What is the URL of my Affiliate Site?

19 Jun 13 11:50 pm

If your existing website is related to the products you want to promote as an affiliate, you don't need to build an additional website, or even necessarily add any additional content to your website.

If your current site is about dog training, or pie recipes, you can easily promote affiliate products related to dog training or pie recipes within that website.

If your website is about dog training and you want to promote affiliate products related to muscle building.... you should probably build a separate site for this, because they're not related.

Not that it's not *technically* possible, it's just that you won't get the best results. People who are visiting your site to learn about dogs are not really in the frame of mind to buy products about muscle building. So it's usually better to keep them separate.

(Although you will definitely see affiliate sites out there that don't follow this advice... with ads for ANYTHING and EVERYTHING plastered all over the page. You can do this, but it's not as good.)

Throughout the Affilorama lessons, we generally assume that people *don't* have an existing site already -- because most of our members don't have one to begin with.

If you've already got one and it's relevant to the products you want to promote, you can probably skip past a few steps :)

01 Jul 13 3:13 am

I wouldn't buy a new domain for each "item" you want to market. We recommend people build websites around "niches" where there are a few good affiliate products to promote.

Eg, instead of building an affiliate site around the product "Affilorama", you build a niche site around the topic of "Affiliate marketing" or "making money online" or "home based business ideas" or "building websites", and then you promote Affilorama alongside a number of other related products. (Eg, a web hosting company, a SEO tool, web design software, WordPress themes, etc)

Instead of building a site around Super Tummy Trimmer 2000, you could build a site around weight loss in general, and promote weight loss products, exercise and diet guidebooks, gym equipment, gym memberships (?), etc.

Building a fresh site in each niche has a few benefits:

1) You have the chance to make more than one sale to a visitor.

2) Your site appears more relevant for your topic because you have more than one page of content on that topic. It appears to be higher quality from a search engine perspective.

3) You're not putting all your eggs in one basket, and if the one product you're promoting starts to tank... you have a few others to fall back on.

4) Your site makes more sense to a visitor, and you develop a distinct brand and character. Think about it this way: if you're a physical store trying to sell car stereos, you're more likely to succeed if you specialise in car stereos, or at least car parts. If you're trying to sell car stereos from a junk shop selling homewares, pet supplies, candy and used books at the same time... people are less likely to see you as an authority on the topic of car stereos.

5) If at any point in the future you want to sell off your site... MUCH easier if it's a separate domain!

Depending on how you're planning to get traffic to your site, in most instances affiliate sites these days need to be more than just single "thin" sites with little content. In most cases you need quite a bit of content backing you up to prove your "quality". And if you're building content, it helps if that content is roughly on a similar topic.

There are always examples of sites that will defy this logic, but it's a safer approach.

22 Jul 13 10:52 pm

Hello all.

We are also new to affiliate marketing and sometimes get overwhelmed with the information. We have a related question about building an affiliate website. We own a sports accessory store and are currently building a new website for our products, due to the fact we have had a lot of success selling our products on Amazon. We really want to diversify our revenue stream with affiliate marketing. Obviously our niche would be sports and fitness products. Since we are already in the process of building a website, do we need a separate site for our affiliate products, or would it be best to post our affiliate links on our current website. We will have blogs and articles and email sign ups so that we can start creating our "list". Also, should we use sub-domains for our affiliate links. All very confusing.

We would also like to utilize ad-sense ads as another source of income.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Great forum by the way!!

Jason