Building an Affiliate Site with WordPress – Detailed Guide

Niche marketing is a simple concept. Create an audience around a niche that has sufficient organic traffic to profitably promote products. But like many simple concepts, it can be tricky to execute. The most important step is to settle on your niche and develop your audience.

Typically after selecting a niche you will build a website and create an audience. The best website, products, reviews, and offers are useless without an audience to present them too. WordPress is the platform of choice for the vast majority of these sites..

You have a few choices when it comes to creating a WordPress website. There are a number of free website builders like WordPress.com that you can use.

Remember WordPress.org is the home of WordPress itself and free themes and plugins while WordPress.com is the free blogging platform based on WordPress.

It is best to self-host your site. It is inexpensive and you can control your domain name and tools. The only two costs are …

This is the one of appeals of niche affiliate marketing — the low barriers of entry.  If you provide content that helps people and makes a difference you will develop trust. Once you have trust, you can make product recommendations that are more likely to convert. This guide is a detailed look at the building of a niche site with WordPress and how to get organic traffic via search and your content. We break down the affiliate site creation into five functional areas:

1. Initial research and niche selection — establish your focus and audience.
2. Hosting setup — your performance and reliability foundation
3. WordPress setup —  the stage for your content and marketing
4. Content Creation — your customer value proposition
5. Marketing and technical  SEO — lets Google and visitors understand and find you

At Prosociate we explore these areas in more detail in our Affiliate Marketing Section. We have an extensive collection of articles and tutorials to help you build your affiliate business. Let’s get started on your affiliate journey!

Keyword Research

Building a niche website starts with researching your potential niche topics. This first step is key, it sets the course of your website. Niche sites typically get most of their traffic from Google search. The commission per transaction from Amazon, eBay and other product-focused affiliates are too low for paid ad campaigns. Ads certainly can be used for promoting your brand an content but SEO is the backbone of most affiliates.

Most affiliates will have a mix of information type posts and money posts. The information posts help develop authority on your topic and generate traffic. Many affiliates also use ads and the info keywords are easier to rank so attract more search volume. The money posts tend to be reviews and other posts that attract people in the buying funnel — they have commercial or buying intent. You need a good volume of visitors, with buying intent from search, to succeed as an affiliate.

Since niche sites depend on search results for traffic, your niche selection research focuses on the info and buying keywords. These keywords will help guide your content creation efforts. 

It makes sense to choose a niche you are interested in. It is easier to stay engaged with a topic that you enjoy. You want to develop deep knowledge and expertise to be a trusted leader in your niche. If you are an authority in a popular niche, you will be able to develop an audience.

But you must find just the right size niche. You need to find that Goldilocks niche. A general niche, like electronics, is too broad. You would be competing with established national and international companies.

These broad niches will also have competition from the bigger affiliates with high domain authority. It would be difficult to rank in the first few search result pages without an ad budget or aggressive black hat SEO techniques.

On the other hand, if you choose a super-narrow niche you may get in the top 5 of the Google SERPS, but so few searches for the niche that there is not enough traffic to monetize. Most people start too broad, don’t be afraid to niche down. Generally, 3000-8000 Google searches a month, from the main keyword, is a good range. There are lots of tools out there to do your keyword research.

You can get lost in all the data and become paralyzed and not take action. There is no reason to have more than 1 or 2 paid keyword research tools and you can likely get by with free tools and trials to start. Though not as good as Ahref or SEMRush, Moz offers 30 day free trials. They have a solid database and you can back that up with a low-cost, one-week trial from Ahref.  A good strategy would be to start with free tools, create a short list of niche targets and then start up your trial period with Moz.  Finally, research your shortlist items with a one-week Ahref $7 trial. Keyword research will validate your niche, assess your competition and help guide your ongoing content marketing strategy.

We have a few detailed articles on niche selection …

Premium Keyword & SEO Tools

Premium SEO tools can get expensive. The better tools like Ahrefs and SEM Rush start at $99/mo. If you are building your first site it may be best to start with free tools and contract someone to do some research for you. You have the added benefit of another set of more experienced eyes to validate your findings.

Premium Tools	Description	Trial	Cost
ahrefs	Number one for data depth. The broadest mix of competitive, keyword and content research. Like SEMrush a complete solution for keywords and backlink profile research.	$7/7-day	$99 – $399
SEMrush	Competitive analytics, Keyword difficulty, domain comparisons. Goes head to head with Ahrefs in some areas but has unique features. If you could have only one premium tool this would be it	none	$99/mo
Moz	Another large SEO toolkit in the $100/mo range. A great free trial for new site builders well with trying. I use the free moz chrome extension but prefer SEMrush for paid tools.	30 day	$99 – $249
Longtail Pro	Excellent Keyword traditional keyword difficulty and suggestion tool with competitive domain strength, page strength for the results.	7 Day	$25-$45
Keyword Finder	Similar to Longtail pro, KWfinder finds long tail keywords including. It uses Google Suggest as a source.	Free Lite Version	$29-$39

 

Low Competition Keywords

A proven strategy for new sites is to start with low competition keywords. Use the tools above and find keywords that you can create content around that has little competition. With these tools you can find how difficult a keyword is to rank for and its monthly search volume. Most Google users see 10 sites in the search result that are not sponsored (ads). It is better to be on page 1 or 2 for a keyword with a few hundred searches per month than on page 9 for one with 2000 monthly searches.

Once you have gained authority on a topic you can move up the keyword competition ladder to higher search volume keywords.

