When Is A Free Affiliate Marketing Website A Good Idea? And why it does not have a bad name in today’s online industry?
When you become an affiliate marketer one of the first decisions you are going to have to make is how to market the free affiliate marketing website provided for you by the merchant running the affiliate program you just joined.
You can probably make a case for just promoting that website, or you can make a case for setting up your own websites and using them as pre-selling for the affiliate offer that you will be promoting.
One of the first online courses about affiliate marketing came from Ken Evoy, the owner of Site Build It. He had an interesting take back then on how to properly handle a free affiliate marketing website.
What was he teaching almost 20 years ago?
Develop your own website first and promote your free affiliate marketing website second. His approach was to pre-sell your affiliate products and offers by interjecting personal experience to your website visitors.
Today that advice remains sound, however, there is a better way to go about doing affiliate marketing than actually building a website.
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What is that way?
The best approach today is to set up your own blog and use it as a website. Monetize your blog with banners, text link ads, and other content that you can link directly to the affiliate marketing website you want to promote.
This gives you a tremendous amount of diversity that you wouldn’t otherwise have if you were to use the free affiliate marketing website to promote directly. It also allows you to market several affiliate offers as your blog grows.
You do this by creating review posts on your blog and linking them to those from other posts. In the review post, you link to the affiliate offer directly after you have listed its pros and cons of it.
Here’s an important concept you need to grasp!
When you drive traffic to your free affiliate marketing website you have no way to develop relationships with that traffic. The people visit your affiliate site, and unless they actually purchase something, they are gone from you forever.
One thing I learned early on was everyone who comes to your website or blog is going to leave. The trick is to get as many of what I call “positive responses” from your visitor.
How?
A better approach is to develop relationships on your blog and encourage people to subscribe to an email list, follow you on your social media sites, and so on. It is a proven fact that people will purchase more affiliate products from somebody they are familiar with and trust than on a first-time visit to a sales page on an affiliate marketing website.
This is why you see so much effort put in by the top affiliate marketers to build an email list. They understand that the subscriber’s name and email address is far more valuable than making one sale on the free affiliate marketing website.
Once you have that contact information you can follow up for years via email. It is also a good way to get people back to your blog from another visit.
This is especially true if you would like to do affiliate marketing on a long-term basis. Why try so hard to make one sale, when you can continue to sell over and over to the same customer?
You can sell products to them via your email, or directly on a blog post. The key is that what you’re promoting is either a landing page or some sort of relationship-building first.
When you’re approaching it this way, your free affiliate marketing website becomes a valuable tool and one that you will better utilize on a second, third, or beyond visit from your prospective customer.
Plus I have found that when people come back to my blog they stay longer the second time than they do the first, and longer the third time than they did the second, and so on. This brings up one more advantage of having your own blog over just promoting your affiliate website.
Join Google Analytics for free and let Google tell you what your visitors are doing. You can learn where they are coming from, what pages of posts they enter first (it is not always your home page), how long they are staying, and so on.
This is valuable information as your blog grows. It tells you what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong so you can make improvements to your blog marketing strategies.
You can not do that when you market the replicated free affiliate marketing website!
If you need help on how to get started with affiliate marketing, check out my #1 recommendation on building a successful business online. You can get access to hundreds of training videos, 24/7 support, professional consultations, private access to training guides, tools, personal private assistance, my personal help, and much more.
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Hi David,
Great Tips you have there Man!
Building relationships with your visitors is truly an important factor for the success of each and every website.
This is one thing that I am trying to learn at the moment. How to create lasting relationships with my site’s visitors.
Relationships lead to trust and trust lead to loyal customers.
Thanks for sharing your ideas!
Glad you get some value with this post my friend, a relationship is key when building anything. The days of spamming your audience with affiliate links have all gone. People want you to have a relationship with them, so you can show them which way is the best way, and what road should they take for them to have success. If they have to build a free affiliating marketing website, they must have a road map to success.
I truly believe that having a community that can reach out to someone any time that they need help, is key. And that is why I love what Wealthy Affiliate has built, so that anyone coming onboared wil be well taught all the necessary things that they need to have success with their free affiliating marketing website.
Dear David,
I could not have agreed with you more as you said that it is more valuable to cultivate developing a relationship with your website visitors in such a way upon engaging with them, you build trust and in turn they would return to you time and time again as they become more familiar with you and see you as an authority who knows how to help them out.
Wealthy Affiliate is my Top Pick for this, I mean come on, who can beat giving out 2 Free Websites when you become a Free Starter Member with them? Plus, not to mention if you need tips or Feedback on how you may go about improving your Website, WA is filled with many supportive people who are more than willing to give you a hand when you need it most. 🙂
Wishing you all the best with your online success above and beyond the horizon,
~Angel
Hi Angel, I could not have agreed more. You said all with the choice you have made with Wealthy Affiliate . I wish you all the best and thank you for dropping by.
Cheers
I have heard that inviting people to subscribe to newsletters is a great way to build relationships with visitors, and I agree with you that people will buy from others who they get to know, like and trust.
I do see the importance now of building a website and adding a newsletter opt-in box to it because it’s a long-term investment for online success.
Affiliate Marketing certainly seems like the way forward for me 🙂
Thanks!
