Diary of an Affiliate Marketer
I was thinking back today as to when I built my first affiliate marketing web site and the difficulties I had in getting started. Like many people it was a question of knowing where to start?
Fortunately for me I came across Ken Evoy’s Make Your Words Sell (which you can now download for free) and this was the book that got me started and helped me understand what was needed to succeed in terms of content.
It also introduced his company Sitesell and that was when I really started learning.
How?
Well I thought I knew something about websites. After all I could build one with Dreamweaver and had uploaded a couple of hobby sites relating to my favorite sport, soccer. However, when you are building an affiliate marketing web site for yourself as a business, there is so much more to the structure of a website than you may be aware of.
Basic things like structure, home page, tier two pages, and tier three pages. The linking structure both for visitors and the search engine spiders. Keyword density and page structure including the title, meta tags, meta description and meta content keywords.
Now whilst the importance of all of these may be changing as fast as Google changes its algorithms the basic principles are still the same. If you want your page to rank highly for your chosen market then getting the basics right is critical.
You can of course get traffic using Pay Per Click and many people do, but even then the structure of your affiliate marketing web site has to be right or you will receive a poor quality score from Google and it will cost you a fortune to compete with your competitors as you are penalized on your content making it virtually impossible to make a profit.
The reason I said early that I was fortunate was because Ken Evoy explains all this in easy to understand tutorials and his flagship product Site BuildIt! does all the technical stuff for you.
If you have never built an affiliate marketing web site then this product can help you enormously. Plenty of training and plenty of help ensure you build a website that works.
Then after some time you suddenly realize that you understand all the jargon and the technical stuff and can’t remember getting there! This leaves you to concentrate on the really important tasks such as writing content and reviewing more products to sell on behalf of the merchants.
In the early days when you are first setting up your website you can end up worrying too much about the technical stuff and forgetting that your primary aim is to pre-sell your affiliate merchants products.
Your website is there to sell and not to be the best looking or the website with the flashiest video and other multimedia. All the latest Web 2.0 and media applications are only of use to you if they help bring more qualified visitors and help pre-sell the products.
Site BuildIt! got me started and without out it I know I wouldn’t have built my first business website correctly and certainly wouldn’t have made any money. Yes that was a fortunate day indeed. Best part of it is that the first website is still growing and continues to make more money each year.
