In affiliate marketing, you can earn passive income while your affiliates market your products. But if you don’t have a website, there’s a problem. Without a website, affiliates may not learn about your program, you won’t attract the ideal affiliate candidates, and it establishes distrust right from the start.
Affiliate marketing requires little investment, but it still requires some investment and that includes building an affiliate website.
In this article, we’re going to walk you through the process of how to create a website for your affiliate marketing program.
Why do you need a website for your affiliate marketing program?
Without a website, how are users going to find out about your program? Join your mailing list? Affiliate marketing programs need to 1) tap into an audience and 2) solve their problems. That’s when customers start to build trust in your brand and buy the products you’re promoting. To do this, you need the traffic to reach your brand somewhere whether through your website or social media channel. The choice is where you want the traffic to find you and the easiest solution is through a website.
A website provides a place to host all affiliate marketing materials for the affiliates in your program like social media posting guidelines and other helpful resources.
Websites also give you the ability to track partnerships by collecting click-through rate data and showcasing your program, allowing you to stand out from other affiliate programs.
How to Create a Website for Your Affiliate Marketing Program
Now we’re ready for the fun part of the article, how to actually build your affiliate website. If you already have an existing website apart from your affiliate program, you might consider adding an affiliate landing page.
The first step is to
Select a platform to build your affiliate website
Perhaps you aren’t sure where to start and that’s okay. There are thousands of CMS applications out there and hundreds of affiliate platforms, so you might feel frozen in the paradox of choice. No matter what your story is, we recommend LeadDyno.
With LeadDyno, you can:
- Add your own custom domain
- Add your own logo and custom favicon
- Choose between a mobile-friendly version or a classic desktop version of LeadDyno
- Add custom fields to collect more information about your affiliates
- Add a Terms of Service section with our base template
- Add areas to put custom text: the header, intro, description, instructions, commission
- Add your own CSS code to customize further
And what’s better, your affiliate website is the home page of your LD affiliate program, so you won’t need to go far to manage your affiliate program.
We also grant the ability to manually approve affiliates for your program, so you won’t get any spammers entering into your program.
LeadDyno offers a 30-day free trial period. All you need to do is select the plan, put in your email, credit card information, and you’re ready to start your affiliate program.
If you aren’t convinced yet about building your affiliate website with LeadDyno, then we suggest building a landing page on your existing business website. Landing pages are just as effective as websites specific to your program. The point is, you should have at least something showcasing your program.
A landing page is one, SEO-friendly page highlighting the features of your affiliate program.
For example, the LeadDyno affiliate landing page shows:
- How the program works
- Why you should join it
- How much an affiliate can earn in the program
Landing pages attract prospective affiliates and influencers who match your program. Properly executed pages move your website visitors to action–in the case of affiliate websites this is to sign up to promote your brand.
Landing pages remove distractions while presenting information in a concise way with snappy CTAs (Calls to Action).
Information on both your website and landing page must be targeted towards your audience and clearly convey your benefits.
Design your website
Now that you’ve chosen your goal (create an affiliate marketing program website), you can now start designing it. We recommend keeping it simple: should be visually appealing but minimalist. No distracting pop-ups or unnecessarily flashy graphics. Affiliates are attracted to simplicity.
When designing your affiliate website, add your brand’s colors, logos, and custom fonts. This website is an extension of your business so any marketing material should reflect that.
Notice how Elementor’s Affiliates Program stays on brand. They stick with their brand’s two fonts (one serifed, one sans serifed) and colors.
When designing your affiliate program’s website, follow the same design principles.
- For best readability, use no more than 3 different fonts.
- Match your font and colors to your brand.
Next, create attention-grabbing headlines and images. Let’s take a look at another example.
Cloudways’ affiliate program’s landing page uses snappy dialogue to inform affiliates of their program’s offerings. “Low customer churn,” “Earn at your pace,” the headlines are all brief sentences to attract attention.
This goes along with our next point
Pick a catchy benefits statement
The statement should include:
- How much an affiliate can earn with your program (15% recurring)
- What the affiliates need to do
It should answer the question: how will my program benefit affiliates?
Will it save them money? Time? Create more opportunities? Reduce stress? Increase productivity? Eliminate a problem? Grow their business?
How will it help them? When affiliates are looking to join your program, this is the question they’ll ask when reading about it.
If you market with only features, your affiliate prospects are left to find out how your product or service benefits them. When they have to put in this extra effort, conversions suffer.
Give your affiliates the right answers to the questions they’re going to ask anyway. Always do the work for them so they’re clear on what value you’re providing them.
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Create compelling web copy
You’ll notice a theme from the last few points. All of the copy on your affiliate website must be concise, simple language that tells a story and answers a question.
When creating compelling web copy for your affiliate program or other affiliate materials, know your target audience. What’s relevant to their experience? You must define them as they’re who you’re writing to.
