The Affiliate Marketing Newbie Series: Designing a Website

August 29, 2008

The Affiliate Marketing Newbie Series

Designing a Website

As an affiliate marketer you will need to accomplish several things in order to be successful. At the very least you will need to:

• Design and build a website

• Write content for your web page

• Create a domain name and find hosting

• Have products or services to sell

• Create ads and squeeze pages

• Set up an auto responder

• Generate traffic

My goal is to write a series of articles to help explain each of these steps, starting with website design.

When thinking about your web page, ask yourself these questions: (1) What is the purpose of your site? (2) Who do you want to visit your site? (3) What are your customers’ needs?

When you think about the purpose of your site think about whether you are going to offer an entire spectrum of products or are you going to target a specific niche. In other words, are you going to sell an entire collection of books on e-commerce or are you going to sell books specifically about affiliate marketing?

The next question is who do you want to visit your site? Do you want to appeal to a certain age group, gender, cultural background or region? In order to figure out the purpose of you site you must define your audience. A good way to do this is to simply look at other sites with a similar purpose as yours. If possible look at their customer or visitor data. Sites will sometimes offer links to their logs or try emailing the webmaster for the site.

The third question is what are your customers’ needs? Is your site comfortable to navigate? Is the layout consistent? Is it pleasing to the eye? Can you navigate through the pages and sections easily? If you have more then one page is there a search feature? Is your content fresh and updated often? Don’t think just as a designer and builder; but as a customer to your site. What would make you buy (or click)? What would make you come back?

Generally, a visitor to a site wants to find information or to buy something. Your goal should be to make it easy for the visitor to find what he/she wants as quickly and as pleasantly as possible. This will create repeat visitors and hopefully—sales.

netinfoseek.com | edit