Which is better; a blog vs website for affiliate marketing? In a blog, traffic can be attracted through creating a lot of content. Search engines index the content and the site is found through the SERPS (search engine results pages).
The same can be true for a simple website, however, it generally won’t rank as well or for as many searches. A website alone is less powerful than a blog with thousands of articles on it because it attracts less attention. So generally a new affiliate will need to advertise their website in order to get visitors to find it.
This can be done very quickly if you’re prepared to pay for it, or more slowly by building a blog on your website and creating a lot of content. Platforms such as Google Adwords allows website owners to drive targeted traffic to them quickly, which can result in sales.
However, it can be expensive to drive traffic to a website, and if you’re unsure of your profitability this comes with more financial risk. (Although you can set a daily budget). Blogging on the other hand is cheap! You can create content over a longer period of time and this eventually will draw more and more traffic to your site for free. But this takes time and a lot of effort. So according to your own personal preferences and circumstances, it’s wise to choose a strategy of marketing which suits you.
Blog Vs Website For Affiliate Marketing
A Google/Facebook compliant website can be set up for the specific purpose of advertising an affiliate product. This can be done fairly quickly and you can then send targeted (paid) traffic towards your site, in order to sell affiliate products. If you’re short on time, this solution is probably better than blogging for you.
However, to maximise the potential earning power of your website, it’s useful to choose an affiliate business model which can be used in conjunction with paid advertising. High ticket affiliate products are a good idea here because you can recover your advertising spend much more easily. With a low value offering, it can more difficult to make a profit. Subscription affiliate programs also offer the ability to make recurring income from each sale you make. This again will help you build more stability into an affiliate business more quickly.
With blogging, it can take several months before you see a good amount of traffic. In that time you’ll need to be creating regular content and uploading it to your site. The disadvantage of this is that it takes a long time to generate the same traction you could with paid marketing very quickly.
The advantage of creating content through blogging is that it can work for you passively once you have put the work in. This means your sales are 100% profit because you’re not paying to advertise. But this can take several months or even years of hard work, before you see anything for your efforts!
Blog Vs Website For Affiliate Marketing – Niche Websites
A niche website is one built around a specific subject or niche. This site Affiliate Marketing Mentors, for example has been built around that specific topic. A niche site can give you an advantage in that it is very focused. If you build a niche site in an uncompetitive niche, you have a lot more chance of ranking your site at the top of the search engines for your specific keywords.
This can be a neat way of attracting free traffic without spending such a long time building hundreds of blog posts. If you do it right, you can get your site ranking at the top of Google. This means free traffic can come quite quickly. However there’s no guarantees and if you’re choosing keywords in a competitive market, your chances are severely limited. See niche affiliate marketing website for more on this topic.
You can also use this same strategy when creating content for a blog. Find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. What this means is that your published content has lower competition on the search engine results pages (SERPS) than shorter tail keywords. As such, you are much more likely to get your content ranking near the top, or at least on the first page of the search results. This means free traffic to your website.
Combining Content & Paid Marketing
You can of course do a little bit of both of these strategies, or all three:
- Build a niche website
- Create lots of content
- Use paid marketing to increase your traffic (alongside your free traffic)
Depending on your situation and available time, you can choose your marketing strategy accordingly. A useful way to promote a blog is through using paid search traffic. Both Google Ads and Bing (Microsoft Ads) offer the ability to run a “dynamic” advert. This is an advertising campaign which uses existing content on your site/blog and shows ads appropriate to your available content. See more about dynamic search ads here.
Whichever method of marketing you use to promote your affiliate product/s from a website, it’s useful to also use email marketing. The power of email marketing is that it allows you to retain your audience’s attention for much longer than is possible from a website alone.
On a website, a visitor only sticks around for a few minutes at the most. Once they leave they are gone forever! If you offer something on your site which encourages them to sign up to your email list, then you can send them marketing messages by email for days, weeks and even months and years into the future!
Summary
A blog is a good idea if you have the time and inclination to create a lot of content on your website. It can give you free traffic if you stick at it long enough. This means when you make an affiliate sale, it’s 100% profit, disregarding the time you’ve put in. Plus, blog traffic gives you a passive income.
However, it can take months or years creating the content for this to work. During which time nothing much seems to be happening! With a website and through using paid marketing, you can build an affiliate business much more quickly; especially if you use subscription affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate marketing products.
If you have the time, you can of course do a little of both blogging and paid marketing. You can also build a niche website around specific keywords to attract the attention of the search engines with minimal effort. See niche affiliate marketing website.