Neil
Hey David,
Affiliate marketing is a great way to take your first step into building an online business because it is not very difficult to learn and it is not expensive to start. Everyone should learn how to build and market a website as it is very a very useful skill to develop.
Other than affiliate marketing, do you use any other methods to make money online?
-Alex
Hi David!
Great advice!
I have my own website building it out now, putting in a lot of time and effort, and I hope that it will pay out in the future.
As an experienced Affiliate Marketer, I would like to ask you what your thought are on building my website, how long will it take me to be successful, and maybe you give me some advice too.
Thanks for your great article!
Chanan
Chanan,
Thank you for visiting my website and leaving a comment. Glad to hear that you are following along the right path by building a website. You can get all the training and what you need to know by getting a free membership by clicking here.
Build out your website and give value to your audience, by posting regular content your website. Minimum 2 posts weekly using competitive keywords. Focus on your audience and do not stray, and eventually you will see your website is going to get rank by the search engines.
Chanan, feel free to send me your website so that I can take a look and render some thoughts on the good and what you should be focusing on. All the best, and looking forward to working with you.
Cheers.
Informative post Bishop thank you for sharing this . Yes I couldn’t agree more with you building an email list is a vital component of any affiliate marketer as well as using Google Analytics to determine where your visitors are coming from .Just a quick question regarding your # 1 recommendation , is it really free to build an affiliate marketing website ?
Yes, Rick, one should always focus on building an email list once traffic is coming to their websites. This will serve as a number one traffic source moving forward and applying Google Analytics will always play a major factor in this area.
You can join Wealthy Affiliate for free and build two free websites without paying any money if you wish. There is also a paid version as well if you want to put your business steroids. Hope that helps.
In my opinion there is nothing wrong with starting out with a free website as long as you know that eventually you may have to upgrade and make it your site .Once you have it built and start getting some content on there then you can make the bold move.That bold move comes with a company like Wealthy Affiliate being right there to blueprint you right through to the end.Thank you for taking the time to right such a great article,Dale
Dale, when I started I never thought I would be where I am today. The system was new to me but I made up mind that I will make a one-year commitment and give it my all. I ask stupid questions and all of them I got a reply. That is what motivates me to stay till the end.
I am here for the long haul and I take this business seriously and on a mission to help others experience the same success. thank you for your kind words and comment. Wish you all the best my friend and let me know what I in can do to help
Thank you for reminding me of How affiliate marketing was started by Ken Evoy of SBI. I agree you about the need to build relationship with your readers and its very important if you need repeat readers or customers returning to your site often.Building an email list would help one be successful in affiliate marketing tremendously.
Thank you for the agreement and I glad that you see how Affiliate market can benefit anyone and the importance of building an email list to interact and educate your audience. Wish you all the best.
Hi David!
Thank you for sharing this amazing tip. I have to up my game with emailing list. I meant to do that a while ago, I do not why I did not do it sooner. Maybe I find technology to be too overwhelming for me lol first thing tomorrow’s morning I am going to build an email list 😉 Very useful post. Perfect for a newbie like me 🙂 thanks!
Thank you for stopping by and leaving a positive comment. Please start your email list and focus on building relationships with your audience and you would have better results.
If you need a hand getting up and running please let me know, I would love to lend a hand and show you what is working for me.
I am one of those people who have been on social media in the past for socializing. This website shows how we can use social media for our benefit to drive traffic
There are some tips I got concerning social media and the content itself. This year 2019 will be different form 2018! That is very true. I have a business account on Facebook but i did not understand very well when it comes to targeted audience. The video explained well.
I will visit often this website to get more tips on how to improve on my networking.
Thank You!
Thank you for visiting my website and leaving such a positive response. Glad that you get some value with this post and it will help you to move forward in 2019 with your social media campaign.
Remember content is king and you always be writing content choosing low competition keywords to keep your rankings high in the search engines when starting with a new website. All the best.
Hello Bishop,
What a great lesson from your post. It is one of the most important thing when building a website with free affiliate program to engage your visitors. Making them stay and always come back for more is of essence. Trust between website owner and visitors will bring about more revenue.
Thanks for the hint one more time, I have learnt more from your post and will really make good use of it. Will be anticipating to read more great posts from you soon.
Regards,
Olushola.
Olushola, happy to see that you got some value in this post, and how it is important to gain engagement with your visitors when creating content. It makes it a great ranking factor as well.
Yes, please feel free to come back anytime, cause I make regular updates what is working in my business and how is the best way to apply to yours. Talk to you soon and all the best with your business.
Hi David.
You really have wonderful, educating and informing tips in your article there
Building good rapport with customers/visitor is really key in blogging. That will give them at least a sense of belonging in visiting my website. Another one I really grab is the creation of email channel to get to know my subscriber very well. That will ensure trust and fast communication.
Thank you david for these tips. they are really helpful. I’m gonna put all these into cognizance
Glad that you were able to get some value here in this post and the need for setting up an email campaign to get to know your audience so that you can build rapport and share some knowledge to them before they can make a decision.
Value will always be the best approach when building a business online, and if done right you will have a large following that would be around for many years to come. glad that I was able to shed some light here. feel free to come back again cause I add content to this website on a frequent basis. talk to you soon.