Affiliates: Would You Use Your Own Websites?
This whole thing I’m talking about here crept into my mind over time as I continued to follow various forums and discussions regarding affiliate marketing.
I see a lot of discussions about what or what Google doesn’t like, why rankings dropped, why conversions suck and stuff like that. And these discussions are always revolving around people wondering why their affiliate sites don’t work or aren’t performing.
Usually, once a link to the site in question becomes available, I like to check out the site just to see what these complainers are trying to do with their sites. Most of the sites that I visit in this fashion suck.
They aren’t usable in the least. They have keyword stuffed content that is unreadable or uninteresting to humans. They have sloppily implemented graphics or look like something I tried to build in the 90′s. They don’t invoke trust at a first glance, they look unprofessional, and the content doesn’t make sense. And the site owners are wondering why “Google slapped my site” or why “nothing converts”.
I Like to Use My Sites
The affiliate sites that I like to build aren’t anything different than what a lot of people are trying to accomplish. Reviews, comparisons, related info – stuff like that.
What I like to do though is take a step back from every site I build and look at it from a user standpoint.
This is much easier said than done, but I’ve figured out how to look at stuff from outside the box after working at it for a while.
The sites that make me the most money or perform the best seem to always be the ones that I analyze over and over again and question myself “why would I want to use this site?”
Often times, I don’t know how to answer that question when I first launch a new site. Sometimes they are just simple sites with a bunch of reviews, and that’s it – to start with.
How I Do It
Once you get a feel for product niche, you can start to get an idea of the types of people looking for the products and what other types of info they might need to know about to learn more about the products before clicking through the links and becoming a buyer.
I like to constantly revisit my sites and more less “audit” them.
I visit the home page, click around a bit and read the copy, and more or less see what comes to mind when I try to learn about the products on my sites. It’s amazing the things that come to mind when even spending 5 minutes clicking around a site and acting as a potential site visitor.
I very quickly think of stuff like:
- What types of terminology is being used a lot on this site that people might need to learn more about? For example, I built a site around the cargo boxes that people mount on their cars, and I found that it was useful to write articles about the types of plastics that are used in the cargo boxes, and how they compare to each other.
- What types of accessories are available for products that are being reviewed? Are they available through affiliate programs too?
- Is the product explained well enough in the review? Sometimes I can think of pictures or charts that would be more helpful, or sometimes I notice features that could be described much better.
- What types of things do I want to see comparisons of? Often times the comparison charts on my product-based affiliate sites are the most popular pages. People want to see how all the items I’ve reviewed compare to each other.
And these are just some small samples of the stuff that comes up when I’m walking through my sites.
When I do these “audits” I basically make actionable tasks for each site as I go through them and review them. By the time I’m done, I’ve got a nice list of actionable stuff I can do to each site to improve it and make it more useful to the visitors.
Since I’ve gotten in the habit of consistently doing this to my sites, I’ve seen nothing but traffic improvements and better search rankings. The search engines seem to love it when I take the time to finely tune a site and make it more useful.
This Isn’t A Lot of Work
I should also mention that this really isn’t a lot of work in most cases.
Most of the time, when I’m done auditing a site, I’ve got a list that contains:
- Which pages need more elaboration within the content
- Which pages need to have links to other pages or related pages
- New page content ideas
- New products or accessories to review and add to the site
- New features that might be nice to add to the site pages, such as social sharing and stuff like that
- Pages that maybe could use some photos or videos to fill them out better and make them more appealing to readers
Once I’ve got a list like that for a site, it doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of work is on the table, as I just mentioned.
I can usually do something like:
- Outsource the article and new review ideas, and only have to do the work of publishing them to the site
- Visit a stock photo site or get my camera out to take a few photos, and add them to the pages
- Install a WordPress plugin or two to add a new feature that I wanted to use – to make the site more interesting or useful
- Add more in-content links from page to page
This type of stuff only take a couple hours at most for most sites, so in reality I usually only create about one or two hours worth of work for myself, per site, after I audit a site.
And evolving these sites over time to make them more useful always seems to pay dividends. It’s time very well spent.
Sometimes you just have to put your “visitor hat” on and visit your sites like a normal visitor. It will open your eyes very quickly.
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