Types of Affiliate Marketing Websites
Posted by admin | 
July 2nd, 2007
If you’re planning to create an affiliate based website, you might be confused about the best type to create. Which one works best? Which one is easiest? These are some of the numerous questions most new affiliate marketers have.
Here are some of the most popular types of affiliate websites.
One Page Sales Letter Sites
This is fairly easy to create. It helps if you’ve actually bought the product you tend to promote so that you can write a credible testimony about the product you are promoting. People will not click links from someone they don’t know or trust. And they will be more inclined to click your link and purchase the product you are promoting if they trust your opinion and recommendations.
One page ‘mini-sites’ are a great way to promote single products. By creating just one single page for your website, you keep visitors focused on taking just one action: Buying this product. The purpose of a one page site is to be sure your visitor doesn’t get distracted with other ads or content. You want them to buy what you’re promoting. Make sure you have a clickable ‘BUY NOW’ button in one or more areas of high visibility and include a ‘call to action’ to encourage the person to complete their purchase.
A one page product promotion site usually has a detailed product review, which is also known as a “pre sell”. In general a presell is much like a detailed review. It tends to be 1000 words or longer, and it explains what you like and don’t like about a given product. This kind of affiliate marketing site works very well, but it doesn’t get much in the way of organic search engine traffic so most affiliates include pay per click advertising or article marketirng to drive traffic to this type of site.
One Page Multi Product Site.
This type of site is similar to the one detailed above. The main difference is that you’re comparing and offering multiple product choices.
Generally you should have no more than three to five products on the page, though some marketers do well comparing as many as ten. I prefer to keep each page at just three products, because it helps to not overwhelm your visitors.
With a multi product affiliate site, you want to create brief product reviews and recommendations. You also want to compare similar products, so the visitor is not pulled into too many directions at once. You also don’t want them to be distracted by other, non related elements, so you wouldn’t put article content or misc ads on the site. Just put three to ten products with affiliate links for each.
Shopping or eCommerce Site
It’s actually fairly easy to create a full fledged ecommerce style shopping site with affiliate products. Some sites have just 10 or 20 products on them, but some have 10,000 or more. These types of sites are usually created using an affiliate datafeed and specialized software. (More on this topic in an upcoming post.)
Informational, Publication Style Website
This type of site can become quite large as it gets filled with information. Commonly, you’ll see sites built with articles on specific topics. The whole purpose of creating these types of sites is to help bring in natural organic search engine traffic and get to links from other websites related to the information you are presenting.
These types of sites tend to run pay per click advertising more often than not, but many also promote affiliate programs, too.
By drawing in targeted traffic to the articles, reports and related content, the webmaster draws visitors to specific topics. Once they have the reader’s interest, they then either recommend certain online merchants and stores, or they list those merchants and stores as related links.
With either format, the links are of course affiliate links. So if visitors come to the site to get information on a certain topic and they want to buy something related to that topic, they’re likely to click on one of your affiliate links. If they buy from that merchant of course, then you earn affiliate commissions.
There are other types of websites for promoting affiliate products. Often people ‘monetize’ the website of their brick and mortar business with carefully chosen affiliate products. (More about this coming soon!)
Whatever type of website you choose, you must keep in mind that it will take time to build up a customer base and it takes lots of traffic to your site before someone will actually click on your affiliate link. You must offer something of value to your customers, work hard to earn their respect, and then work hard to keep them coming back.
