The affiliate market is, in fact, a tremendous opportunity to make money on the internet and will continue to be for many long years. However, and as in other markets, some Affiliate marketing experts do things the right way while some do things the wrong way.
You will need to understand first how it all works and what its possibilities are, to try to extract the maximum potential from your projects. Another important thing is that affiliate marketing has nothing to do with multilevel marketing; they are two different markets.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a way for you to generate online passive income through sharing, recommending and promoting products or services from other people or companies. Basically, when you help another company sell a product, you get paid a commission for that work.
There are several forms of commissioning, but the concept is similar in all of them, that is, you promote something in exchange for a slice of the value of the generated sale.
Affiliate marketing is not new. People have been working on similar commission models for hundreds of years. A good example of this type of work would be real estate agents. They advertise properties on and off the internet, receiving a commission on the sale of that property.
How to Create an Affiliate Website?
Creating an affiliate website is not as complex as it may seem. If you already have a sense of creating websites and blogs, the principles are the same. The only thing that changes is the fact that you are building a project around a very specific theme.
The structure, SEO, domain, hosting, etc., are all identical to any other project you have ever created. The secret is precisely in the niche market that you’ll choose and your ability to create epic content that makes a difference in that same niche.
To help you, I created a step-by-step guide on how to create an authoritative and profitable affiliate website. You just have to follow each step and start producing remarkable content and applying your SEO knowledge to achieve good long-term results with your affiliate site. Let’s start?
1. Choosing a Niche Market
There are several ways to choose a niche market in advance. However, when the goal is to create a niche website, we need to take into account several other factors, such as your knowledge of certain subjects or your ability to hire freelance writers to write about subjects that you do not master.
In both situations, we need to create strategic planning and assess the feasibility of creating a niche website on any of these issues.
To facilitate your work, we will evaluate some questions that you can ask yourself to find out more easily what your skills and knowledge are, which we can then technically analyze if they are viable from the business point of view:
- What subjects do you master and/or have above-average knowledge?
- What will you consume in terms of content, on the internet?
- What are you good at?
- Does anyone ask you for clarification on a certain subject? What subject is that?
- What is your area of study or training?
- What subjects do you like to write about?
- What kind of books do you usually read and what series do you usually watch?
- Am I able to write 100 articles on this topic?
- Is it possible to monetize this type of traffic with affiliate offers?
- Is it possible to create digital or physical products for this niche?
From these questions, you may find the answer related to the topic that you like the most and / or feel most comfortable with, whether it is the level of internal knowledge or the level of taste for the subject. Still, this does not mean that the subject itself is a good deal from creating a niche website and monetizing it with affiliate programs and paid ads. We need to confirm this!
Assuming that you decide that you are good at writing about “physical exercise”, what are your possibilities in terms of analyzing niche markets? To that end, I love using a tool called KWFinder (affiliate link with 20% discount), which is fantastic and gives me all the information I need to know to create a content plan and anticipate the results of my work with websites.
If we consider several other keywords, then we could be talking about a niche market with a lot of potential, and my suggestion would be to create a niche website right away.
Also, consider your competitors before you start. In KWFinder, it is possible to look at the competitors and the main SEO metrics (search engine optimization) for each of them. This can help a lot when evaluating your new niche site.
Competitor Analysis for the Niche Site
A good organic search volume for a niche keyword would be over 3,000 monthly searches. Depending on the niche or segmentation, the search volume may be well below that value.
Some tips for you to choose your niche market correctly, taking into account that you are building a niche site include:
- A niche website does not work with just one keyword, but several
- The main source of traffic is search engines, which means good SEO
- You will need to produce hundreds of articles on converging and interconnected topics
- Start slowly and scale your traffic and content over time
- Develop pillar articles on central and cross-cutting themes
- One of the goals is to capture leads and sell products via email marketing
- Another great goal is to work on affiliate offers.
2. Domain and Hosting
After selecting a topic that makes sense from a business point of view, it is time to start preparing the ground and strategy. It all starts with the domain and hosting.
For a niche website, domain and hosting are not as important as for other types of projects, since we are not building a global brand, which needs to be recognized by the public, much less a website with a very high traffic volume. As the idea does not pass there, I suggest you hire an affordable hosting and a domain that makes sense for your strategy.
Bear in mind that, from an SEO (search engine optimization) point of view, Google no longer gives relevance to keywords in the domain name, therefore, registering a domain of the type “exerciciofisico.com” will not give you any kind of advantage, okay? The idea is to create a domain that makes sense and at the same time is contextualized with the theme of your niche site.
Some Tips for You to Register Your Domain
- Short and memorable – A domain ideally needs to be short and easy to memorize.
- Related keywords – Although they are no longer useful from an SEO point of view, it is always good that your domain contains words related to the theme of your site for easier identification of the topic covered.
- Local or global extension – If the objective is to rank on Google search, then it is recommended that you use a local extension of the type “.com.us”. If the objective is to rank all content internationally, preferably you should choose a “.com”, “.net”, “.org” extension or any other international extension.
Do some word conjugation tests until you arrive at a name that makes sense and is at the same time easy for your readers to remember, even if the goal is not reader loyalty since the types of content you are going to write are timeless and will not be updated over time? They will remain on the site and the objective is to position this content well in the organic searches of search engines and to monetize this traffic.
