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How to Plan and Research for an Affiliate Website

Author: Carl Heaton
He is our senior instructor and originally from Manchester UK. Carl teaches our Web Design and Online Marketing Courses.
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In this Video tutorial Carl talks teaches how to first research good keywords and a product to use for Affiliate marketing.

In this Video tutorial Carl talks teaches how to first research good keywords and a product to use for Affiliate marketing.

Start by looking for a product that interests you then move onto planning out the site we will need.

Creating a site is easy but it takes good planning to make a great site.

1. Keyword Research

A keyword(s) is a string of words you want to be top of search engines so when users search for that phrase they click on your site.

There are two types of keywords, short tail and long tail. Essentially short tail keywords are short phrases (maybe 2 or three words) and long tail are more like “books on world war 1 in France” rather than “world war 1”. Long tail keywords are easier to rank for but less people search for them, so you need to find the happy medium. They Google Keywords tool will help us with this..

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

  • Enter your keyword phrase e.g. “web design books in Thai”. (then enter annoying capture)
  • On the left de-select Broad and select “Phrase”. This means we are looking for the exact phrase people are typing when searching.
  • Also choose where you want so search e.g. Thailand, United Kingdom or remove the location and you will get global results.
  • A good keyword has around 10,000 to 20,000 (or more) searches locally/globally (whatever your market is) and has very low, if any, competition.
  • If you find a good phrase click on it and check the top results. If you see heavy weight sites like Wiki or “yourphrase.com” then best to move onto another phrase as it will be difficult to knock them off the top spot. If you get a load of pages with PDFs, a few blog posts and a couple of forums then you are in!

Note, you can go for any keyword you want. If you are an affiliate marketer you are probably making throw away sites that you want to get to the top quickly with minimal effort. If however you are a brand that is hoping to take on the market then go for your keyword phrase and stick to it, after time you will get up there if you produce quality unique content.

2. Finding a Product

When looking for a product choose one that you think people need and what you are interested in, the later is very important as you will need to write content about it.

In this screencast we are using Amazon for our products which means that when the user clicks purchase they will goto Amazon. This is not idea, as we would prefer they buy through us, but then again Amazon will ship the product, is a well known name and so people are more inclined to trust the purchase and process.

Look for products with good reviews as these can be copied into your site and give you inspiration to write new ones. I recommend purchasing the product yourself as this will allow you to write better content for the site as you will know what you are talking about.

3. Planning Your Site

Affiliate Marketing Site Plan

The bare minimum for a site plan is a sitemap and wireframe for the key pages. I tell you this from experience and some will disagree but I think that using a tool such as http://gomockingbird.com is a quick and easy way just to decide what will be on the page.

Now that you have a sitemap and the wireframe done for each page you can plan you content confidently and have it ready for building yours site.

Affiliate Marketing Site Design

WordPress and Affiliate Marketing Courses

If you are interested in taking this further and building a wordpress site, then please check our wordpress training page. We will go through each stage of creating an a quality site ready to bring in affiliate sales.

We also have a fantastic a new Online Marketing course. The course is run as a 1-2-1 giving you the ability to make your own marketing strategy and know how to move your site to the top of the search engines through creating quality content that people want to engage with.

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