There are different ways through which you can use your website to generate income, the easiest of which is affiliate marketing. However, this doesn’t imply an entirely passive income since you will have to do diligent work behind the scenes.

Creating your own affiliate website from scratch will be difficult if you aren’t a web developer. Since nobody wants to deal with actual code just to create one website, this step-by-step manual on how to create a website for affiliate marketing websites is a lifesaver. We will walk you through the entire creation process so that you can get it done in a few hours.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Helping someone sell a service or product for a commission isn’t the most original idea, but it’s still a brilliant one. Affiliate marketing is done by employing affiliate links on your website to do the same. If you succeed, you could make as high as seven figures.

Advantages of Affiliate Marketing and Affiliate Marketing Websites

Here are the reasons why you should try to earn through affiliate marketing:

• High return on investment
• Low startup costs
• No customer support
• No products or services
• No office
• No sales team

There are many advantages to creating an affiliate marketing website. If you do it right, you can bet it will work. Doing it wrong is when you spam your social media groups, forums, and platforms with affiliate links. The best way to do it is to create an affiliate marketing website and post helpful content for your audience within which you can insert the links.

Affiliate marketing can be a reliable source of income if you approach it with dedication. When you post resourceful content consistently, you can become an authority in your niche so that users come to your site for purchases. Not only do websites make you appear professional and reliable, but they are also a prerequisite for some affiliate programs.

Moving Parts of Affiliate Marketing

The Merchant is the owner of the service or product and a mandatory part of the process. They will handle the headaches of customer support, shipping, and other hands-on requirements of sales. They are also responsible for creating affiliate programs that offer percentages or fixed fees for product or service sales.

The Affiliate is you. You need to create a website and use it along with your socials, blog, or YouTube to promote the products and services you want. As you publish content, you insert links to the Merchant.

The Customer is the last part and arguably the most important. When they buy something via an affiliate link, the Affiliate gets paid according to the amount they’ve agreed with the Merchant.

How You Get Paid

The merchants can track the clicks and conversions from your affiliate links because each link has a unique identifier. That’s how they know that it’s your link that made the sale.

With each customer click, a cookie is inserted in the customer’s system to keep track of their purchase behavior. These cookies can have settings of between 24 hours and 6 months of life so that if the customers who used your link complete the purchase in that time frame, you’ll still be eligible for your commission.

If they make the purchase after that time has elapsed, you miss out on the commission. On the other hand, if they land on the website with your link and end up purchasing multiple products, you get a commission on all the products.

How to Create an Affiliate Marketing Website in 9 Moves

You will find it easy to follow the steps outlined in this section as you embark on your journey of creating your affiliate marketing website. By the end of this piece, you should be able to launch your affiliate marketing business without additional assistance.

Move 1: Select Your Niche

Due to the work you need to do on your website, selecting a niche about which you are passionate is wise. If none comes to mind, it doesn’t mean you must spend a long time figuring out your niche. We’ve curated a few questions that you can use to assess yourself so that you can narrow down your niche.

• Is there any niche about which you’re passionate?
• Do people search for your niche a lot?
• Is the demand in your niche consistent or seasonal?
• Is the competition too stiff?
• Can you generate steady content for your niche long-term?
• Are there affiliate programs for your niche?

When you’ve answered all these questions, you can pinpoint the niche for you fairly quickly. Remember that choosing a niche you’re passionate about is crucial because you must keep updated on the latest niches and create content regularly.

Move 2: Select the Ideal Affiliate Program

When you’ve chosen a niche, the next step is choosing the best affiliate programs for you. The selection process demands that you understand some other shades of affiliate marketing. We’ve outlined a few recommendations for how to get started with this move.

Consider Products You Already Use

If a product or service you are really intimate with has an affiliate program, there’s no better ambassador. You obviously know its features, pros, and cons; therefore, creating valuable and resourceful content for your audience will be easy.

Take Advantage of Affiliate Networks

Affiliate networks are excellent for connecting you to affiliate programs. Although some merchants work hard to create affiliate management systems, some prefer to leave it to third parties. These third parties are the affiliate networks, and they cover about any niche you could think about. Some of the best-known affiliate networks include Click Bank and Rakuten Marketing.

Most affiliate networks have the same requirements for signing up. You will often need a website that already generates traffic, insights into your marketing methods, and a social media presence with a following.

Contact Product and Service Owners

Some product and service owners with affiliate programs don’t advertise them as you expect. Some call their affiliate programs ‘refer and earn programs’ or ‘partner programs’. Those that don’t advertise their affiliate programs at all often rely on the affiliates contacting them to get started. Basically, you should contact owners of products and services with who you may be interested in affiliating.

Evaluate Commission Structures

You should take a deep look into the commission structures of different affiliate programs. Ensure that you understand the basis of commissions or amount per product that the affiliate programs you’re considering offer. Being profitable is the end goal; therefore, this step is crucial in finding the perfect program.

