3 Reasons Why All Affiliate Marketers Should Have Their Own Website

Affiliate marketing is widely considered an easy way to generate an income online. Affiliate marketers do not need to set up website, develop any products, write sales copy or provide customer support. They can just concentrate on generating traffic to the product sales page and collect their commission when a sale is made.

However, successful affiliate marketers will go the extra mile to generate more sales. They will set up their own websites to promote other people products. Here are three reasons why you should also have your own websites as an affiliate marketer.

1. Offer Your Own Bonus

If a product is very popular, it will attract a lot of affiliates. In order to capture a bigger slice of the profit pie, you need to convince your prospects that buying through your affiliate link is the most sensible thing to do. The best way to do this is to offer a bonus that is related to the product you are promoting. For example, if you are promoting web hosting, you can offer to build a website for each prospect that purchase through your affiliate link. You have to make sure your bonus complement the product you are promoting. Do not offer anything that is in direct competition. Most important of all, you must deliver what you promise.

After setting up your own website that showcase your bonus, you can direct prospects to your website so that they see your offer first. This way, you are creating more value for the product you are promoting. In addition, you are establishing your own unique selling point and differentiate yourself from other affiliate marketers.

2. Ease of Tracking

When you have your own website, tracking becomes a whole lot easier and useful. Although there are many affiliate programs that offer you tracking capability, they are seldom up to the mark for serious affiliate marketers.

With your own website and hosting account, you can install your favorite tracking program to monitor all your marketing campaigns. Even if you do not use any tracking software, you can still obtain a lot of useful data from your web host log file. These data include the number of visitors that have visited your site, duration of their stay, where they come from and the keywords they used to find your site.

By analyzing the data from the web host log file or your favorite tracking software, you can gain a lot of market intelligence that will help you understand your target market better. In addition, it can also help you refine your offer to target the right audience.

3. List Building

To ensure the long-term survival and success of your online affiliate business, you must have a list of targeted prospects. With your own website, you can add an opt-in form on your home page requesting for your visitors’ name and email address. You will need to install your own mailing list management software or subscribe to a mailing list management service before you can start collecting visitors’ personal data.

Building an opt-in email list is one of the best ways to gather prospects. However, the addition of an opt-in form may distract your visitors from your main offer. You have to decide what action you want your visitors to take and design the home page of your website accordingly.

These are but three of the many reasons why all affiliate marketers should have their own websites. A personal website can definitely help to maximize earning potential when used correctly. The possibilities are endless and are limited only by your imagination and creativity.

By Stephen Chua