How to Build a Website to Maximize Your Affiliate Marketing Earnings

If you are seriously interested in affiliate marketing, then one of the first things you need to do is to build a website/blog to maximize your earnings. You can surely advertise your affiliate programs without a personal website, by adding links in your email signatures. But the number of people you can target using this method is very small and will help just a little. If you can build a website to maximize your affiliate marketing earnings, the audience to which you are exposing the affiliate program is much larger.

Tips to maximize your affiliate marketing website potential:

1. Choose a Great Topic: This step is critical and many people go wrong here, as they don’t pick an area they are passionate about. You need to create a website around a niche that you love or know a lot about, so that you can always work on it and make it better. A lot of your time and effort will go in creating good content for your website. So choose something you really love to read and write about. Once you have selected your niche, do research to identify some good affiliate products that would go well with your site. Also, make sure that there is a good market for those affiliate products and people buy them.

2. Selecting a Domain Name: Using a site like register.com or a good web-host’s site, do some research and check for domain names. While you are doing your research, remember that it is a great idea to have an important keyword in your domain name. So if your website will be about “designer bags”, try to include that phrase in your domain name. Your domain name must be easy to remember, have a good keyword and easy to type. Try not to have dashes in the domain name and instead, look for ones that have a dot com address.

3. Web Hosting: Purchase a basic personal website package from a web hosting company. Prior to selecting your web host, ask around for some good recommendations. You need a web hosting company that has good customer service, is reliable and is not down too often.

4. Site Builder / Software: Next comes the task of building your website. For this you can make use of a site builder like internetbasedfamilies.com, or software package like Microsoft FrontPage. Site builders are normally easy to use, and also include web hosting. Thus, you will end up paying a monthly fee for the software and hosting combo. You could also ask someone to design and build the site for you.

5. Driving Traffic to the website: You will have to optimize your web pages for search engines using SEO (search engine optimization) to get good traffic. You can also write articles with good content and submit them to article directories. A few other options to drive traffic to your website are buying ads on other sites that are based on your niche, newsletters and pay-per-click advertisements.