How to start an affiliate marketing website in 10 steps

 How to start an affiliate marketing website in 10 steps

How can you get started with affiliate marketing? Now that you know some of the ins and outs of affiliate marketing, we can get to the nitty-gritty of developing a website that sells.

Step 1: Choose your niche

As they say, the riches are in the niches, and the first step in developing your affiliate marketing strategy is choosing your niche. 

To find your affiliate marketing niche, 

First, find an industry you love. 

Second, identify a brand that aligns with your tastes or values. 

Third, find out the ins and outs of the brand’s affiliate program.

Does it have an affiliate program with lucrative commissions? If so, great job. You’re on the right track.

Keep this in mind: It’s important to double-check your work before you double down on the brand. 

How much search traffic does your niche get in Google? If no one is searching for it, then your website doesn’t stand to get many visitors, and it’s going to be challenging to sell. 

Utilizing a tool like SE Ranking will add to your bottom line in the long run. You can evaluate the search volume of relevant keywords through the Keyword Research tool and type in a keyword you’re considering targeting. 

DO KEYWORD RESEARCH

Enter a search term and find untapped keyword opportunities to make your site more visible in search.

Enter a keyword

Analyze

In this case, let’s analyze the keyword “electric mixer” to see if we should pursue a baking blog.

Keyword analysis in SE Ranking

On the results page, we get some good news: “electric mixer” gets about 14.8K searches per month. However, it’s also pretty difficult to rank for this particular keyword.

Data on keywords in SE Ranking

To investigate further, we can view the report under Similar Keywords.

Keyword ideas in SE Ranking

This brings us here.

Data about keywords in SE Ranking

This tells us that we have many options for keywords, and while some of these phrases might have a lower volume, the competition is lower, too.

The key takeaway: We know that there is search demand for this product type in Google. 

If you start to do keyword research and see that your niche looks promising, a logical next step is to collect all of the relevant keywords in one place, like a spreadsheet. These phrases will shape the type of content you create and your target keyword list.

Step 2: Analyze your competitors

Ranking high in Google means outranking a lot of other web pages. Competitor research is a critical aspect of discovering how you’ll strategize to outrank your competitors. SE Ranking’s Competitive Research tool can give you key insights. 

DO COMPETITIVE RESEARCH

Who are your closest rivals and how do they position themselves in search? It's time to find out.

Enter a domain / URL

Analyze

In Competitive Research, you can enter the URL of sites you would ideally like to outrank for important search terms. The tool will give insights into important factors that will help you outrank your competition, such as:

Organic traffic and keywords for which the site ranks

Paid traffic

Referring domains

Backlinks

You can also look into historical data to gauge what your niche and competitors have looked like across time. To look at the stats of a particular competitor, all you need to do is adjust the time.

Competitive research using SE Ranking

You’ll be able to view any domain’s keyword history, along with their organic and paid rankings, as far back as February of 2020.

Go to Keyword Research—Organic SERP History to get a holistic view of the niche you want to target. There, you can see which sites ranked in the top-100 for a particular keyword across a selected period of time. 

You’ll be able to spot all the rankings fluctuations, whose rankings improved over time, and which sites dropped in rankings. Also, you’ll see which sites have been in the top-10 the longest and who just recently joined the competition. 

Checking ranking fluctuations in SE Ranking

This information can give you insight into your competition and your niche’s volatility. By doing so, you’ll better understand how you can climb the Google rankings.

Step 3: Choose an affiliate network

In a nutshell, affiliate networks connect brands and retailers with marketers. 

It’s a win-win. The brand gets exposure, and the marketer gets paid. ShareASale is one such network. They help content creators, website owners, and influencers build partnerships with brands that align with their values. Impact and Rakuten are two more options if you’re looking to jump into an affiliate network.

These networks take a lot of the grunt work out of finding brands to partner in affiliate marketing.

You can also explore aggregators like OfferVault. This platform helps affiliate marketers find offers, connect with networks, and verify their reputations.

At this point, you can study various affiliate programs and decide which brand you’d like to partner with once your site is up and running. In most cases, you won’t qualify for admission into an affiliate program until you have a website that boasts a steady flow of traffic.