Move 3: Choose a Domain Name

This is one of the most important parts of the site creation process. The domain name is the part of a website’s address before the extension (we will explain what an extension is). If your site is about computers, and you want to name your business Top Tech Computers, you could pick the domain name toptechcomputers. It would be best if you made it simple and easily relatable to the name of your business.

When you choose a domain name, all who search for your site and its pages through your web address will view it. People who are familiar with your business or website but aren’t sure should be able to try and remember the actual domain name, which is why you should make it memorable and short. It should also include keywords and have no special characters.

Once you’ve decided on a domain name, choose a good extension. The extension is the part that comes after the domain, for instance, the .com or .org that we might place after toptechcomoputers. toptechcomputers.com is generally a better domain name than, say, toptechcomputers.org. Other extensions include .info and country-specific ones like .uk for the United Kingdom, .au for Australia, and .us for the United States. The country-specific ones will restrict your audience to the borders of your nation.

You should then register your domain name with a domain registrar, such as GoDaddy, BlueHost, HostGator, SiteGround, and NameCheap. They will also help you confirm that another website doesn’t already take the domain name you choose. Two websites can have the same domain name if their extensions are different, but choosing a domain name that’s already taken is not advisable.

Note: Read about your next move before registering your domain.

Move 4: Choose a Hosting Provider

Hosting entails the storage of the entire website and all its files, including pages, images, content, and videos. You may have noticed that some of the domain registrars we’ve listed above have ‘host’ in their names. Well, that’s because they’re hosting providers first and foremost.

Factors to help you choose the best host

The reason you need to read on this move before registering your domain is that we will advise you on choosing the best host, and you might like that host to register your domain as well. Choosing the ideal host for your site is crucial to the performance of your website. You might want to consider a few things when choosing your host.

Most hosts offer different hosting plans that you can sign up to with different prices and features. All you need to do is compare the different plans that different hosts have and find the one that offers the most features for the least cost. Your host should at least support the content management systems you prefer. We strongly advise that you stick to WordPress. Since you’ll be selling stuff off your site, your host should offer WooCommerce support.

Many hosts have decent uptime, which they’ll often state to be 99.9%. Avoid any host that offers anything below 99.4%, because that implies that your site will be offline that much more. The difference may seem meager, but it can turn out to be very costly for you.

If you want to have email addresses for your website, choose a host that offers that. You should also be on the lookout for 24/7/365 customer support. Hosts that offer many ways of reaching them, including live chat and phone, are best.

Ensure that the amount of storage and bandwidth you’re signing up to will satisfy your needs. A good hosting provider will give you regular backups with options for daily and weekly being best. They should also provide instant website restoration services.

You can take a look at the most popular web hosts, such as HostGator, Hostinger, Cloudways, Bluehost, and SiteGround. If you want to make news website instead, Don’t forget to read best hosting for news website.

Move 5: Select a WordPress Theme and Plugins

At this point, you should have already set up WordPress with the help of your hosting provider. The next step is selecting a WordPress theme. Creating a website gets tricky at this juncture if you don’t have a theme, but WordPress has a rich directory filled with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of themes. Once you choose a theme and import it onto your site, your site adopts its appearance, pages, elements, and extensions.

Choosing a suitable theme is crucial because it directly affects the look, user experience, functionality, and ease of use of your website. It would be best if you went with a theme that has premade pages from which you can choose your favorite.

There are themes for all the niches you can imagine, so you can choose one that fits yours. Alternatively, you can use a multipurpose one to leave room for future diversification. The third option we highly recommend is going with a theme specifically built for review websites. You can review eCommerce products, write review blogs, or anything else in any niche.

Choosing a WordPress Theme

You can go out in search of one of the best WordPress review themes out there, which will take up a lot of time, or we can walk you through the best one we know. We recommend that you go with Revieweb, which is not only competitively priced but also has the most outstanding features. Its friendly premium support puts it head and shoulders above most of the well-known competitors.

Revieweb supports all WooCommerce features, so you can even set up an online shop. It also enables you to include reviews and ratings for your WooCommerce products. You can insert ratings for different products as your users leave reviews and ratings for those they purchase.

With Revieweb, you can display the ratings of different products using more than one rating criterion. You can write review posts with star, percentage, and number ratings. Multiple rating criteria are perfect for giving high-quality information on products to your customers. Revieweb allows your customers to include images and videos of the products they purchased in their reviews, making them more reliable.

As you accumulate reviews, this theme will ensure that they will contribute significantly to your site’s overall SEO. It comes with the Review & Structure Data Schema plugin ($29), which offers a simple solution for optimizing your ratings for search engines. Revieweb also streamlines the management of your ratings.

You will enjoy a wealth of page and section layouts with Revieweb. It offers 4 full-site demos with comprehensive pages and functions, so you can choose your website’s look. It comes with the Elementor page builder for a seamless drag & drop customization experience. Revieweb supports Gutenberg too, which is also a superb customization tool.

