Building a website, whether for Affiliate Marketing or some other reason, need not be tough. You don’t need to be a programming whiz, you don’t really even need to know any HTML PHP ASP or any other programming language at all! The first thing you need to do is decide what kind of website you want to make. Some people have great results with Blogs like this one, some people prefer to use the sales landing page for each product they affiliate for. Some sites are simply review sites that review differeing products which they affiliate for. Each of these has it’s own good and bad points, and each of them has different ways of building. Now i could go into HTML (I used to teach Microsoft Technical Support beginning HTML here in AZ), I could give the rudiments of PHP and let you all go at it. I could tell you just how to create the best page for each type of affiliate marketing that you want to do. I’m not going to do that though. First I’m going to go into each type of page, and the pros and cons as i see them. Then i’ll go into the different ways of making them, and where you can find good resources on all of it. So lets get right into it.
Blogs These are very popular these days, and not only are they good for advertising, but they’re also good for giving more value to the consumer, extra information, and they allow everyone to get out their own opinions about things. They do require quite a bit of work though, and definitely are not for everyone. You must be able to write decently, to attract peoples attention with your posts, and keep them reading to the end. You must post often, give people reasons to come back to your page more than just the once. This is tough for some people to do and a different type of page would be better for you. If you want to do a blog, there’s a couple programs out there free which help with that. WordPress is what I use, it’s easy to install and simple to use, but I think it really takes a bit to master. You can get all kinds of things to plug into the program as well which will make your blogging easier. Also a good one that you need to pay for (but is still definitely worth the cost with the different special extras it offers) is TypePad and MoveableType. These two are very targeted, and help greatly when you know exactly what type of blogging you want to do, and helps to target the right people for your blogs and make sure you get quality traffic to your blog.
The Push Button Marketer is another paid program that helps with automating daily blogging/emailing tasks. This program is totally worth the money and has helped me immensely, with getting the mundane daily tasks done for me, and frees up my time to create blogs worthy of you all’s attention! Definitely check this one out!
Landing Page This is where you basically design a page, for each product you affiliate for. It’s usually one page, and gives a good advertisement for the product. It’s usually not got too much information, and the one page serves to drive people to the publisher you’re wanting them to see. Also it serves to help the consumer make a decision to buy and a well written page can create good conversions which means more money for you. These pages are fairly simple, and can be made with simple HTML and CSS or can be complex and made with PHP. This is where you pick up a WISYWIG editor to create your page. Dreamweaver is a good one, and you do have to pay for it, but it’s one of the best out there and if you’re doing a lot of landing pages, you’ll find that the cost is paid for very quickly. You can get this from Adobe
definitely as i said worth the cost. If you’re dead set on a free WISYWIG editor, then you’ll not get anything as feature rich as Dreamweaver, but it should be serviceable. This page Free WYSIWYG Editor List is where i usually head when i want to find good free HTML editors or software. Also if you want to see a bit on how to code (i’ll write an article on HTML for dummies later) this is a good page to check out.
Review Sites These sites are setup quite a bit like the Blog sites, but are basically sites that review different products as a way of advertising them to the consumer. You can do this page either way, by useing the blogging software we spoke of earlier, or a WYSIWYG editor. Either one works fine, but the blogging software will probably be eeasier for you because they are designed to easily put updates on a site, and review sites need to review prodcuts and update those reviews with different stuff or put new reviews in occasionally. Not at the same rate you’d need to post in a blog, but still enough so that it’s a good idea to use blogging software rather than an editor and doing it all manually. This is all your choice though.
So there you have it. How to build a website for affiliate marketing in three easy steps! Please comment with anything i may have missed, or things you still want to know about and i’ll definitely post back ASAP. Enjoy and keep your eyes open for coming posts.
