Don’t Click This

After reading a thread over on the A4U Forum, I thought it would be good to post about what you should be thinking about if you’re looking to create your first affiliate site. I’ve noticed a ton of threads that have started since the new year about people looking to get into the industry and how they should go about.

Firstly, it’s important to pick an area that interests you, ideally in a niche without too much competition. I completely didn’t follow this rule when I started out and found it harder to keep motivated and update my site than if it had been an area I was really enthusiastic about. If you don’t enjoy what you do, it’s much harder to work productively and create quality content for your site. Whatever you do, don’t try and start a shopping directory site - it’s been done to death and there is virtually no chance of you making any money.

Research! Find out who your competition is, see if there’s room for you in the market. You may have chosen an area that’s highly saturated, in which case it’s probably best to look somewhere else unless you’re a complete don at SEO and have a massive marketing budget. A good idea that was mentioned over at A4U was that if your area is saturated, you could try and find a sub-niche within it - there could be a gap waiting to be filled! Plus, the chances are the more ‘niche’ you go the more likely you are to receive organic traffic.

Linkage! Unless you plan on driving all traffic to your site via PPC, you’ll need to get some inbound links. A good way of finding links is by taking one of your competitor sites or a site that is related to your area and see who is linking to them. Type ‘link: http://www.competitor-site.com/’ into all the major search engines and see what comes up. You should set yourself a target of trying to get x number of links a day or a week or whatever.

If you are planning on using PPC to drive traffic to your site, remember to work out all the figures beforehand. For example, if you get 100 clicks costing you 10p each it’s cost you £10. If the conversion rate for whatever the product is 1% and commission is £5, then you’ll be losing money.

Finally, remember to keep your site updated. Content is king after all, so keep on adding and updating - this is why it’s so important to be an area you find interesting. John Chow has some good posts about creating content on his blog.

Here are a few resources that I found pretty useful (and still do):

Keyword Search Tool Great keyword tool that allows you to check and compare search volumes across the major search engines. The only downside is that it doesn’t always work - sometimes you have to keep refreshing the page to get the results. Still good though.

Keyword Generator Free tool for generating keyword strings and variations for PPC campaigns.

Website Checker Tool that checks your websites meta tags, SE friendliness, load time and more

A4U Forum A forum mainly for UK based affiliates with a wealth of information. There’s tons and tons of really useful posts, it’s worth setting aside some time to browse through it.

Fraser’s Affiliate Podcasts Great for picking up tips and getting a good insight into the industry as a whole.

I know this is only really a quick overview of a few main points, but there’s loads of free info out there about affiliate marketing on forums, blogs etc, all you need to is head to the big G and search!