Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the fourth lesson in our affiliate marketing basics module.
In this lesson, I'm going to give you a high-level blueprint to start your first
affiliate website.
And this lesson will give you a good idea of the skills, techniques and strategies
you'll learn throughout this course.
But first, let's recap some key principles we've covered in the previous 3 lessons
which are going to play into your strategy.
So, at a high level, your affiliate site is going to be made up of primarily blog posts.
And the types of content you'll create will mostly be informational pieces.
For example, how-to articles and comparisons of different products.
And within the content, you'll add your affiliate links to products you recommend.
Now, when someone clicks on one of these links and makes a purchase you're going to
be compensated by the affiliate merchant or partner.
Now, not only will your content convert visitors into revenue, but it's going to attract visitors
to your website, too.
And the marketing method we'll use to get traffic to your affiliate site is search engine
optimization because the traffic is free, consistent and passive.
Best of all, SEO traffic will help you generate consistent revenue that compounds over time.
Now, there are actually quite a few steps to get to the point of generating consistent
traffic and revenue.
But to give you a high-level overview, we can break down the process into
four macro steps.
Finding a niche; planning your website; building your website; and getting traffic to it.
So let's go through these phases at a high level, starting with finding a niche.
When you're starting an affiliate site, especially if you're relatively inexperienced,
it's beneficial to start with a heavy focus on a niche.
For example, it would probably be better to start a barbeque recipes site rather than
a generic one on all types of recipes.
And that's because broader topics tend to have more competition and as a result,
it'll be tough for you to get traffic to your site.
And without traffic, there is no revenue.
Now, this is just one small example of the things you'll need to consider when choosing a niche.
There are other things to evaluate like breadth of the topic, personal interest,
commerciality, and more.
We'll go through some techniques in module 2 to do this and I'll give you a checklist which will
give you the best chance at creating a successful affiliate website.
Alright, the next stage is planning your affiliate site.
This is where you'll be creating the blueprint for your affiliate website.
And there are two things in particular that you'll need to plan.
#1. You'll want to plan your content strategy.
And this is a super-important step because it's foundational to both
traffic and conversions.
Now, the majority of the planning will be done through an SEO technique called
keyword research, which is a process to understand the queries people use
to search for products, services, and general information in search engines.
And the second thing you'll need to plan is your site or content structure.
And by structure, I'm mostly talking about grouping which is done with internal links.
We'll cover all of this in great detail in module 3.
Now, after you've finished planning your site, you'll need to build it out.
This includes making a website and setting up tools for things like tracking.
Now, the most time-consuming and important part of this stage is creating content.
Because content is what will help you to rank in search engines and it's what your visitors
will use to make buying decisions.
We have an entire module dedicated to content creation where we'll talk about
the content creation process, the types of content you should create, and I'll also give
you templates you can follow for various affiliate type content.
Now, getting traffic through SEO is much more challenging than just
writing good stuff.
A key ingredient to rank high in Google and attract a ton of visitors to your site
will be backlinks.
We'll talk about some basic strategies that any beginner can implement which should
help power your pages to rank for their target queries and hopefully put some
money in your pocket.
So now that you have a high-level overview of what building your affiliate site will look like,
let's get our hands dirty and move on to the second module, where we'll dig
deep into finding niches, qualifying them, and choosing one that'll be right for you.