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Amoeba
Designing an Effective Affiliate Marketing WebsiteMatters like delivering valuable, original content and appealing to a market to can speak to with authority should already be well-understood by the time you set out to design your affiliate marketing website. You've got a firm background in your subject matter, you know the needs of your niche-market - now you've just got to build the perfect web-vehicle for reaching your audience.
Whenever anyone sets out to design a website, the primary concern is getting traffic to it. It's important to have a workable traffic-strategy in mind during the planning phases of your site - so you can build it around your goals. On-page SEO factors are the most important ones for the search-engines to consider. I've seen websites with fewer than 70 backlinks rank higher on Google than websites with more than 800. Of course, the quality of those backlinks is an important factor as well - but we're getting ahead of ourselves here...
The things to keep in mind when designing an affiliate-marketing website are identical to those in designing any website, with a few additional concerns regarding your intentions for the site:
You want your visitors to eagerly navigate throughout your site by following your links. This sort of gets them in a clicking-mood, (as long as they're sufficiently motivated to explore) and if you continue to deliver high-quality content on pages they click through to on your site, they'll be that much more inclined to follow your affiliate-link as well.
It's important that the navigation on your site is well-structured for a web-crawler to explore easily. Since you're making an affiliate website, you're probably not going to have a lot of convoluted deep-linking. it's generally a bad idea to have links go more than four folders deep in your linking-structure. When you've got your individual pages outlined, make up a neatly organized "link-tree" and keep your folders and pages in order. (Later, when you create a sitemap to submit to the search-engines, you'll benefit from a simple and orderly linking-structure.)
Keep your content condensed and readable in palatable content-blocks. The average Internet-user will simply skim through large chunks of written content, if they bother to look into it at all. If you've got a lot to say, (and you should, if you're truly speaking authoritatively to your market's needs), break your content up into roughly 200-words chunks and give your visitors the option to click-around to find more. This has the benefit of creating a clean, good-looking page, well-structured internal links, and affords the user control over the content being viewed at a given time. Well-written content that leads to further elaboration will usually provide incentive enough for a user to explore your pages further.
It's also incredibly important for your affiliate marketing website to stand out! There's a lot of competition out there, and if you don't do a great job of capturing the interest of your visitors, they're probably going to go elsewhere for what they're looking for. Come up with an attractive color-scheme, use nicely streamlined images and other relevant media to make your site attractive - but don't go so overboard as to overwhelm your visitors and distract them from your content...
At every stage in designing an affiliate-marketing website, ask yourself how you, as a regular web-visitor, would react to a given page, a given content-block, etc. Does this piece of content compel users to follow the link included? Are there any dead-ends where a visitor finishes reading your content and isn't provided a navigation option to follow? Does the course of navigating the website naturally bring visitors closer to making an informed purchase through your affiliate link? Does the content provide sufficient motivation to opt-in to a mailing list to get more valuable content from you?
If you carefully keep all these things in mind during the design phase, then you'll save a lot of time in optimization-work later on, and you'll have a powerful affiliate-marketing website that will achieve the goals you've set for it.
Whenever anyone sets out to design a website, the primary concern is getting traffic to it. It's important to have a workable traffic-strategy in mind during the planning phases of your site - so you can build it around your goals. On-page SEO factors are the most important ones for the search-engines to consider. I've seen websites with fewer than 70 backlinks rank higher on Google than websites with more than 800. Of course, the quality of those backlinks is an important factor as well - but we're getting ahead of ourselves here...
The things to keep in mind when designing an affiliate-marketing website are identical to those in designing any website, with a few additional concerns regarding your intentions for the site:
- Crawler-friendly and User-Friendly design/content
- Carefully arranged navigation options
- Bite-Sized Content Chunks
- Color, Style and Originality!
You want your visitors to eagerly navigate throughout your site by following your links. This sort of gets them in a clicking-mood, (as long as they're sufficiently motivated to explore) and if you continue to deliver high-quality content on pages they click through to on your site, they'll be that much more inclined to follow your affiliate-link as well.
It's important that the navigation on your site is well-structured for a web-crawler to explore easily. Since you're making an affiliate website, you're probably not going to have a lot of convoluted deep-linking. it's generally a bad idea to have links go more than four folders deep in your linking-structure. When you've got your individual pages outlined, make up a neatly organized "link-tree" and keep your folders and pages in order. (Later, when you create a sitemap to submit to the search-engines, you'll benefit from a simple and orderly linking-structure.)
Keep your content condensed and readable in palatable content-blocks. The average Internet-user will simply skim through large chunks of written content, if they bother to look into it at all. If you've got a lot to say, (and you should, if you're truly speaking authoritatively to your market's needs), break your content up into roughly 200-words chunks and give your visitors the option to click-around to find more. This has the benefit of creating a clean, good-looking page, well-structured internal links, and affords the user control over the content being viewed at a given time. Well-written content that leads to further elaboration will usually provide incentive enough for a user to explore your pages further.
It's also incredibly important for your affiliate marketing website to stand out! There's a lot of competition out there, and if you don't do a great job of capturing the interest of your visitors, they're probably going to go elsewhere for what they're looking for. Come up with an attractive color-scheme, use nicely streamlined images and other relevant media to make your site attractive - but don't go so overboard as to overwhelm your visitors and distract them from your content...
At every stage in designing an affiliate-marketing website, ask yourself how you, as a regular web-visitor, would react to a given page, a given content-block, etc. Does this piece of content compel users to follow the link included? Are there any dead-ends where a visitor finishes reading your content and isn't provided a navigation option to follow? Does the course of navigating the website naturally bring visitors closer to making an informed purchase through your affiliate link? Does the content provide sufficient motivation to opt-in to a mailing list to get more valuable content from you?
If you carefully keep all these things in mind during the design phase, then you'll save a lot of time in optimization-work later on, and you'll have a powerful affiliate-marketing website that will achieve the goals you've set for it.
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