Step 4: Design your website structure

Before you start building anything (or paying someone else to do it), put pen to paper and map out:

(a) The look and feel of your website. 

(b) How your website needs to function.

Is it going to be image-heavy or packed with videos? Is it primarily text-based? With what other tools does it need to integrate, possibly a CMS or CRM?

Additionally, what will your website structure look like—linear, network, or hierarchical? Having the proper structure helps with search visibility and optimization.

The best time to start mapping out the pages of your website is when you’re designing your web structure. Web structure is important because you need to consider how you’ll map out SEO early in the process.

SEO for a new website is vital because it can get you started on the right foot with Google.

Remember, in Step 1, you started collecting keywords that you need to optimize your pages around. While designing your web structure, it’s important to put these keywords into clusters—meaning that you organize them into buckets based on their topics. 

Organizing keywords into clusters makes finding relevant information easier for your users. It also helps Google understand and rank your content. 

Step 5: Build your website

At this point, you know you have two options: learn to build your site yourself or hire someone to do it for you. Either way, you’re going to want to utilize the research you’ve done thus far around your keywords, optimization, website structure, etc.

Step 6: Fill your site with content

You know what they say: Content is king!

Creating high-quality, SEO-optimized content that’s relevant to your niche is important, but updating and regularly adding to the website is pivotal to your success as an affiliate marketer.

As you create content, you’ll want to keep two main things in mind: 

(1) The keywords you need to optimize your content around.

(2) The affiliate links you’re going to insert once you join a program. 

By keeping these factors top-of-mind, you can determine where you’ll focus your blogging. Then, in utilizing an SEO tool, like SE Ranking, and finding high-traffic, low-competition keywords, you can create a keyword strategy to dominate the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).

Staying consistent with competitive research is immensely important and will help you reach your affiliate marketing goals. You will be able to find what keywords bring your competitors the most traffic and use them for your content.

Step 7: Build your backlink profile and stay consistent with your SEO strategy

A backlink is a link from another site that points to your site. Backlinks are so important because Google takes them into special consideration when determining your website’s authority and ranking.

A backlink is basically another site recommending your own. High-quality backlinks from authoritative sites can pass along some excellent “link juice” to your site. (Conversely, low-quality backlinks, or a lack of backlinks, could potentially hurt you.)

How can you get more backlinks? 

To get more backlinks, use SE Ranking’s Backlink Checker to audit your competitors and their backlinks.

You can reach out to the sites attached to your competitors and see if they’re willing to collaborate with you. You can ask them for a link to your page, or you can utilize guest posting strategies to provide them with unique content that links back to your website.

In addition to content and backlinks—which are two essential pillars of a successful SEO strategy—you’ll need to take care of several other things, such as improving a website’s technical health, taking care of on-page tweaks, and aiming for a top-notch user experience.

With SE Ranking’s all-in-one SEO platform, you get the right tools to deal with every single SEO task.

Step 8: Decide on which programs to join and add your affiliate links.

Once your SEO strategy proves fruitful, let your investment pay off by joining the programs you spotted earlier. 

First, consider the logistics. Then, look for programs with fair commissions whose requirements you can meet.

Beyond that, you want to partner with brands you can get behind. Remember, you will be recommending their products to your audience, and they need to be brands you trust. If you recommend something that your users have a bad experience with, it will hurt your relationship with them.

The key takeaway: become an affiliate for brands that you shop with yourself.

Step 9: Split-test different elements of your content

Any good affiliate marketer understands the importance of testing. Comparing two or more versions of the same element is the only way to determine if you’re on the right track.

You can split-test just about anything: H1s, meta-titles, meta-descriptions, CTAs, images, and so on. When you test, be sure you only change one variable at a time. Otherwise, you have no way of isolating any changes that occur—and knowing what triggered them.

Step 10: Convert!

You’ve set yourself up to become a successful affiliate marketer, and now comes the part for which you’ve been waiting. 

As you bring more traffic to your site, you will gently guide these users to your product pages and eventually start making sales. 

To always be able to calculate your conversion rate, don’t forget to monitor your metrics along the way.

Click Here How To Make $475 per day with Affiliate Markiting