Who should an affiliate site benefit?

Who should an affiliate site benefit?

Building an affiliate site is easy. Building a good affiliate site is another story. Nearly anybody can slap up a site, throw on a few affiliate links and call it good. But sites like that will rarely make any sort of serious money.

A quality affiliate site will be beneficial to the customer, to the merchants, and to the affiliate.

Beneficial to the customer:  A good affiliate site should be able to benefit the customer and be a site that is useful to the customer. This can be done in a number of ways:

• Give the customer what they are looking for – When someone does a search for something it should be easy for them to find what they are looking for. If they are searching for “nascar jackets” and you deliver a site that sells NASCAR jackets you are helping them.

• Give the user content they can’t find elsewhere –  Product information and reviews are a good way to do this. Give the customer some original content about a product they can only find on your site.

• Aggregate content – Rather than having a customer visit multiple sites for the information they are looking for you can aggregate that content onto one site.  Embedding videos, articles, having multiple products available, price comparisons, etc. are a good way to do this.  If you can make your site a one stop site for your niche there is less chance the customer will go elsewhere to look for information.

• Provide something useful to the customer – You want the customer to get some use out of your site and give the customer a reason to buy from you. It could be a coupon or deal, something explaining the benefits of a product, a recipe if you have a cooking site, show how to use a product properly, an interview with an expert in that particular niche, etc.  There are dozens and dozens of useful ideas you can give a customer or something that will help the customer. Try to do more than just give a link.

• Solve a problem for the customer – When a customer has a problem and they find your site and can get a solution to the problem that is a great benefit to them. “How to…” articles are great for this. If someone has a problem like “Whenever I cook chicken it is always too dry and rubbery” and you give them a good recipe or tips on how to cook moist chicken that solves their problem and they are probably very thankful to find a tip like that.

• Provide quality traffic – Merchants are looking to make sales. Affiliates are looking to make money. The more quality traffic that an affiliate generates the more beneficial they are to the merchant.
• Presell the customer – Let’s say a merchant regularly converts 1% of the visitors to their site. If an affiliate is doing a good job of preselling the customer and convincing them they need to buy this product and the traffic from that affiliate ends up converting at 5% that is very beneficial to the merchant.
• Access customers the merchant wouldn’t normally see – A merchant’s main job should be to sell stuff. Most merchants aren’t experts in SEO, PPC, social media, video, etc. Quality affiliates will be able to drive traffic using many of those methods and it will allow the merchant to focus on what they do best.
• Provide a greater reach for the merchant – Let’s say a merchant who sells grills and barbecues is doing a good job on their site and they have some good search engine listings for some keywords like “gas grills”, “charcoal bbq”, and some of the bigger keywords in that niche. If they just stick with those big keywords they are missing out on a huge portion of their potential traffic. They could have affiliates that have some niche sites focused on a specific type of grill, sites with bbq recipes, a site dealing with backyard patios, a site dealing with grilling pork, and dozens of other niches driving traffic to them that they wouldn’t normally get. That expands their potential traffic from just a few general keywords to thousands of more targeted keywords

Beneficial to the affiliate: Affiliates are there to make money. Yeah, they might say that they want to help customers, provide something useful to the customer, and other grand philosophical ideals but in the end if the site doesn’t make money it is pretty useless as an affiliate site. I’m not saying you can’t use those great ideas to drive customers and make money. Some of the best sites out there don’t seem like they are out there for the $$ but money is what drives the vast majority of affiliates. But on the flip side the more you help the customers, the more you can relate to them and connect with them, the more “good stuff” you do for the customers the more money you will make.

Personally I wouldn’t build an affiliate site if I didn’t think it would make money. There are plenty of other sites I might build without a goal of directly making money and those sites are great but if I build an affiliate site I want to see some $$ come out of it.

Finding a customer need and filling it is one of the time tested methods of selling stuff. If you have a site dealing with baby strollers and you see that there is a great need out there for someone to put the strollers through torture tests (like Dwight did on The Office) and you take a bunch of strollers, beat the crap out of them and then let the customers know what the best results are and which stroller holds up the best you are providing a very valuable service to the customer but also you will have a very good chance of convincing that customer they need to buy a certain stroller. In a case like that you are providing a great service to the customer but in the end the goal there is to make the sale and get the commission

Or if you see that people want to know what the sharpest pair of scissors is and you go out and test out a bunch of scissors, pull in some reviews from other sites, give the customer a coupon so they can save on their scissors you are idealistically being very helpful to those customers but in the end you are still trying to drive that sale.

So when building an affiliate site all 3 of these should be present. There are hundreds of sites out there I can think of that fill all these needs and many of them are very, very profitable. If you can build a site that benefits the customer, the merchant, and the affiliate your site should end up being successful.

Any comments? Am I missing something? Do you have anything you can add? Please leave a comment below and let me know.