You have built a website and begun getting readers and followers, but where do you go from here? Many people find themselves asking this question when they are ready to take their website to the next level and begin making money from it. One of the best ways to monetize your site is through affiliate programs. For those that are unaware of affiliate programs, they are a form of marketing that businesses use that will provide you with commissions on sales that come from your website. These affiliate programs are an excellent place to begin and relatively easy to set up. Read below to find out more on how to successfully implement an affiliate program on your website.
Affiliate Program Examples
Not only can affiliate programs work with the sales of products, but leads and other types are also available. These two websites listed below are both examples of websites that use affiliate programs.
sell-dental-gold.com
top5cashfordiamonds.com
Each one of these websites lists buyers of gold and diamonds and the webmaster is able to earn a commission for the business that he sends to the different buyers that he is affiliated with. You can use these sites as guides to help you better understand what I am explaining in this article.
Building a Network
Social media has allowed us to quickly and efficiently connect with people from all over the globe. As more and more social media networks are created everyday, it can be difficult to maintain a presence on every platform so you should focus on the ones that best suit your website. Also, the main social media networks such as Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Pinterest, can connect you with millions of people instantly and would be a good place to begin.
The readers of your website are going to be the ones who are going to buy from the affiliate programs that you use. This is why it is crucial that you sign up with affiliate programs that will match your reader’s interests and the website’s main focus. By providing your readers with quality content, they can share your website on the different social media platforms enabling your network to grow organically. Establishing a network is the first step toward monetizing your website and will be important step in
Website
Whether you have created your website already and want to implement an affiliate program, or you plan to build a website around an affiliate program, it needs to be organized in a way that will produce the most conversions (sales, leads, etc.) while maintaining its purpose. A quality website does not have to be designed by a professional. A clean layout with organized content is what many people look for in a website and this can be achieved by someone with little or no experience in web design. Keep in mind the focus of your website and what information your readers come to the site for to help determine the best possible layout and design.
Once your website has been built, you can start to implement the affiliate programs you have signed up with by placing affiliate links on your website. The way affiliate programs track where the sales come from is through these affiliate links. Upon signing up for an affiliate program, you will be provided with a unique link that is what keeps track of where sales come from. These links can be placed anywhere on your site and it is up to you on how they are used. You can put them in a sidebar away from your content, or even within the text of blog posts. Depending on the type of site that you have, you can decide where they will get the most conversions. People generally do not like a website that is riddled with advertisements and this can be the same for affiliate links, especially if they were not there originally. Later on I will explain how you can find which links may be most effective.
Promoting Your Website
Now that the website is set up and you have an affiliate program or two in place, you can begin promoting your website to increase the amount of conversions. Promotion can be done in a variety of ways. The easiest way to promote your website would be to continue to produce a high level of quality content that gained you readers initially. This will likely be content that will keep people coming back and things that they would share with their friends and family. By producing fresh content, people will know that you update your site and will come back more often for the latest updates. This is a relatively simple way of promoting your site and something that should be done regularly.
Another form of promotion is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What this means is that you are looking for people to find your website based on certain keywords that are searched in the different search engines. Simple on-page changes could help your website rank better in search engines and send more traffic to your site. SEO can be both very simple as well as complex so you can look into different SEO strategies and what may work best for your website.
As I have mentioned before, different websites will work better for different ways of promotion. The social media platforms that we looked at earlier are an obvious place for you to promote on. If you have a large amount of followers on any of the social media networks, you should post updates on when new content is available to tell people to come back to the site. Twitter can be great for announcements and having relevant tweets can keep your followers interested and remind them of your website.
Marketing your website is very important to the success of it. If you can produce content that people are really interested in, then your site can see great exposure from people sharing it themselves. It is up to you to determine how to effectively market your website and what channels are getting people to convert on your website. One way to help you see what is working most effectively is by using analytic software that lets you know how people are interacting with your site.
Analytic Tools
Analytic tools are going to allow you to have more insight on the interaction of the readers and the website. Allowing you to see where people are coming from to get to your website along with what pages are most popular can greatly affect the success that you will have. Some of the analytic tools and software that I would recommend using are Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and Adwords.
Once your site has been operating for a while, you will have collected data on how the website is performing. For example, maybe one page of your website is getting significantly more traffic than the others. It would obviously be a good idea to place affiliate links on this page because of the traffic, but you can even take that one step further. Google Analytics will allow you to see exactly where the readers are clicking meaning that you could find that links on the bottom of a page are more effective than ones at the top. Much more information can be gathered from these tools that will ultimately lead to more success for your website.
Affiliate programs are a great way to monetize your website. They are easy to implement and can provide you with income in a relatively short amount of time. After you have implemented an affiliate program, it is important that you maintain your site and continue to produce quality content. The content is what will keep people interested and your network is a very important to the success of the site.
