Complete course: Build An Affiliate Marketing Website (2021)

This is a complete course that will teach you how to build an affiliate marketing website. But first, I need to let you in on a little secret about making passive income

There is an entire industry who is devoted to tricking you out of your money. In most cases the people promoting affiliate marketing courses are only worried about making money for themselves.

They are only interested in making money from you instead of giving you the information that you need. So today I’m going to show you how to break that cycle and start an affiliate marketing business for less than fifty dollars a year. 

The Entire Affiliate Marketing Course

If you would prefer to watch a video tutorial of this course, I’ve uploaded it to Youtube for you here:

Because there are many ways to skin a cat, I’ve listed additional training for you here:

• Is it possible to do affiliate marketing without a website?
• An in-depth way to do serious niche research
• Common but easy to avoid affiliate marketing mistakes

Choosing Your Niche

If you are starting for the first time, you are going to need to pick a niche. This is probably the most misunderstood step because newbies approach the word niche in the wrong way. What you need to do is approach the word niche as a need.

Ask yourself what does someone need from me? What can you give someone that is going to help them? Once you find that out it will be your starting point.

When you are finding a niche think of the things that you are interested in or are already good at.

Write a list of those things and search it through Google Trends.

We’re searching it in Google Trends because we want to check and see if there is enough interest in your niche all year round. 

Validate Your Niche

Now we need to validate that you can make money from this niche. Go to Amazon.com and search your niche. Make sure that when you search you are on books. We want to make sure that people are buying these books on your niche.

To validate that there is a market for your niche check the number of reviews that these books have. The next step in validating your niche is to make sure people are spending money on Google.

Type your niche into Google. What we would hope to see is ads. What this means is that businesses are competing to get ad space on Google. The final step in validating this niche is to make sure that digital products are being sold.

Search for the Clickbank Marketplace.

Once on the site search your niche and hopefully you should see that products from your niche are being sold. On the left side of the screen change the gravity to one and you should be able to see the gravity of the products now.

The gravity allows you to know that people are buying these products. Now that we know our niche is profitable we need to narrow it down so it is more specific.

Affiliate Marketing Keyword Research

Now that you have niche ideas that are validated, we need to do some keyword research.

We need to check if people are actually searching for these key phrases. There is a tool called SEMRush (affiliate) that we can use to search up keywords.

On the left hand side click Keyword Analytics and in the drop down choose Keyword Magic Tool. Now you can type in your niche ideas.

Once you have searched it you can see exactly how many times the niche has been searched, keyword difficulty, and how much you would have to pay for ads. You’ll notice that the more words a search has, the lower the volume and key difficulty will be.

We need to look for a keyword that has a relatively high search volume, but a low keyword difficulty. You’ll want to export all of this data as well. 

There you can find some ideas to narrow down your niche to the sub niche level. 

If you are stuck and cannot think of a way to narrow it down just search your niche in Google, and go to the bottom of the search page where you’ll find “searches related to”.

Website hosting

After you’ve found your niche, it is time to take your next step forward. If you can spend around three dollars per month on hosting, you’ll be okay. This is important because you need to have full control over your website. Don’t depend on free hosting.

The reason you need real hosting that you own is because free options are a terrible idea. Don’t waste your time with free hosting because you don’t actually own the website. In fact you are just borrowing it until they decide they don’t want to deal with you anymore or they don’t like what you’re doing.

What you need to do is invest in a self hosted WordPress website. To do this quickly, easily, and cheaply you’re going to need a webhost that has cPanel.

You’re also going to need a domain name as well, but thankfully they only cost around ten bucks a year. When you add it all up, it really costs less than fifty dollars a year to own an internet business. 

Let’s go back to our computer so we can set up a website in just a few clicks. The web hosting company I use is called Siteground (affiliate).

There are many hosting options, but I recommend that you go with the Managed WordPress Hosting option.

Choosing A Domain Name

When you choose a domain I recommend that you go for a .com because for branding purposes that is going to set you off in a much better way.

You want to avoid clever, funny, or vague domain names. We want crystal clear domain names. Once you’ve signed up, go to the tab that says My Account and click on ‘go to cPanel’. It leads you to a strange page with lots of things going on, but don’t worry about it.

All you need to worry about is the part that says ‘AutoInstallers’. Click on WordPress and it will lead you to a page that will prompt you to install WordPress. Make sure that your domain name is selected and choose a site name and update the site description.

Installing Self-Hosted WordPress

Now you can install WordPress and it will be a very fast process through Cpanel.

You can visit your website now and you’ll notice that it is a very simple design, but you can sort that out later.

You can also log into the admin panel where you can add posts and pages.

WordPress has a lot of really awesome free plugins for your website. Let’s go to the plugin tab and install some of the ones I recommend you get started with.

Essential WordPress Plugins

The first one I recommend is Yoast SEO which will allow optimization on your website. Once you install, click activate when it pops up. Next, install and activate W3 Total Cache. For security install and activate Wordfence Security or Sucuri Security.

Once you’ve activated them all you can change the setting however you like. Take a bit of time to explore your WordPress website and maybe even change the theme. 

Now that you have a niche and a website, you need to get an email provider.

Choosing An Email Service Provider

You need this so you can send offers to your email list. The great thing about email is that it can be automated so people receive them the second they subscribe to your list.

99% of the time you’ll be promoting to people who are interested.

There are lots of autoresponder services and email providers to choose from, but most of them will only give you 500 subscribers for free. Don’t be tempted to spend money here because that’s not the solution.

