subject: How To Build Your Affiliate Marketing Business From The Ground Up [print this page] How To Build Your Affiliate Marketing Business From The Ground Up
Ensuring that you have all the basics of your affiliate marketing business in place and correct will help you to build and maintain long term relationships with your customers and also earn you more profits.It isn't simply a case of choosing a product or service to promote, and quickly throwing a website together. Your website is your shop window to the world and it is very important to make sure that it looks as good as possible.Not doing this will have a very big negative effect on your ability to actually make money and become a successful affiliate marketer. If your site offers no real value to your visitor they will simply go somewhere else and you can almost guarantee that they will not return.Do not build a site that has dozens of links and flashing banner ads. There are numerous reasons for this. The major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing etc do not like sites like this and potential customers don't like them also because they offer no real value, advice or information, which is exactly what they are looking for.To make your affiliate marketing business stand out from the crowd and also ensure that the search engines keep visiting you your site needs to be full of useful and interesting information related to the products you are promoting and the affiliate marketing business in general.You need to write good reviews of the products or you are selling based upon your personal experience of them. Don't just copy and paste a load of sales copy into your page, but give your personal testimony instead. People don't like hard selling! You will get far better results by trying to educate your visitors about what you have to offer and by answering their questions in full.Always keep in mind that you are attepmting to build a relationship and trust with your visitors. Helpful tips and advice about affiliate marketing and working from home in general will be appreciated and will encourage your visitors to keep coming back. There is a lot to learn in affiliate marketing and people are always looking for free and helpful advice.Another factor that many people don't consider is how quickly there website loads. Too many banner ads and funky pictures can greatly effect load time. A visitor will only spend a couple of seconds waiting for your site to load. If your site loads very slowly they will simply click away.You will also want to portray a professional image. It is true that your visitors need to be able to learn a little bit more about you and you should definitely build an 'about me' into your site but you should not over do it.Include a picture of yourself so that people can put a face to your name but don't over do the cute family pictures and pictures of Ferrari's and luxury holidays etc. If you do, you will find that many customers will take a quick look and move on to another site that portrays a more professional and authoritative image.You should also ensure that your site is easy to navigate by providing your visitors with easy to follow directions on how to sign up for your programs, place their orders or find the information they are looking for. An easy to navigate site will help ensure that visitors spend more time looking around your site and don't click away because they are frustrated.Another great way to make your affiliate marketing business stand out from the crowd is to make it possible for you and your visitors to interact with each other. There are many ways to do this and visitors love to be involved.Ensure that your visitors are able to leave comments about your site and the info you are offering and actively invite them to leave their comments because this will help you to have a much better understanding of what your visitors are looking for and of what they really think about your site. In the long term this will help you to meet the needs of your visitors. It is always possible that they may even have some very good advice for you!Other effective ways to distribute your content and socialize your website are via an RSS feed that people can sign up to so that they can be regularly updated about any new content you have added and also via links displayed on your site to popular social networks where people can quickly share what they have enjoyed about your site.Your goal is to attract as many visitors as possible to your website, build up a trusting relationship with them and make sales. So, to make your affiliate marketing business stand out from the crowd ensure that your site is clean, simple and easy to navigate, portrays a professional image, is full of useful and interesting relevant content and that your visitors are able to interact with you and each other.
