How To Build An Affiliate Website That Works

If you’re looking to make some extra money on the side in 2022, well, you’re not the only one. The global economy is still recovering after the unmitigated disaster that was 2020, while an impending cost of living crisis is forcing many of us to reevaluate our financial futures. If we’ve learned anything from these past few years, it’s this: look after your money, because you never know when things might go wrong.

Thankfully, the internet offers plenty of decent ways in which you can do just that: you could go into ecommerce, for instance, particularly using dropshipping to sell items without needing to stock them. You could also take freelance gigs through sites like Fiverr to supplement your income. One option that can be really useful if handled well, though, is running an affiliate website.

In this post, we’re going to look at how you can build such a website in 2022 and beyond, ending up with a passive income stream that you can steadily cultivate over the coming months. Let’s begin.

Start with an easy-to-use site platform

Before you build any kind of website, you’ll need a platform upon which to place it, and making a bad decision about which one to use will cause you major problems. If you have no compelling reason to choose anything else, we’d suggest going with WordPress: it has a massive community, a huge range of affiliate-related plugins, and the system itself is free. It’s also incredibly easy to install and use.

If you do opt for WordPress, it’s essential that you choose a reliable hosting solution. Shared hosting (where multiple websites share a single server) is typically the most affordable option — so it’s a natural choice if you’re just starting out — but it won’t offer the same level of performance or uptime guarantee as cloud hosting, for example. Better yet, a managed WordPress hosting provider such as Cloudways (one of the fastest WordPress hosting solutions) will offer optimal performance and round-the-clock support, ensuring your affiliate site doesn’t suffer from downtime or latency issues.

Focus on providing worthwhile advice

If you want people to click on your affiliate links (and get to your website in the first place), then you need to have something meaningful to offer. Doing the equivalent of saying “Here are some links you can click on” won’t get you far. So, how can you compel people? One option is to rely on the strength of your personal brand — but unless you have a ton of followers, it won’t work.

And even if you do have a lot of followers, you’ll still need to show that there’s a reason why you’re linking to particular things. To achieve that, you should focus on offering in-depth advice that’s as truthful as you can make it. If you have no bias in the links you provide then you can be totally neutral on what gets clicked (provided something does).

If you’re looking for inspiration, Finder is a great example: helping customers save money across more than 300 brands in over 50 categories — from insurance to mortgages, credit cards to hotels — the site appeals to a huge number of brands looking for a way to promote their products and services. It’s unlikely you’ll be operating on this kind of scale, of course (Finder has over 1 million current members), but their model is one to aspire to. 

Choose a popular and growing niche

The niche you choose to concentrate on will massively influence the success you can have. If you pick something that most people don’t really care about (perhaps just because it’s something that you’re interested in), then you’d better be sure that there are enough people out there who might want to click on your links.

If you don’t have a particular niche in mind, that will make things easier in the sense that you’ll be able to go with whatever’s trending — but having in-depth knowledge is important. The best scenario involves finding in-demand products and/or services in an area you care about. A good way to proceed is simply to pay attention to what people are buying and talking about. Fitness is a reliable industry, particularly at key times of the year — getlasso.co lists some solid schemes.

Keep up with the latest products and services

Speaking of paying attention, it’s vital to remember that simply setting up your affiliate website and leaving it alone won’t get you the best results. Interest in products and services changes over time, and something that’s hugely in-demand one day can be boring the next — so keep looking for new affiliate schemes, weighing up the commissions they grant and coming up with the right selection to give you a good chance of making some money.

A good way to stay on top of the latest product trends is by monitoring social media: look for the things users are discussing, the posts they’re sharing, the types of products and services that are the most popular across social feeds. You can also use tools like Google Trends to analyze search data and see what users are most frequently searching for: this will give you an idea of current and emerging trends, and enable you to tailor your affiliate site to those products and services that are in the public consciousness.