliate link), and promoting that link online. This can be done in many ways, not just from a website. You can promote your affiliate link through an email message, through an advert or throughout your social media platforms too. You can upload videos and promote your link that way.
However, the reason many affiliates choose to build a website is that it offers an affordable way to generate traffic. An affiliate website, set up with all the bells a whistles, may be set up to sell in principle. But without traffic, it won’t sell anything.
Traffic is a major key to selling with affiliate earning websites. But it isn’t the only factor in generating an automated income online.
Affiliate Earning Websites – Types Of Traffic
Not all traffic is equal. Some people come to visit a website and only want to find some information. Other visitors might want to buy something, but the intent of most online users is in gathering information. After all, the internet is an information gathering tool.
To build an affiliate earning website which generates sales, you’ll need to attract the kind of traffic which converts into sales. This can be done by paying attention to the search terms looked at by visitors immediately before finding your website.
So for example, you might have searched for the term “affiliate earning websites” before finding this page. Each search term has a particular intent behind it. For an affiliate website you want your search terms on your website to attract buyers.
A good example of a search for someone wanting to find some free information is “how to sell an ebook from your own website“, for example. “How to” queries tend to signify that the visitor is looking for information, not wanting to buy something.
Someone looking for a review of a product, though, is very different. Product review websites tend to be a good idea for affiliates for a simple but powerful reason: the visitor is looking for something specific to buy. A good example of a buyer intent search term might be “Modern Wealthy Review“, for example, a product I promote on this website.
Affiliate Earning Websites – Knowing Your Audience
Since there’s millions of people online at any particular time, you can easily attract the wrong kind of visitor to your affiliate website. To avoid wasting your time creating the wrong kind of content, or paying for the wrong kind of advertising, to get traffic to an affiliate earning website, it’s useful to know who you intend to attract.
To get very clear on your target audience or customer avatar, spend some time figuring out who you can best serve with your affiliate product/s. What kind of person would be likely to be interested in buying from your affiliate website? Where do they live? What searches are they performing online? How old are they and so on.
When you can answer these and more questions about your customer avatar, you can begin to either create content to attract them, or pay for advertising to get people to land on your website. See the customer avatar worksheet pdf to help you work on your customer avatar.
Knowing your audience, and specifically, the audience who is most likely to buy from you, can shave years off your affiliate experience.
Affiliate Earning Websites – Attracting Traffic
Now you have spent some time on your customer avatar, you know who you would like to attract. There’s two main ways to attract people to an affiliate earning website: either through content marketing or with paid marketing. With content marketing you create content on your website which attracts your target audience. With paid marketing, you use an advertising platform to send traffic to your site directly. See also content creation vs paid marketing.
While paid marketing is very fast, you can also spend a lot before you start selling. So it’s wise to start with a small marketing budget you can easily afford to lose, while you test and measure your results. The advantage of paid marketing is that it’s super fast and it’s pretty much like turning on a tap for traffic. Plus, you can scale up too, once you’re running a profitable campaign which gives you a good return.
Organic marketing, on the other can be very slow. You’ll need to create and promote a lot of content before you start to see even a trickle of traffic. The benefit of content marketing is that it’s free to do, although it does take time and effort. The good news though is that over time, your work compounds and the small trickles of traffic slowly grow into streams and rivers.
Affiliate Earning Websites – Email Marketing
Most affiliate earning websites have an offer you will find somewhere on the website. Often this will be obvious when you visit the site and it might take the form of a popup offer, promoting a free ebook or course.
This is a strategy which is very beneficial for an affiliate earning website – email marketing. By building an email list of subscribers, the affiliate has greater control over their traffic. They can send out regular messages to their subscribers which either promote their content or their affiliate products (or both).
Affiliates build trust with their subscribers by delivering value driven messages while promoting their products. See also don’t forget your email list.
Touchpoints
To earn from an affiliate website you need to join an affiliate program and promote your product from your site. Since most website visitors only stick around a few minutes, it’s definitely worth building an email list as I mentioned. An email list gives you a much longer period of time to let your subscribers build their confidence in you and of course offers more opportunities to buy from you too.
Studies have shown that the average online user will need 6-8 touch points before they buy from you, especially if they don’t know you. A website doesn’t offer this but you can communicate with visitors who have signed up to your email list more frequently. You can also use retargeting to place advertising in front of visitors who have left your website.
Your choice of product is an important part of building an affiliate earning website and has a lot to do with your success. Ideally choose products which are already proven to sell and which offer huge value to your audience.
See also best products to sell as an affiliate.
Summary
As you can see there’s a lot to think about with an affiliate earning website. The easy part is setting up your website with affiliate links within it. It’s much more difficult bring traffic towards your site which converts into sales.
To increase your conversion rate you can spend more money on traffic or create more content, build an email list or use retargeting – to bring visitors back to your site. Ultimately though you need to attract visitors who have an intention to take action on your site. This can be done more simply after understanding who you want to attract to your site – see the customer avatar worksheet for more on this.
You can get started with a “plug and play” website through this training program.