The digital space offers many opportunities to earn a passive income. One way is through affiliate marketing, and it’s on the rise. In fact, according to Google Trends, there was a 200% increase in search queries for “affiliate marketing” between 2015 and 2020.
If you weren’t aware, one of the best ways to pursue affiliate marketing is through WordPress.
That’s exactly what we explore here: WordPress for affiliate marketing as a versatile and powerful platform that you can leverage to maximize your efforts to generate a passive income.
Understanding Affiliate Marketing
To understand affiliate marketing, it’s worth thinking about it through the lens of a middleman. There are companies that offer products and services, and there are consumers. Where the middleman or affiliate marketer steps in is when they promote and then sell such products and services on behalf of the business to consumers while earning a commission for their efforts.
Apart from earning a commission, getting started with affiliate marketing has other benefits. It is a low-cost exercise and has a low ongoing cost. Furthermore, it’s a low-risk activity. You can also aim your marketing efforts at targeted traffic, enjoy flexibility, and earn a high return on your investment.
Some of the ways you can earn from affiliate marketing include:
- Creating content online, such as blogs
- Writing recommendations and reviews
- Creating a price comparison site
- Sending emails
- Creating videos
- Recommending through word-of-mouth
- Promoting on social media, or
- Sending newsletters to your subscribers
With websites being one of the most powerful ways to leverage the potential of affiliate marketing, it’s worth noting that WordPress offers a user-friendly and customizable platform for this purpose. It is compatible with many popular affiliate programs and plugins and is worth considering when you opt to pursue affiliate marketing. With around 80% of brands offering affiliate partnerships, there’s no better time than now to use WordPress for your affiliate marketing efforts.
Building a Conversion-Focused Affiliate Website with WordPress
To begin your affiliate marketing efforts, you will need to choose a website name and then secure your hosting. Once you’ve done this, you need to build a conversion-focused website with WordPress. In order to do this, you first need to select a theme.
This is essentially what your website will look like on the front-end without compromising the back-end, and it can be customized to suit your preferences. There are also thousands of theme options you can choose from—both free and paid—including Astra, Roxima, Enfold, Webify, Porto, and Sway.
It’s important that you choose your website’s design to reflect your affiliate niche. For example, a friendlier theme will be suitable for those promoting pet products, while something more professional will be required if you are promoting a fintech service.
If you already have a website on a complex platform like Sitecore, migrating Sitecore to WordPress while preserving your content and data is quite feasible. The key considerations comprise finding the right WordPress host, creating a complete data backup of the website, migrating the content, and conducting rigorous testing. However, this can still involve errors and give rise to potential security risks, data loss, SEO implications, and more.
After all this has been prepared, it’s time for you to create compelling content that engages your audience and converts visitors into paying customers. To ensure your affiliate marketing website is a success, it’s also crucial to hire a dedicated remote team who can help you with content creation, SEO, and other essential tasks. For more on this, keep reading below.
Choosing the Right Affiliate Marketing Plugins for WordPress
Although there are thousands of WordPress plugins available for affiliate marketing, you need to choose the right ones for you. Since affiliate marketing involves a lot of tracking to ensure that your commissions are accurately traced and subsequently paid out to you, plugins are essential. Although many do come at a cost, it is worth it in the long run based on compatibility, ease of use, and tracking capabilities. In particular, some of the essential plugins you should use with your site include the following:
- Security: for online safety and to prevent online threats
- Search engine optimization (SEO): for higher rankings on search engines
- Statistics: to enable you to track the visitors to your website
- Contact forms: to help customers reach you in a convenient way
Creating High-Quality Content that Converts
When your plugins are ready to be used, it’s time to populate your website with high-quality content. The ultimate aim of your content will be to be actionable so that you convert visitors into buyers.
As mentioned earlier, there are several content types you can create, including product reviews, comparison articles, informative buyers’ guides, listicles, how-to guides, infographics, videos, etc. The main purpose is to indicate how the company’s products or services you’re promoting will help solve a customer’s pain points, what benefits they will have, and how these will improve their lives.
However, irrespective of the type of article you create, you also need to include naturally placed actionable (clickable) affiliate links and/or call-to-action buttons on each piece of affiliate content. In most cases, you can obtain affiliate links directly from the affiliate program you’re working with. You should receive specific URLs at signup that you can use in your content.
Optimizing SEO for Increased Visibility and Traffic
Earlier, we mentioned that one of the essential plugins you need is an SEO plugin. Why is this essential? Because it will help you conduct keyword research to target relevant keywords that your audience is actively searching for.
Known as an on-page SEO technique, when you know what keywords are getting a high search volume, you can target these and include them in your content. When search engine bots crawl your site, they will pick up these keywords and bring your articles to your audience’s attention when they rank high on search engine results pages.
The higher you rank on search engines, the better for your affiliate marketing efforts because this is a great way to drive traffic to your site and get more visitors consuming your content. It’s important to remember that as a new website, it may take some time for your content to start ranking, but once you get traction, you can continue your efforts for cumulative results.
As such, content writing efforts should be done on a consistent and continuous basis because it takes time to rank. However, the more quality and relevant content you put out, the better the results will be for your affiliate marketing efforts. WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast are a great way to help you optimize your content before you hit the “publish” button.
Monetizing Your Affiliate Website with WordPress
It’s now time to monetize your affiliate website with WordPress. Getting the foundations right is the first step. However, that’s not where the process ends. In fact, it is a continuous process that will require your attention on an ongoing basis. With this in mind, here are a few best practices to follow:
- Make sure your visitors have a pleasant and enriching experience on your website. For this reason, you should avoid over-cluttering with ads and links. This practice is actually discouraged by many affiliate networks. In addition, you should hide your affiliate links from your banners to bypass ad blockers.
- Connected to the above best practice is the importance of keeping your links relevant to your audience. Your content and links should be connected.
- Use SEO best practices to ensure that your site offers an optimal user experience. You will need to look at factors such as alt text for images, website loading speed, mobile compatibility, etc. Also, look at some of your most popular posts and try to continuously optimize them by reshaping them and adding new affiliate links, where appropriate. Older posts should be updated, and you should optimally use them by enriching them with some affiliate links. You can also make your site more user-friendly by using tables, charts, and graphs.
- Try to use landing pages on your site to help your prospective customers get more information about the product or service to help them make a purchase decision.
- Exit-intent pop-ups are a great idea to help you increase your sales because this is an effective strategy to increase the number of people in your email list.
Common Mistakes in Affiliate Marketing with WordPress
Having looked at some of the best practices in affiliate marketing with WordPress, it’s also good to avoid common pitfalls. Here’s what you should look out for when building your side gig:
- Over-promoting products and sacrificing content quality
- Neglecting website performance and speed optimization by using plugins and themes
- Ignoring compliance with affiliate program terms and conditions
- Targeting too many categories simultaneously
- Promoting low-quality products and/or services
Conclusion
Overall, there are great benefits and potential of using WordPress for affiliate marketing. You’re sure to find success by following the tips and best practices outlined in this article to get started and continue on your journey. Remember that affiliate marketing requires consistency, patience, and continuous learning for success.