New Affiliate Advice – You Get What You Pay For
by Tom Wozniak, Director of Marketing
You have decided to take the plunge and get into affiliate marketing and are now ready get things rolling. As a brand new affiliate, you definitely aren’t generating any revenue from your business yet. Affiliate marketing is often billed as an industry you can get into with no money invested. So, it may seem natural for new affiliates to look for as many services for free as possible. However, it is best to remember the old adage that “you get what you pay for.”
A key for new affiliates is to know where they can take advantage of free or ultra low-cost services and when they need to pay for quality. Setting up your first website may seem like a great place to utilize some freebies – but this may not be the best decision. Here are just a few tips to think about when building that first site.
- Web hosting – Avoid free hosting services. You will likely run across a variety of free website hosting or blog hosting services as you are getting ready to set up your site. Many of these services have major drawbacks and limitations. The biggest immediate challenge is that they may not allow you to use them for advertising purposes. (You will run across this regularly with free blog services.) This means no AdWords, affiliate banners, or anything else that jumps out as an ad. You may still be able to include some affiliate links in your blog posts or in the text, but your ability to truly monetize your site will be hampered. Free hosting services may also provided limited bandwidth, storage space, etc. There are plenty of relatively low-cost hosting services available that won’t create these limitations and still won’t break the bank.
- WordPress Themes – If you are using WordPress as a platform for a blog, you will want to install a theme that is affiliate marketing and SEO friendly. There are thousands of free WordPress themes out there for you to download at no cost. Many of them look awesome and would seem to be an great choice for your blog. But, while some of these themes may be pleasing to the eye, they are anything but pleasing to the search engines and affiliate marketers. Many themes do not lend themselves to including banners or other ad placements and may not be optimized for SEO purposes. Not to worry. There are a large number of themes available for a small fee (under $200 for some of the best) that are designed with affiliates in mind. Do a little research and you should find a wide range of options that will be vastly more effective than a free theme. Some popular themes with affiliates are the Affiliate Theme and Thesis Theme, among many others.
- Site Design – Don’t design your own site, unless you are actually a capable web designer. Basic HTML is pretty easy to learn. Pick up a book on the subject and after a few hours you can pretty easily have designed your own website. However, it probably won’t be very pretty and it most certainly won’t be professional quality. Remember, this is your affiliate marketing ‘business’ we are talking about. Your goal is to make money and a well designed website will help you immensely. It is actually very inexpensive to hire a freelance web designer to built a simple but effective site for you. One easy place to find freelance designers is a site called Elance (www.elance.com), but there are many others, as well.
- Content – You don’t have to write your own site content or marketing copy. There are many very successful affiliates who don’t write the content on their sites. Now, if you’re creating a blog that you intend to update regularly, writing your own content (or a lot of it anyway) likely makes sense. But, if you are building a landing page or other site, you may want to get professionally written copy. Just as with outsourcing your web design, there are thousands of talented copywriters available on sites like Elance that you can tap into at a very low cost.
There are exceptions to every rule, but if you use these tips as guidelines to help you spend money wisely, you are much more likely to meet with success.
