Affiliate Marketing - What makes a good affiliate website

I guess the short answer to this question is SALES. Money in the bank must make a good affiliate marketing website.

Up until now, I have dabbled in affiliate marketing, and there is so much information out there on the internet about what makes a good affiliate site that it is hard to know who to believe.

Traffic

Obviously the first thing that you need is traffic to your website. So, you can either get free traffic by working on creating content around certain keywords and then working on getting a good search engine ranking.

The other way you can get traffic is by buying it. Buying links to bring traffic (even though the search engines don't link this), or Google Adwords are the main ways you can buy traffic. This will require that you manage your conversions so as to ensure that your program remains profitable. No point paying $50 for a $20 affiliate commission.

Conversion

Once you get the people to your website obviously you want to convert them to a sale, or at least capture their contact details so as to keep in contact with them.

The layout of your site should lead your prospect towards your affiliate links or banners. Bottom right hand corner is where I am using my affiliate links. I do this so as to not him them with advertising straight away. This gives me time to build trust so as to make it more likely that they will click on the links. Great website copy will help you to build trust and solve their problems.

I use a combination of inpage text links and banners to lead people to my affiliate program.

My primary goal is for people to click on the affiliate links on my website.

Secondary goal is to capture their contact details. I do this by offering them a free newsletter or free ebook.

Tracking

I use Google Analytics for my tracking program. I create goals for my website and then I track how well my website achieves these goals.

The main metric that I use is how many people click on the links compared to how many people visit the site. I am also looking at how many click on text links and how many click on banner links.

I am then intending to use different experiments on my website to see which elements help conversion.

Website Redesign

With these parameters in mind I have almost completed a redesign of my Soccer Drills Review website. I will be posting results along the way on this blog if you would like to follow along and see what I find out.

My new site will be live next week. If you want to see how not to do affiliate marketing go and have a look at the old site.

Affiliate Marketing - What makes a good affiliate website