David Fiske A subtle blend of affiliate marketing and web development

The last few days have seen posts from Kieron, Chris and John about how to market your website.

Here's my take.
 
The Idea

Firstly, we need a fresh idea. Look beyond cashback websites and price comparison sites. Before the hypocritical police come a knocking, these are still perfectly good website ideas if and only if you can make a twist on them. Compare Sat Nav is a price comparison website. Whoopie-doo - except for it has the price checking facility. Suddenly it has a sticky feature. Something a bit different.

Cashback has been done time and time again. The chances of you creating a website bigger than Greasy Palm or Quidco are slim. Infact the chap behind Quidco (Paul Nikkel aka Maple Syrup Media Ltd) is probably laughing himself silly at the success of it. Why is it a success? Money Saving Expert forums seem to have 'elected' it as the cashback site of choice. Plus, Paul has set up Hot UK Deals which naturally ties into Quidco. The amount of times I've seen Quidco mentioned as highest earners for various affiliate competitions makes the mind boggle!

I would like to say Hot UK Deals and the Money Saving Expert 'tie' are what makes Quidco as successful as it is. Without these, would it be as successful? Who knows.

Anyway, what you need is a good idea. Have a brew and a think. Good places to start are those topics that are close to your heart. What are you passionate about? What makes you tick? Another way is to develop a service or website that does something that you want that no-one else does or no-one else does as good as you. I set up UK Affiliate Marketing Blogs to keep track of what was going on in affiliate land.

The idea needs to be good. How do you know an idea will be good? Experience is probably your best test. When you start out, really weird concepts seem a good idea - "of course someone would pay $100 a month for access to pictures of kittens"! Experience however tells you otherwise.

The Software

The software is important as it could help you and could hinder you. If you have more than 10 pages on your site, it's probably best not to use static HTML or PHP pages. Use a content management system. Which one depends on what you want to achieve but most affiliates seem to be raving about Wordpress lately. I don't use it as I can't stand it but eventually, my current platform won't do as much for me as Wordpress can and hence I will switch.

If you can code (or willing to learn to code), build your own CMS. I used to use open source software for most of my sites but I'm now tending to custom written stuff. Being able to code in PHP, XHTML and MySQL helps me develop solutions out of the box software isn't equipped for. Plus, I can interface systems so they can talk to each other. Another great perk.

Whichever software you choose, make sure you have the ability to produce Google sitemaps and an RSS feed where possible. SEO friendly URL's are a requirement and perhaps an ability to mimic html pages using .htaccess.

The Marketing

"Build it an they will come" is a popular mis-preconception of new affiliates - again, another experience thing. It used to be a case of building a website, exchanging links with people and watching your site grow. To an extent that's still true but the people making it big are those that use social marketing.

Lee is a great believer in social marketing and has been quite vocal this last month about the benefits of it.

Your RSS feed should be pinged to as many relevant RSS feed sites as possible when you update it. You should try and include social bookmarking links on your site and encourage people to talk. "Tell a friend" enables just that.

If you have the ability to accept comments on your site, do so. If you are using Wordpress, turn off no-follow so all the links in your comments section can be spidered by Google. People are more willing to comment if they get something out of it (in this case, a bit of link love).

Use social marketing but don't abuse it. Spam is worse than it ever has been. Don't get caught in the trap of being accused of spamming, for your sake and the sake of everyone else who uses the services.

The Reaping Of Rewards

Sit back and relax? Not quite. We may have a good website with some traffic. But you need to be doing more.

If you want to sell the site, you need to collect email addresses (remember Data Protection laws and the fact that you may need to register with the Information Commissioner). Lee mentions that you can create a community on Facebook and grow your contacts. All good and well so long as you can get the email addresses out of Facebook. Why? If someone buys your website, a major part of the valuation is the number of subscribers you have. In the Facebook scenario, how many email addresses do you have? I'm not registered with Facebook so don't know whether you can extract email addresses but I'm guessing not. in which case, all you have is a Facebook group, not a physical mailing list.

You need to also give a reason to your visitors of why they should come back. Regular updates is by far the easiest and most popular. Latest news, latest offers, latest discounts, latest freebies, etc. All reasons to subscribe to the RSS feed and come back.

The End

That's it. Yes, there's more depth to each of these and I may go into that at a later date. There's no keyword research for one.

But it's a start for anyone who's all messed up inside their head and can't find a starting point with affiliate marketing.