Next, address their problem. When affiliates find your program, they want to know what your commission rates are, your cookie duration, and any other bonuses your program may offer. So, when writing your copy, address these issues and answer their questions.
Put your CTA in a visible place
Your CTAs (Calls to Action) must be in a visible and accessible place. We recommend placing it at the top of your page with bright, on-brand colors, and short, commanding language.
Examples:
- Sign up now!
- Join for Free!
- Learn more!
Add testimonials for social proof
Testimonials build trust in a brand. More than 70% of customers say positive reviews make them trust a brand more. When you add customer testimonials on your affiliate website, you’re showing the affiliate that you have a product customers trust and want to invest in. This makes an affiliate’s job easier. Affiliates must believe in your product before signing up to try to sell it.
When introducing testimonials on your website, use phrases like “Here’s what others have to say about…” “What others say about…” “What others like about our products…”
Add testimonials to assert social proof.
Optimize Your Website
Once you’ve designed your website, you’re ready to optimize it. Website optimization means using all technical and marketing tools to acquire traffic, and engage and convert visitors into buyers.
Analyze
The first step to optimizing your affiliate marketing program’s website is to understand the visitors in your niche using Google Analytics or other analytics software.
Google Search Console (GSC) offers user behavior reports. These reports offer traffic data to show how users behave once they land on your website, while GSC tracks metrics including session numbers, unique visitors, bounce rates, and more.
When analyzing data, you’re looking for specific patterns. How are users finding your site? What search terms are they using?
One single data point won’t reveal anything about your website, but multiple data points do. If only 4 people visit your website and don’t click on your CTAs, this isn’t exactly a problem. But if you have a large volume of traffic and they’re ignoring your CTA, you’ll need to adjust your strategy.
Analyzing the data is the first step to understanding what needs to be done to optimize your website.
Avoid too many navigation links
When creating your affiliate marketing program website, you want to avoid too many navigation links. The reason being is that it distracts from the CTA. And on your affiliate website, your CTA must be most prominently displayed so that your affiliates know exactly where to go to join your program.
Your CTAs should be the only navigation links you have on your affiliate website.
Solve any site speed issues
Site speed greatly affects your conversion rate. That is to say, slow websites kill conversions. 47% of customers want your websites to load within two seconds, and if it doesn’t, they abandon ship. 40% abandon it altogether if websites take longer than three seconds to load.
So, let’s fix this. Check your website speeds using Page Speed Insights. All you need to do is type your URL into the address bar and press “Analyze.” Google will analyze if your website is up to Core Web Vitals standards.
GTMetrix is another page speed checker and works in a similar fashion. It will grade your website’s speed and offer concrete tips to improve it.
Optimize your website for mobile
A common mistake when building a website is not cross-platform testing it before publishing it. In 2018, nearly 40% of all eCommerce purchases during the holiday season were made on a smartphone. More and more users are clinging to mobile devices to view websites and purchase products. Ensure yours is ready for these users.
LeadDyno offers a mobile-friendly version of our affiliate website. You can design a version for both mobile and desktop to cover both of your bases.
Test your website out
Once you’ve optimized your website, it’s time again to analyze the results. We analyzed our website at the beginning of the article to see what needs to be fixed. It’s also important to reassess after changes occur, this way you know what works and what doesn’t. The main method for testing website optimization changes is by A/B testing. A/B testing is also known as split testing. Split testing means comparing 2 versions of your website after making a minor adjustment and seeing what works and what doesn’t.
For example, if you’re testing CTA button colors, you’ll make two versions of your webpage, version A with color A and version B with color B. After making a minor edit, you’ll track these changes and see which yields better results.
Consider split testing as a part of regular maintenance testing on your website. This way, you’re always discovering minor tweaks that aid in the success of your website.
We also recommend Google Optimize. Google Optimize allows you to A/B test and also offers other testing options. You can use their visual editor to make a small text or image change or edit using HTML or JavaScript code for more advanced changes. Then, analyze your results and adjust accordingly.
Conclusion
Creating a website might seem like a challenging task, but it doesn’t need to be. With only a little bit of setup, you’re well on your way to advertising your affiliate program. A website allows choice affiliates to find your program and also provides a place to organize marketing materials for your affiliate program. In this post, we reviewed
- how to select a platform for your affiliate program (HINT: use LeadDyno!)
- how to design your website by adding your brand’s custom designs, using snappy CTAs and benefits statements, creating compelling copy, and adding testimonials to your website for social proof.
- how to optimize your website by solving any speed issues, ensuring uniformity on your mobile devices, monitoring with Page Speed Insights, and testing your website out using A/B testing.
You’ll have your site running in no time!
Create Your Affiliate Website Today
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Hassle-free setup. Try Free for 30 Days