Hosting
In terms of hosting, choose a reliable company that offers competitive prices. You won’t need anything very complex, just hosting where you can install WordPress. Create a database and start receiving traffic. There are several hosting services that you can choose from.
With that, you will be ready to start your niche website!
3. Install WordPress
To create a niche site, I usually recommend using WordPress. In addition to being free, WordPress is fantastic for content management, easy to scale and configure and there are thousands of templates available on the internet for you to use. In a few minutes, you can have your website online and start publishing your content.
After installing your WordPress, you will need to choose a template for your website or blog. You can choose from free or paid templates. There are thousands of template options, so investigating a bit and choosing the right template is essential for you to be successful with your blog. Especially if the template is good for SEO (optimization for search engines) with a well-established content hierarchy and correctly executed HTML programming. Keep in mind that there are thousands of bad WordPress templates in SEO.
Create a Blog – Add a New Theme
After WordPress is installed, log in to your user panel and go to the sidebar. Go to Appearance> Themes and click the “Add New” button to add a new template to your WordPress, which you can later activate to be used as the theme of your niche site.
WordPress Templates
Choose one of the various templates available and install each theme. Later, you can preview how this template looks on your website or blog. I always recommend that you test several until you find one that is really what you are looking for, both in terms of appearance and functionality.
If you prefer to use a paid template, there are two sites that I recommend for you to buy your paid themes:
- Theme Forest
- Elegant Themes
4. Install Essential Plugins for a Niche Website
WordPress plugins are extensions that allow you to create new features that WordPress doesn’t natively support or doesn’t include in your back end codes.
The plugins help a lot in the execution of tasks and mainly in a technical way to achieve certain results. There are lots of SEO plugins, contact forms, comments, among many other things. I do not recommend you to use many plugins.
Good parts of the plugins that exist in the official WordPress repository contain bugs or serious security flaws. You need to be aware and do some research before you start using unpopular or very old plugins. Be careful with that!
There are some plugins that I consider very important in any type of project, so they are the ones that I recommend you to install and configure correctly, to make the most of your niche site. Here are some plugins I recommend:
Yoast SEO – It is by far the best and most complete SEO plugin for WordPress
- Contact Form 7 – Perfect for creating contact forms
- Redirection – Ideal for performing 301 directions and monitoring 404 error pages
- Broken Link Checker – To find broken links in your articles or pages
- WP Super Cache – Cache plugin to speed up the loading of your website pages
- Akismet – Anti-spam control plugin for comments on articles
- WP-Optimize – For optimization and removal of unnecessary content from the database
These are the main plugins that I use in almost all my projects and that I recommend you use on your niche site. You can use more or fewer plugins depending on your needs. In the official WordPress repository, there are thousands of other plugins that you can just install for testing purposes.
5. Install Google Analytics
Finally, so that we can start working, we just need to install the Google Analytics code. If you don’t have an account yet, create your account on the official Google Analytics page and add your site so that Google Analytics automatically creates the tracking code for your site. Look:
Create Google Analytics Property
When creating the property, configure the Name and URL address of your website and save. Google Analytics will send you to the tracking information page:
Google Analytics tracking code
The tracking code is the code that you need to put in your website’s header to track traffic through Google Analytics. Copy the code and paste it into your template’s header file which is usually the header.php file. If you are not comfortable with this situation, install a plugin for that purpose or ask a developer to help you with this integration.
After integrating Google Analytics, our niche website is ready to start receiving content and traffic
6. Content strategy
When we talk about a niche site, we also talk about content strategy. It is impossible to be successful with a niche website without properly working with content marketing through an inbound marketing strategy designed to achieve results. Everyone knows that “content is king”, be it text, image or video content. Producing content always yields better results than producing nothing for the development of a content strategy aimed at the growth of your niche site in the long term.
Focused on keywords or real problems – When you develop an article, it is essential that it has a keyword in focus or an existing real problem and that it can be solved through that same text.
Adequate styling – An article must be styled. This means using lists with dots, bold, italics, lists with numbers, headings and subheadings, images and quotes, etc. Everything that can stylize helps the reader to consume the content more easily.
Value for the reader! Your content needs to add value to the reader. This will be a great difference compared to other existing content on the internet Competitiveness – Since it is no longer possible to invent the wheel, its contents should be more complex than those already on the internet. Analyze your competitors and where you can make a difference.
External and internal links – Your articles must link internally and externally to other relevant content that complements the reading of the topic addressed.
In terms of content development, there are also rules. I recommend that you read the article on how to write and optimize content for SEO, where I explain step-by-step all the fundamental aspects of writing and optimizing content with a view to good optimization for search engines. Still, I leave you with some general ideas that you will need to take into account in producing the content:
- Titles of articles are marked with H1
- Subtitles are marked with H2 or H3
- Use a keyword in focus throughout the content
- Don’t just write focused on the keyword. Write for humans, not robots
- Produce content with at least 1,000 words and that approach the subject in depth
- Look for related or converging keywords in Jaaxy and use them to
Conclusion
Along with a content strategy, you need a frequency strategy, that is, the regularity with which you will publish new content on your niche website. There are no rules regarding frequency, but it is always good to have a content strategy aligned with the frequency of publication. This helps search engine robots to visit your site frequently in search of new content.
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