If you have been considering trying your hand at affiliate marketing as a means of generating an income on the internet you should be aware that the way you handle your affiliate marketing blog or website will make a tremendous difference in the success that you may experience.
One of the things that you must keep in mind is customizing your site utilizing SEO and effective advertising-specific content.
There are several different ways that you can implement affiliate marketing in your blog or website. One of the most popular and easy to use, however, is pay per click advertising, better known as PPC. With this type of advertising you or the companies that you are working with will place advertisements in the open space around your blog throughout your website or give you links that you will imbed in your content through the use of highlighted words. This type of advertising works by inviting readers to click on the advertisements or highlighted words that are in your content. Ideally these advertisements will be closely related to your content so it is a natural move for your readers to be interested by the products and services being advertised.
Each time that an advertisement or highlighted word is clicked, you will earn a commission. This means that in order for you to build your income you will need to direct a constant flow of traffic to your blog or website. Beyond just bringing these readers to your site you will need to keep them there by offering interesting content that will keep them reading so that they will have plenty of opportunity to find advertisements or words that will inspire a click.
You can increase your traffic in several ways:
Lure Readers to You
SEO is a technique used to optimize pages for the purpose of making sites visible on the internet. You must identify the exact message that you are trying to express through your content and choose keywords that are likely to be used by those searching for such material.
For example, if you are writing an affiliate blog about preparing for the holiday season throughout the year you should decide on the words and phrases that you think would be present in search engine inquiries of your intended audience. There are several online tools that you can use to identify effective keywords, but you can also explore on your own by going to other sites that are similar to yours and seeing how they present their material, what words are used frequently, and if you feel that if you were a reader you would feel that that site was properly fulfilling your needs.
Take this information and then modify it so that your site is equally or more effective, but is not a copy of any competitor site. At this point in optimization you are appealing to internet software called spiders. These spiders are going to explore the internet and find out what is contained within all of the sites and blogs that exist. You want to feed these spiders so much that they will remember you when someone searches for something that the spiders saw on your blog.
Get Them Interested
Once the spiders have brought your affiliate blog up on the search engine results and a reader has found your page there will be a moment of determination. Either the reader will be compelled enough to want to stay and read your content, or they will be bored and go back to the search results.
To keep readers on your page you must create a blog that is visually appealing. WordPress themes give you an incredible amount of flexibility and control over the look and feel of your blog. You can select a theme that speaks to your niche and shows your personality in a way that will at once make your readers feel that they can approach the material but not as though they have seen the exact same site before.
Keep Them Interested
The soul of your blog is the content that you will produce. If you don’t put enough content on your site for it to seem valuable readers will automatically assume that you are only in existence to sell something. This doesn’t usually sit well, which means that they will want to leave.
You need to produce content that is information-rich yet personable. Most importantly you need to seamlessly weave your affiliate marketing activities into the content so that it fits in. Ideally your readers will see the products and services that are being advertised as a natural extension of your content, which means that clicking on the advertisements would be a natural extension of them reading your content.
Traffic is key. You need traffic to keep your blog—and your goal of making money as an affiliate marketer—alive. Help the traffic find you by making sure that your blog is as visible as possible, and that it is then worth having been found.