The inclusion of the premium Review & Structure Data Schema plugin and Classified Listing plugin at no additional cost makes Revieweb an absolute steal at a mere $29. The Classified Listing plugin presents the best way to showcase classified ads. This outstanding theme has many more excellent features, but we hope these are enough to give you an idea of what you’re getting.

Getting the Best Vital Plugins

Your website could still do with a few improvements, which is where WordPress plugins come in. You should consider the following plugins to enhance your site’s security, performance, and user-friendliness:

• Caching plugins – these plugins will improve your website’s speed as you gain more users.
• SEO plugins – Revieweb has excellent SEO, but you can optimize it further by employing plugins like Yoast SEO and RankMath.
• Security plugins – your website needs security against cyber attacks and malware. You should be golden with any of the top security plugins, including Sucuri and WordFence.
• Affiliate plugins – With affiliate plugins like Pretty Links and ThirstyAffiliates, you can shorten your affiliate links and harmonize them across your entire website if your merchants update them. They also help with functions like URL cloaking, which makes your work with the links super easy.

Move 6: Churn Content for Your Niche

Now that your website is ready, you need to get to work and start producing content. Although creating social media and YouTube content is an excellent route for affiliate marketing, blogging has remained popular for a long time for a reason. You get to write topics you like, engage your readers, and publish different types of content.

Types of Content

Before you write a single sentence, you need to consider the content that will position you as a trustworthy and resourceful affiliate marketer. You only want to help your audience and become an authority in your niche. Here are some of the content types that will work wonders for you.

’How-to’ Guides

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site is to create posts that explain to your users how to do different tasks or use products. Of course, we mean a post like this one. You can then insert affiliate links for the products mentioned in the content.

Product Reviews

Product reviews are an excellent way of attracting and converting customers who are lower down the marketing funnel. Users will often look for product reviews so that they can assess helpful information concerning the products or services they want. You can use the opportunity to educate your readers on the features, pros, cons, and usage information of products so they can make informed purchase decisions.

Product Comparisons

When users are undecided on two products, they usually find comparison posts very helpful. They need content that compares the two products, their merits and demerits, and where one edges the other out. You can help them decide on the product with a well-designed comparison post.

Move 7: Work on Your Email Marketing List

Email marketing campaigns aren’t as old-fashioned as some people may think; you could enjoy a return on investment of up to 3,600%. While that’s an insane number, creating a list isn’t like cutting butter with a hot knife, but the results are well worth the results. Having an email list means you have people waiting on your resourceful regular content.

You can create your list by offering lead magnets that you offer at no cost. These can be free courses, subscriptions, eBooks, and cheat sheets. You can also rely on your organic traffic while collecting their contact information using contact and email opt-in forms. All you have to do is use a plugin like Contact Form 7 to create and place forms on any page you want.

Move 8: Utilize Social Media for Content Promotion

A whopping 56.8% of the world’s population is active on social media networks. This statistic means that more than half of the world is poised to come across your post if you optimize it and your accounts diligently.

Like with building an email list, it takes time and works to create a social media following. However, it doesn’t mean that you should hold off promoting your content until your following is large. You should start promoting it right away and be sure that you will attract a following that is mostly composed of your model customers.

You may have to invest in the venture, but eventually, you will find that it is worth it. It takes a little bit of time to have all your socials and website drawing you income at this age.

Move 9: Enhance Your Site’s SEO

Any content on the internet demands that you work on optimizing it so that it reaches your targets easily. No website succeeds without proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When content is optimized for search engines, web crawlers find it easily and connect it to relevant searches by users. The better optimization content has, the higher it appears in search result rankings.

You have to understand the elements that affect the SEO of a website so that you can work on those that you can.

• For starters, you have to interlink different pages on your website because internal linking is massive for SEO.
• You also have to use keywords within your content well without overdoing it.
• It is ill-advised to have duplicate content on your site since crawlers deem that as spamming.
• The usability of your website is also a significant factor when Google ranks your website; therefore, you should work on your site’s design and navigation.
• The user experience your site offers depends on the Core Web Vitals, including mobile friendliness, browsing safety, and lack of popups.
• The speed of your website and the performance of your pages affects your site’s ranking gravely. You should check your pages regularly to ensure that they’re all responsive.
• Due to the high number of mobile device users, Google deems it important that websites have high mobile friendliness.

You can work on enhancing your site’s SEO with the help of SEO plugins too. There is always something more that you can do to be the top-ranking search result.

Final Thoughts

There you go, the comprehensive guide to creating your own affiliate marketing website. If you’ve never created a website, creating one isn’t a straightforward process. As we’ve outlined in this article, there is a great deal of planning and work that goes into it, but as long as you know what’s needed of you, you’ll be just fine.

The real work is in creating helpful content, keeping your website’s performance high, and tracking your results. If you’re patient and meticulous enough, you will for sure convert this idea into a reality. You can look at other website monetization routes so that you can start earning even earlier.

We wish you nothing but the best and hope that you can tell us your success story sometime in the future.