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Building an Affiliate Based Website

One of your first steps to affiliate marketing is to make sure your website is projecting the right message to your visitors. You want to build trust and credibility when a visitor lands on your site, and the way to do this is by building an affiliate based website which is easy-to-navigate and pleasing to the eye.

Here are a few tips for designing your website to make sales:

1. Try to use a white background and black font. Excessive use of fonts or colors will give your website an unprofessional look. Keep the design clean and easy to read.

2. Make the navigation friendly. Have a navigation menu with your main categories then underneath each of those categories you can have links to sub categories or articles. Have an updated site map so that visitors can easily find what their looking for and make sure you give them a link back to the home page.

3. Avoid flashing imagines and flash introductions. These all take away from the purpose of your site and also affect your search engine rankings. Keep it simple and avoid any flashing graphics, music or flash images in your design.

4. Keep offer to a minimum. It’s tempting to sign up for a lot of different affiliate programs at once, but this could lead to over promoting of too many different things. If you give your customers too many choices, they many get too confused and not buy anything at all. Depending on the size of your website, keep your promotions to a few quality programs and always weave affiliate links into the content of your site.

5. Warm up your customers. Don’t give visitors a sales pitch as soon as they land on your website. Instead pre-sell them by offering information, advice and substance they can actually use, then and only then should you make an offer.

6. Avoid overusing exclamation marks! Or hypey language, this can be a turn off to a lot of people and may look unprofessional and like you’re just out to make a sale. Again, think information first.

7. Keep in touch. Don’t let visitors just leave your site. Make sure you get their email address so that you have a way to follow-up with them later on. Don’t abuse their information and send them product offer after product offer because they may just unsubscribe from your list. Instead, send them useful information and content and then make subtle product recommendations that will help fill their needs.

8. Provide your contact information. People are weary of a lot of websites. Clearly list your contact information on your website. Of course, you may not want to give out your home address but a P.O. Box, email address and general information about you and your business helps build trust and credibility.

9. Ask for feedback. Place a poll or form on your website where visitors can send you feedback. This is a great way to do market research and learn what your visitors would like to see or how you can improve your website.

Those tips will help you build a visitor-friendly affiliate based website. And by following these tips you’re also increasing your chances of free search engine traffic. Search engines are in the business of providing the best quality search results to their visitors, by doing that in your own website you’re pleasing your visitors as well as the search engines. It’s a win/win situation for everyone involved.

Additional Tips:

- Give Your Visitor A Compelling “Call To Action” Your page should include a “call to action”; some examples include “click here to purchase now” and “click here to sign up”. Try using words and phrases that create a sense of urgency, such as “limited time offer”. Remember, if you do not ask them to take action, they won’t.

- Provide Testimonials A testimonial page will provide further credibility. If possible, ask the people that are providing the testimonials to allow you to publish their photo. If your visitors see that real people, just like them, are using your product (and are satisfied with it); they will be more likely to purchase from you.