Just get a free option and when you get five hundred subscribers then you can upgrade to a premium option, but make sure you are making money before you do this.

AWeber (affiliate) is a really good starting point.

How these work is that once someone signs up, they are added to your list and this list stays with these companies. The company manages the sending of emails to this list and you can automate this to make passive income.

You’ve decided on an email provider and now it is time to put your email sequence together. We’re going to automate this so that it runs on autopilot from the very second someone subscribes to your email list.  Say you have a five day email sequence.

It can be as long as you want, it doesn’t matter as long as you deliver lots of value in the process.

Automated Email Sequence

So on the first day, the email should have a link to your lead magnet and then allow the lead magnet to make money. In this email you’re not selling, you’re just delivering value.

At the end of the first email on day one you need to tease the second email. So you tell them what’s coming next and what they should expect.

This creates tension and excitement so they look forward to the next email. On day two you can send them a story about your journey, the problems you’ve faced, how you overcame those problems, and the obstacles.

Make sure these obstacles match your audience’s problems. This shouldn’t be a problem if you’re in the right niche. In this email you can link a product or make a recommendation to something that they need.

On day three we send another high value email that can be a case study or a before and after showing how someone else achieved the results that your audience wants to achieve. Here again you can link out to another offer.

On day four you want to give them a tutorial to help them solve their problem. Then you can link out to an offer that is going to help take them further on their journey. On day five you can make an explicit offer.

Once you follow this formula you should see results because you have both value and an offer.

The more simple we keep it the better results we get. 

Now you have a website and an email provider. How do you choose what products to promote?

Choosing Affiliate Products To Promote

Let’s go back to Clickbank because that is the world’s biggest affiliate marketplace.

It’s not perfect, so do your own research on it, but if you want to get up and running fast, this is the best way. Click on Affiliate Marketplace and it’s going to allow you to choose from offers.

Search your niche up and we are going to want to focus on the filters.

Move the gravity up to one again. Now it will only show us products that have a gravity of one. If the gravity is not 0.1 or higher it means the product is selling, but the higher the gravity is the more popular the product is.

Gravity can be manipulated to persuade affiliates to promote their product. What we want to do is forget about the actual gravity number and instead compare it. Go through the list and pay attention to the ones with the highest gravity.

Also pay attention to the average sale. It is going to be very tempting for you to promote higher ticket offers but people are price sensitive.

A twenty dollar sell will be easier to make than a one hundred and seventy dollar sell. A good tactic is to find products that have a low initial sale, a decent commission rate, and an average rebill total.

This means on the front end they have a low ticket item that is probably going to be an impulse buy. They’re then asked to buy a second product which could be a membership program and then you earn a commission.

You should also check to see if the product has a dedicated affiliate page. Affiliate pages could give you banner ads, instructions on how to get started, and other helpful information. 

Let’s move on to the next section which is all about your hop link. On Clickbank, once you’ve found a product click promote.

It’s going to ask you to sign into your account. Once that is done click Generate Hoplinks and your link will be generated. You could just copy that link and use that in your marketing material, but that is a huge mistake.

Think about how you are going to track it. If you are going with email, type in something like email into the Tracking ID space. Click Generate Hoplinks again and you will see a new link.

For now keep looking for products you can promote on Clickbank. 

Things are falling into place very nicely, but how do you get people to subscribe to your email list? Let’s start the email list building process.

The best way to do this is to offer additional value to your visitors and offer them an ethical bribe.

This is called a lead magnet.

Making A Lead Magnet

A good lead magnet entices people to join your email list and we’re going to make one right now. Go to Canva.com  and once you create your free account search ‘Report’ and choose it from the dropdown.

Choose one that is relative to your niche so we can start editing it.

The great thing about Canva is that you can add up to thirty pages for free. So what do you put on these reports? There is a temptation to associate volume with value, but that is not true. The more content you give someone does not equal more value.

It’s about the quality of the content you give them.

When you’re creating lead magnets just condense down everything they need to know down to the essential components.

Don’t create long winded thirty page long PDFs. No one wants to read that.

We want short easy to consume content so they can just look at something and know what they have to do. If you can make bullet points that is probably better. 

You want to focus on potential solutions presenting options that are available and you can monetize these magnet leads through the form of product recommendations. Once that’s done download it as PDF standard and now you can host that.

Sharing Your Lead Magnet

To host it go to your WordPress dashboard and on the left hand side choose Media. In the dropdown choose ‘add new’ and upload your PDF.

Click edit and copy the file URL and use that in an email. The very first email they receive is going to have a link to that lead magnet where they can download it. 

The next step is to go to WordPress and you only have to create two pages here. The first page is going to be a content page that can be an article or a video.

I encourage you to create one piece of unique content that tackles one big problem that your customers face. This piece of content must help them solve part of their problems.

It really is important that you do not try to sell on this page. This is a mistake a lot of newbies make. You only have one chance to ask each visitor to take action and asking them to buy something straight away can break their stuff.

On the content page link to the second page that asks people to join your email list. Now all you have to do is drive targeted traffic to the content page. The reason we do that is because content pages are easier to promote.

We can put them anywhere in front of our target audience and it’s going to get traffic plus it builds trust. Then when you ask them to click onto the second page to opt into your email list, they now have a reason to trust and listen to you.

They now have a reason to subscribe to your email list and it’s on that where you do the selling.

This is what separates amateur affiliate marketers from professional affiliate marketers. Now you have the foundations of a business that generates passive income.