This article is the first of a 10 part series about an affiliate site that I have recently been working on. I won’t be sharing the URL or the niche, but I will share the entire process that I am using.

This process, as a whole, is something new that I have been trying out; it is a combination of many different internet business principles I’ve learned over the years.

Why You Should Build Affiliate Sites That Are Authoritative

When I first started affiliate marketing, I did a lot of direct to merchant and single page promotions. While that model is great for quickly finding profits, it isn’t so great for building a sustainable affiliate business. The problem with these quick-and-dirty affiliate promotions is that you can be wiped out far too easily by a Google slap, a change in the affiliate program you are promoting, a competitor that decides to copy you, an overall change in the market, or one of many other factors.

The remedy for these problems is to build a fat affiliate site. What I am talking about here is still an affiliate site, but it is much more than simply sending PPC traffic to a single landing page. Instead, we are going to create a useful website that contains articles, product reviews, product comparisons, user-generated content (ratings, reviews, and comments), forums, tools, and more.

While all of that might seem like a tall order, rest assured that it doesn’t have to happen all at once. The main goal is to start out with just the foundation, get that to start making profits, and then use those profits to develop the site into a full-scale web property.

The end product (our fat affiliate site) will receive traffic and revenue from multiple sources. Traffic will come from referring sites, search engines, repeat visitors, newsletter mailings, pay-per-click listings, and other advertisements. Revenue will be generated mostly through affiliate offers, but also through private advertising and in-house product development.

This isn’t much different than any regular website you might create, aside from the fact that we will be using profits from pay-per-click affiliate marketing to fund the development. Because of the potentially large budget, we will turn it into an authoritative website.

Basically, you should build authoritative sites as an effort to maintain/increase your income and protect your lifestyle. Thin affiliate sites can be easily wiped out at any time, without warning. Having a larger site that isn’t reliant on one source of traffic or one source of revenue offers much more security.

Choosing A Market

The first step, as usual, is to decide on a good target market. This process is almost identical to the one I explained for autoresponder affiliate marketing. You need to choose a market that has enough information for you to cover and has the potential for back-end sales.

The major difference here is that your market must be able to support an authoritative site. A great way to determine this is to search for competitors. If you can find large content websites, forums, and affiliate websites within the market, there is a good chance that you can create one, big, combination site.

If you choose a market that is too narrow, you can still make incredible affiliate marketing profits, but your uses for those profits will be limited to personal spending/saving or investing in another market. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that (I have plenty of affiliate sites in markets that can’t support much expansion), but you won’t be able to apply this series of articles to those markets.

Finding Related Affiliate Programs

This sort of goes hand-in-hand with choosing a market; if it doesn’t have good affiliate programs, it will not be a good market. What you should be looking for are groups of similar affiliate offers. The reason for this is that we will be creating multiple landing pages, depending on the keywords, that take various pre-sell approaches. Here are a few examples:

• Single product reviews – detailed review of the product you are promoting
• Product comparisons – side by side comparisons and short summaries of related products
• How to articles – product recommendations for doing something

These landing pages can also work together to provide more value to the end user. For example, the product comparison pages will contain short summaries of each product, but they could also link to the individual detailed reviews. Similarly, the how to articles could use affiliate links as recommendations, or they could link to the review page to offer more information.

I got a little ahead of myself here, but even though we aren’t talking about building landing pages yet, I felt it was necessary to give you an idea of how the affiliate offers would be used. In addition to the landing-page uses, you will probably want to find some offers that can be incorporated into an autoresponder sequence for follow-up sales.

Keep in mind that, as you are finding these affiliate programs, you should also be applying to them. It sucks having to wait for approval/acceptance into an affiliate program when you are all ready to launch a campaign. Doing so in advance can save you a lot of time and can help maintain continual progress.

Develop A Master Plan

Now that you have chosen a viable niche with plenty of affiliate offers to promote, you need to create a plan for your website. I like to do this with a pencil and paper, but you can use whatever you feel comfortable with.

What you basically want to do here is write out everything you could ever hope to have in the website. Remember that your goal is to make a ton of affiliate commissions that can then be rolled into the web development, so nothing should be left out. You can always hire freelancers to do the hard stuff for you.

Take another look at your competitors’ websites and determine what makes them successful. Take good ideas from each of them while also trying to come up with some of your own. This list will serve as a todo list or goal sheet that you can come back to when you have some profits to reinvest.

In addition to planning what will be in your website, you also need to think about how each component will work into the big picture. You should focus on building a system that is flexible enough to support landing pages (with no distractions) as well as content embedded within the regular site design. A good way to do this would be to have multiple versions of your content:

1. PPC versions that are blocked (noindexed) to search engines (to avoid duplicate content) and are specifically optmized for conversion
2. Integrated versions that are indexed by search engines and are optimized for conversion, branding, stickiness, and repeat visits

Some other things to think about would be the best ways to integrate an email opt-in form for your autoresponder sequence, how to laser-target your landing pages with dynamic content, and which product you should group together for comparisons and how to group them.

Those are just a few of the issues that I can think of. Try to think of as many solutions as you can so that you have a clearer picture of where you are going. If, however, you come across a problem that you did not account for, there is absolutely nothing wrong with improvising and creating a solution on the fly.

Next Article

That’s it for part 1 of “Building An Authority Affiliate Site.” In the next article, I will talk about laying the foundation for your site. It will start as a collection of landing pages for your pay-per-click campaigns, and will eventually be built upon to grow an authority website.