In this 5-part training series, Tim McKinlay, an expert trainer from Wealthy Affiliate, walks you through the entire process of how he chooses a niche and creates affiliate websites from scratch.
Wealthy Affiliate is where I initially got my training to become an affiliate marketer several years ago. I wish I would’ve had this class from Tim back then! He makes everything so easy to understand.
In this training series, you’ll get an “over the shoulder” look at how he chooses a high-potential niche, builds a new site, plans the content he’ll be creating and how he monetizes the site. The goal of the series is to give you everything you need to model what he’s doing to start your own affiliate website.
WATCH MY VIDEO OUTLINING THE TRAINING SERIES:
How to Start an Affiliate Website
This course to start an affiliate website consists of 5 expert training classes:
1. Selecting a Low-Competition, High-Potential Niche. Choosing
a profitable niche is the first step to create an affiliate website. In this class, Tim shows you exactly how to choose a high-potential niche.
He’ll actually choose the niche in this class and use it for the rest of the training series.
He’ll also give you some insight into why it’s so important to choose a good niche, how to differentiate between broad and narrow niches, and how to come up with ideas from scratch, even if you’re new at choosing a niche.
A note about niche selection: I think it’s important, especially if you want your website to become your full-time job, that you choose a topic you actually like. It doesn’t have to be something you’re an expert in. You can gain knowledge as you research the topic and create your content.
But if it’s not something you’re actually interested in, creating content for your site will be tedious. Choose something you’re interested in, and creating content will be fun!
2. Branding and Building Your Site Using SiteBuilder. Now it’s time to get your affiliate website up and running. Tim will show you how he comes up with brand/site name ideas and how to register a domain name using SiteDomains. Then, he’ll show you how to choose a theme and build your site using Wealthy Affiliate’s SiteBuilder platform.
And finally, he’ll walk you through setting up the foundational elements of your site so that you’ll have a fully functioning website that’s ready for you to build out by the end of the class.
A note about choosing a website theme: I personally think it’s better to choose a simple website theme. Look at this website you’re on right now. It’s clean. White background, black text, menu and ads on the site. Simple and easy for your viewers to actually read your content!
3. Architecting Success with Winning Content Ideas. Creating content is the most important thing you need to focus on if your goal is to create a profitable affiliate website. There’s no point wasting time writing just for the sake of writing. You need to create content on the right topics.
Tim will show you how he determines what his site is going to be about and what topics he’ll be writing about in the coming days, weeks and months ahead. He’ll also show you how he separates his ideas into different categories and how he records his ideas using a simple Content Plan that he creates using Google Sheets.
A note about content creation: I can’t stress enough how important it is to 1) create content consistently, 2) create unique, quality content and 3) have at least a basic content strategy in place.
In the beginning, I was all over the place! I wasn’t consistent, I was creating “junk” content, and I didn’t have any plan about the topics I wanted to cover. Learn from my mistakes: listen to Tim on this!
4. Keywords & Content: The KEY Ingredients for Endless Quality (Free) Traffic. Now you’ve chosen a niche, built your site, and created a Content Plan to give you a broad idea of what you’ll be writing about going forward. In this class, Tim will go deeper into the keyword research process.
A note about keyword research: Wealthy Affiliate has its own keyword research tool called, Jaaxy. It comes free with a paid membership. I’ve used Jaaxy since I started my first affiliate website, and I use it almost every day in my business. It’s priceless, and super easy to use.
Tim will show you how he vets his ideas effectively, and how he adds his chosen keywords to the Content Plan. That way, he knows exactly what to write about to get quality, free traffic to the site.
Tim will also show you exactly how he approaches the content creation process to create the best content in the most efficient way possible.
5. Monetize Your Site with Compelling Affiliate Offers. Most people think they need to focus on the “making money” aspect of affiliate marketing first. But this is actually the last step in the process, and for a very good reason. Once you get the site set up and traffic coming in, the money part is simple.
In this class, Tim will walk you through how to monetize your website. He’ll show you how to select the best affiliate offers for your niche, give you an overview of the different types of “money pages” he creates to promote affiliate offers and how to maximize your site’s revenue potential.
You might want to check out this course, Earning Revenue With Your Online Business to learn more ways to monetize your website.
He’ll also show you why it’s worth running ads on your site, the best ad networks to join, and how to put the ads on your site. This way, you can have a mix of both affiliate offers and ads on your site, which is an effective way of earning revenue.
Me again lol: A note about putting ads on your site: I have Google Adsense on my sites and it’s turned into quite a hefty source of income. BUT, I personally cannot stand going to someone’s website and find they have so many ads on their site that I can’t even read their content!
So I refuse to do this to my readers. Also, when you’re creating good, valuable content, you’ll make way more money working your business correctly than you’ll make with ads. I say use a happy medium. Ads? Definitely. Tons of ads? Nope!
How Much Does Wealthy Affiliate Cost?
Wealthy Affiliate offers a Free Starter Membership where you can take some free classes to see if you like the training, and to see if affiliate marketing is something you want to pursue.
If you decide (like I did!) that you want to continue, you can upgrade to their Premium Membership, which includes virtually endless training not only about how to do affiliate marketing successfully, but how to start and run an online business in general. You can cancel your membership at any time.
That is how I started. Read my full review of Wealthy Affiliate here!
If you’re a beginner (like I was), you should start with the Free Membership and upgrade to the Premium Membership only after you’ve tried it out and decide whether you want to go forward.
Starting an Affiliate Website from Scratch
I personally built this affiliate website plus two more affiliate websites from scratch with the training at Wealthy Affiliate. They taught me to build a professional, profitable WordPress website and taught me (about a million ways) to monetize my websites.
I’ve been a full-time affiliate marketer for almost a decade as a direct result of their training.
To hear from Kyle, one of the owners of Wealthy Affiliate and the guy who trained me all those years ago, check out his course called, An Introduction to Affiliate Marketing.
Feel free to comment below if you have questions. I’m happy to help! Debra