Getting to page 1 is always the goal. The old cliche of Google page 2 being the place to hide bodies is based in truth. Once you do reach the top 10 on page 1 your work is still not done. The #1 post gets near 50% of the search volume.

We have a few articles on keyword research …

Domain Name

You have selected your niche after thorough research, now time for a domain name. In the past, having an exact match domain (EMD) like thebestcordlessdrills.com would have been desirable. There was strong SEO value. Now, long EMD names are more likely to get you penalized than rewarded. Since Google no longer values these long EMDs, it is best to look for a brandable or partial match name.

Often a name uses one of the head keywords from your niche and a descriptor. This is a partial match domain. It will always evoke your niche because of the keyword and your descriptor can make it memorable. The single keyword in the domain name stills adds some SEO value.  In this case, zippydrills.com, for example, would be a better name than thebestcordlessdrills.com.

Brandable domain names are those where there is no keyword in the domain name. Kayak.com and Google.com are good examples of these. The benefit is that you can have no ties to a specific keyword and can expand the domain topic as you need. They also have an advantage if you sell a site and the new user wants to move in a different topical direction.

Best to go with a .com domain or perhaps .net or .io Most other TLDs should be avoided with the exception of other country specific domains like .uk. Google does not care, but domains other than these look less professional to some consumers. A .com domain is always going to be easiest to sell as well. Every little bit you can do to be perceived as a resource vs. an affiliate marketer is helpful. When choosing a domain registrar, check their reputation for name server changes and general administrative responsiveness. A good benchmark is Namecheap who has good pricing and an easy to use dashboard for name server and other updates. A new domain at Namecheap is under $10, with a year of free private registration.

Site Concept & Styles

After you have selected a niche, you need to determine how you will present information and value to your audience. You are in the content marketing business, so you need to organize your site around these concepts. Some affiliate marketers build multiple product sites, others are monetizing health and fitness blogs. Editorial formats include Top 10 sites, review sites, niche expert blogs? Perhaps a storefront in a larger association’s site. After you decide this editorial format, you can design the site and start creating content. There are a few tried and true formats that convert for product niche marketers. Among them are:

Top 10 site –  Everyone loves lists. People looking at Top 10 lists also are showing buying intent. Visitor Benefit:  You have researched the marketplace, curated and compiled a list of the best in class.

Niche Authority Site – These sites aim to have the deepest, most complete set of information available for the niche. Even to the point of obscure. You want visitors and Google to perceive you as the industry expert. Visitor benefit: The go-to site for this niches detail.

Comparison Site – Much like the top 10 site. These sites compare multiple related or competitive products within a niche. Visitor Benefit:  You have researched the marketplace, curated and compiled a list of the best in class.

Review Site – In-depth reviews of typically a small set of products. This type of site needs to pay very close attention to product selection. You need products that are feature rich to give you points of differentiation. You want products that are fairly high-priced and in the high-end of Amazon’s commission schedule. Trending products work best. Visitor Benefit:  You have researched the details about a multi-featured product. Visitors can have tables comparing features side-by-side.

Storefront or Catalog – These sites have lots of products. Some may curate the best products of a certain niche, others offer best deals for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc. These are the hardest to convert. You will have a lot of thin content if you use the images and descriptions from Amazon and eBay. It is best to rewrite the descriptions. Some marketers would spin them, some would just not index them and let the site rank on the basis of the non-product information. You need to be careful to have plenty of additional content or risk a de-authorization from Amazon for thin content TOS violation. You will definitely need to be on top of your social game as getting a viral social following is the best way to succeed with these sites. Visitor Benefit:  You have researched the marketplace, curated and compiled a large list of niche specific products organized in a store or catalog format. They also can work well for organizations and other communities.

Blogger — Typically these are sites that identify themselves closely with the individual creator. So a mommy blog would highlight the blogger, their experience etc. It is much easier to create an audience with these types of sites. People develop a loyal connection to the blogger. A lot of trust is created with the audience which is a critical part of affiliate conversions. These sites can be harder to sell because of the tight association with the original owner.

Start Networking Early

When building an authority site, you need to start networking while you are in the planning stage. You don’t want to show up on a Facebook group the day you launch. Join the groups relevant to your niche and be helpful. Then down the road, you can lightly promote your new site.  Be active, be helpful, don’t sell anything. Get a feel for the tone of the group before posting. Also, find Sub-reddits for your niche. The same as the Facebook groups; be active, be helpful, don’t sell anything. In fact, Reddit users are particularly sensitive to sales pitches in their groups.

During the earliest days, just focus on networking and great content that is valuable to your target audience – don’t sell anything.

Hosting Setup

There are 3 broad choices for hosting as an affiliate:
1. Shared Hosting
2. Virtual Private Server (VPS)
3. Hosted WordPress

You can certainly start with shared hosting. Most people do. Be careful to not purchase the lowest cost provider or package. Performance is a ranking characteristic for Google so you don’t want a sluggish site. Shared hosting performance is largely dependent on the number of other sites on your server.

A managed VPS is a virtual machine within a large server with support from your hosting provider. This means you have your own dedicated slice of a server that you have total configuration control over. Closely related is cloud-hosting which allows flexible changes by using cloud-based resources In both cases you will have cPanel access with full control of ftp, email etc..

Finally, a Hosted WordPress server is tuned for WordPress. Rather than cPanel, a dedicated user interface for management is used. Managed WordPress often comes with a staging site – a