How to Make a Website for Affiliate Marketing and What to Do With It
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You already guessed — today, we are discussing how to create a website to promote affiliate offers.
Wait, but I’ve heard I didn’t need a website — a landing page would be enough!
Yes, that’s true. There are basically two ways how to work in the affiliate marketing industry: with or without a website.
So, when do you need your own website for affiliate marketing, and how to make and promote it?
What Are Affiliate Marketing Sites?
Let’s make things clear from the get-go: we are speaking here about affiliate marketing websites, not landing pages or pre-landers.
What’s the difference?
Basically, a landing page is dedicated to a single offer — and contains all details about only one product, website, mobile application, etc. It has only one purpose: collecting leads.
A website is a more complicated story: it is usually about a single topic but can include many relevant offers and also extra content — for example, some articles.
Such a site with useful content allows you to promote offers in a more native way: a conversion is just a part of the whole funnel.
When Do You Really Need A Website?
If you are a beginner and just looking around various niches and offers, you barely need a website. You can easily start with a plain landing page to try different verticals and gain experience.
Why invest so much time and money when you don’t really know if you are here to stay, right?
Still, if you have been working in a particular niche for years, know all the best offers in your vertical, and want to grow as an affiliate marketer in this chosen industry, the website will be a much better solution.
It will be a great boost for your reputation, especially when you post some expert content — and this will greatly increase trust in the offers you are running.
What is also important, some affiliate marketing programs are literally impossible to run without a website. For example, if you want to work as an affiliate flight ticket aggregator, you need to establish a reliable user-friendly platform.
Consider your budget, too. A website requires additional investments – design, content, hosting, and domain, after all. And, yes, it might take time before your site becomes trusted — and popular enough to bring profit.
Ready for that?
To sum up, here is a brief checklist to help you decide:
Do you need a website for affiliate marketing?
| Yes, you most likely do | Not really |
– You have vast expertise or a big interest in a particular niche – You are ready for a long-term play – You want to get traffic from SEO – You have a team or are ready to outsource – You can afford additional expenses – You want to promote offers from advertisers that require you to have a website | – You are a beginner and want to explore different niches – You want to earn pretty quickly – You prefer working with Direct Links – You don’t have SEO skills and a team – You don’t want to invest large budgets |
How to Choose a Vertical and What to Do Next?
Finance
This vertical works best at websites that combine useful informational content with a showcase of products. Most affiliate marketers perform as independent experts here — and natively promote different financial products.
Here is an example: the website posts educational articles about various types of loans, and helps users find the best suitable credit products. They even added an interactive loan offers search form:
So, most of such websites are promoted via expert content that can include reviews on various products and informational articles with the best-performing keywords in titles. For example, ‘How to take a mortgage or ‘What is a credit score’.
The main goal is to inspire trust in the users: your website must become a reputable portal, a brand responsible for what it suggests. It might even be useful to add some negative reviews (if they are honest, of course), to show you are not promoting every single company that paid you.
Keep it native, overall!
By the way, it’s not only about banks: don’t forget about various crypto exchanges and trading apps.
Quick content ideas
- Educational articles related to finance
- Detailed reviews on financial products
- Saving tips and lifehacks
- Comparison of similar financial products from different brands
- Quizzes related to financial awareness
- Top rankings of financial products, like ‘Top-10 Credit Cards to Get in 2022’
Where to find offers
As you guess, it should be some long-term cooperation. So, the best idea is to search for direct affiliate programs offered by various banks, crypto platforms, or private lenders. Here is a short list of the top popular ones:
Try checking CPA networks, too: they usually give access to various quick loans and credit card offers.
ECommerce
The most obvious conversion type in eCommerce is CPS (Cost Per Sale). So, you need to sell the products, that’s it!
Still, it doesn’t necessarily need to be an online store — it’s just one of the available options.
The other ideas might again include some informational or educational content. For example, you can post unique articles about pet nutrition and allow users to order dog meals you recommend — right from your website via your affiliate link.
One more option: product comparison. Such platforms allow users to search for various products, compare them to others, and finally make an online purchase via your referral link.
Quick content ideas
- Detailed product reviews and testimonials
- Product comparison reviews
- Educational articles related to a product
- Photos and videos of a product in use
- Lifehacks and problem-solving ideas with a product
Where to find offers?
Most large marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, or AliExpress have their affiliate programs: your user follows your affiliate link that leads to a marketplace. Then they make a purchase, and you get a commission.
Depending on your niche and on how popular your website is, you can even contract with big direct advertisers like Samsung or Xiaomi to sell their products with your affiliate links.
Utilities
Another very profitable vertical includes various apps for mobile devices and PCs — and here you go again with the reviews! The thing is that most such apps are paid, so if you explain to people why they are worth it, you’ll easily gain Cost-Per-Install and Credit-Card-Submit conversions.
You can stay very straightforward with users: for example, one of such websites even puts a disclaimer that it earns commissions from your purchases. Honest, modest, inspiring trust:
You don’t need to stick to VPNs, though: it can be a website dedicated to various software solutions like the best video converters, best parental controls, password managers, etc.
Still, VPN apps remain on top of the list for affiliate marketers, so you will never lack offers.
Quick content ideas
- Utilities reviews
- Educational articles like ‘Top 5 reasons to use VPN’
- Top rankings of similar utilities
Where to find offers?
