When you first start affiliate marketing, it is crucial to plan how you will build your website. What kind of website is best for affiliate marketing?
As a general rule of thumb, your website should have around 80% purely informational type of posts and the rest 20% based on product review. If you make an affiliate marketing website purely based on product reviews, then unless you have huge authority and tons of backlinks, it would be really tough to rank well.
Further in this article, I will be sharing with you whatever I have learned following various SEO blogs, YouTube channels, and also my own experience. Plus, I will also share with you some affiliate marketing website examples. Keep reading till the end so that you don’t miss out on anything!
Which website is best for affiliate marketing?
In short, the website that can be The Best Possible Resource on any given topic is best for affiliate marketing!
I don’t want to confuse you by discussing what is a niche site or what is an authority site. Let’s for a moment start thinking from the very basics.
We want to build affiliate marketing websites – So that we can earn money from that – But wait – we require traffic – That means we need to build a successful blog that gets a considerable amount of traffic every month, right?
So when thinking of what type of website or which website, we need to focus and think of it as a successful business that keeps bringing lots of visitors every month.
Now if you are in this space of affiliate marketing then you might already know that your website should be on a particular topic. It should attract a particular group of people that have common interests.
For example, if you are building a website of golf. Then, you are actually attracting a large group of people who have a common interest in “golf”. I hope you got the thought process.
So the first point is clear that you need to build a website for affiliate marketing based on a certain topic/niche.
Now the next thing that comes is content planning. Considering the example of a golf website. You have two options. Either you can build a complete product-focused website by writing posts like these:
- Best Golf Clubs
- Best Golf Balls
- Best Golf Bags
Or you can make a Content Mix website where you would also write the above-mentioned product-focused posts but in limited quantity.
You would actually have on your blog a major portion of the informational type of helpful posts that actually solve some problems of your readers or answer some of their queries.
So some of the types of posts that you would be writing on will be like:
- Is A Golf Cart A Waste Of Money?
- Can A Golf Club Be Too Heavy?
- Why Are Golf Clubs So Expensive?
| Product Focused Website (100% product) | Content Mix Website (80% informational + 20% product) |
| Targets only buyer intent keywordsCompetition is usually very highUsually hard to rankRequires high authorityRequires many backlinks | Targets both buyer as well informational intent keywordsCompetition is moderate and easy especially for the informational based posts |
What is the Google Product Review Update And Why Is It Important?
Now since you are about to start a website on Affiliate marketing your major goal would be to bring traffic from google organically. So it is essential to know about the google algorithm related to affiliate marketing blogs or websites.
Google announced that it would release the product review update on 8th April 2021.
The primary aim of Google is always to give the user the most useful and helpful information as much as they can. And they do it through various testing, review processes, and experimentation.
They certainly realized that the user used to appreciate whenever the content was more in-depth rather than the one which just summarized the web (kind of thin content). In order to reward the content that deserves to rank well, they announced this product reviews update.
Since Google is now stricter more towards affiliate content and unless you can provide really in-depth product reviews it would be harder to rank your blog.
However, if you target the low-hanging fruits or in other words, the low competition keywords that the users in your niche are actually looking for. Then, it would be much easier. And therefore content mix strategy seems to be good.
Affiliate Marketing Website Examples
The WireCutter
This is a very popular website example when considering the affiliate website. As per Authority Hacker, this website originally started in 2011, now it is one of the top 6000 sites online by just focusing on finding the best products in each category.
It is based on a simple model of earning from the affiliate commissions mainly from Amazon and BestBuy.
New York Times recently acquired this website for the US $20 million!
SideNote: There are plenty of affiliate programs you can join but generally you would get higher conversion rates with Amazon only. So if you are a beginner it is best to first start affiliate marketing with Amazon.
Making Sense of Cents
This site is in the finance niche and it is run by Michelle Gardner. What’s unique about this site and sets it apart from other sites in the same niche is that Michelle writes all her content by herself.
As per one of her monthly reports Michelle made around $125,000 monthly revenue. The goal of this site is to help people budget and save money.
On this site, Michelle makes her money mostly by affiliate marketing and selling her own courses.
Conclusion
In short, the context mix type of website where you have a significant portion of informational content and the remaining portion of product review type content, seems to be good for affiliate marketing.
It is not only comparatively easy compared to only product-focused type blogs. But also, since you would be creating helpful informational posts that solve your reader’s problem, you can establish your blog as a complete best possible resource on the given topic your blog is based on.