There are plenty of Utility offers in almost every CPA network. For example, if you open Zeydoo, and type in ‘VPN’ — the results will be pretty inspiring:
And, some big providers have direct affiliate programs, too. Among them are:
- NordVPN
- ExpressVPN
- Private Internet Access
- VyprVPN
- Torguard, and more.
iGaming
You probably came across such websites: they post fair reviews about iGaming platforms, create some comparative infographics, and post sports news or tips for players. As a cherry on the pie, they recommend users try their top-rated iGaming websites — and give their affiliate links, of course.
As iGaming is not legal just everywhere worldwide, you might be limited by GEOs. Sometimes it even makes sense to narrow your content to some specific country.
For example, you can create articles about the best legal iGaming portals in the USA.
Quick content ideas:
- iGaming websites and apps reviews
- Tips and tricks for iGaming sites visitors
- Sports news
- iGaming rules and hidden rocks
- Top rankings of iGaming websites
Where to find offers?
Almost every iGaming platform has its affiliate program — just make sure you are promoting the offers in the right GEOs and dealing with legal websites, having all necessary licenses.
Travel
Traveling is an immense niche: you can play with all sorts of content, from general travel tips on how to get a visa to more exclusive ones — like the top-themed hotels in Rome.
Besides, your travel affiliate marketing website can be simply an aggregator of travel services and work like an online booking system.
For example, you can join a hotel affiliate program of some large brand like Booking.com. Your site will show the hotels catalog, but when your user presses the ‘Book a room’ button, they will be redirected to Booking.com. After a user pays for their reservation, you receive a commission, that’s it.
Of course, if you want to work this way, you need to make a unique value proposition. It can be top-notch customer support in your targeted GEO’s local language or some special assistance with finding lodging options.
Besides, you can also add some written content to such a site and make it more visible to search engines.
Quick content ideas
- Hotels and airline reviews
- Travel ideas and routes
- Advice on how to choose a hotel
- Top hotel rankings by price, service, or design
Where to find offers?
Most large booking systems have affiliate programs and are ready to share their fees from hotels and airlines with their partners. Among the top popular and reliable ones are Booking.com, Expedia, TripAdvisor, and Viator.
Besides, you can expand your catalog by choosing something from CPA networks, too. For instance, they often publish travel insurance offers. Is it obvious enough that such offers gain much more trust if located at a large travel portal instead of a plain landing page?
Content Sites
These sites can be about literally anything. A news website or some fashion blog — all you need is to have high-quality content. And, you should post it regularly, so your own effort might not be enough — but we hope you remember what we told you about the team in the very beginning 🙂
And what’s the point of some random content website?
It’s time to remember that affiliate marketing involves two sides: advertisers and publishers. So, your workflow will look the following:
- You own a popular website with useful unique content
- You show Google AdSense ads on your site and thus earn money
- You use an ad network (like PropellerAds) to drive traffic to this site
Got the idea?
You don’t publish any offers, but just monetize your visitors with AdSense. The point is to purchase traffic from the other ad networks for less money than you get from AdSense — basically, this is affiliate marketing in a nutshell!
How to Build a Website?
We mentioned that a website might take a lot of time and effort. That’s true, especially if you mainly rely on organic search. Still, the beginning is half the battle, so let’s see what you shall begin with.
Domain and Hosting
First, your website needs to have its address on the Internet — this is why you need a domain name. It is exactly what you type in the search bar: for example, PropellerAds.com is our domain.
Besides, you must find where to locate your site — so hosting is also a must. Hosting is a special place for your website on the Internet — like land for your house.
It’s pretty clear with a domain name — it should be relevant to your vertical, sound easy, and contain a keyword if possible.
What about hosting?
Briefly, there are various types of hosting and your choice will mainly depend on your website traffic. In other words, your hosting must be capable of serving all your visitors: always load all the pages quickly and be ready for sudden traffic spikes.
Here are the top three popular hosting options:
| Shared Hosting | VPS Hosting | Dedicated Hosting |
| ~$3 per month ~3,000 visitors per day | ~$5 per month ~7,000 visitors per day | ~$100 per month ~30,000 visitors per day |
Website Layout and Design
What about the site itself? You basically have three ways how to deal with it:
- Build a website yourself if you know the ropes of web design and programming: priceless
- Hire a web developer: prices start from $30 per hour
- Use website builders like Tilda, WordPress, Blogspot, or Shopify. Prices start from $4 per month on average, and the subscription usually includes hosting and a domain name.
Website Traffic
Okay, and how to promote your website? It can be a long journey with many pitfalls worth a series of articles, so we’ll just cover the essentials:
-SEO. We mentioned written content many times in this post. So, you might have guessed that your content is the key to your website promotion.
If you create content yourself, you need to analyze Google search results and think of the most efficient keywords for your website copy. Alternatively, you can hire an SEO specialist (from $100 per hour) and a copywriter (from $50 per hour for texts in English).
How Much Money Do You Need to Start with Affiliate Marketing?
-Context Ads. Google Ads is at your service, too: paid promotion via context ads will help you with traffic much quicker than SEO. However, you might want to hire a PPC manager, who will optimize your advertisement budget and will reduce your expenses. Such a professional might cost $250 per month.
–Ad Network. We at PropellerAds have plenty of advertisers purchasing traffic for their websites at ad networks. Just create a campaign and drive relevant traffic to your site using the available ad formats.
That’s actually the basics. Want to know some insights or ask for advice from experienced affiliate website owners?
Try your luck at our Telegram chat!
And if you are ready to go —
