UK Affiliate Networks

Independent UK Affiliate Programs

Affiliate FAQs

Many of the questions that you might have about affiliate marketing will be answered in the glossary. This section seeks to answer additional questions that are frequently asked by affiliates.

What should I write about on my website?

That is completely your choice! However, it is helpful to write about a subject that you either know about or are interested in, because then it is easier and more interesting for you to create unique content to put on the web site. If you are not sure which subject to choose, use Google to see what other sites already exist on your prospective subjects - then pick a subject area where there is less competition. The smaller the number of other sites trying to do the same as you, the more likely you are to pick up free search engine traffic. Remember, the search engines love **unique content**.

What type of products should I feature on my website

This depends on the subject of your website. As this website is all about affiliate marketing, I have included links to companies that run Affiliate Programs. In addition, I sell Affiliate Marketing ebooks. I could also feature books on Affiliate Marketing that you could buy from Amazon. In addition, I could think outside of the box a little. If you are looking to set up an affiliate website, you will need a good webhost. I could run a feature on web hosts and recommend some for you to try, linking to each of them through an affiliate link. Alternatively, I could just display a banner ad for a web host, although my personal recommendation for a particular web host would probably carry more weight. In the same way, I could feature links to sites that sell domain names. After all - if you are going to set up a website, you will need to buy a domain name.

The sort of products I would not feature? Products that I suspect my site visitors would not be interested in, such as gambling, loans, pine furniture or air conditioners. I might have other websites with information about all of those things, but they are not appropriate to the content of this website, and so I would not feature them.

What type of website should I build?

In other words, should I build a static site, a review site, a forum, a blog or something else? It's really up to you, any type of site can be profitable based on how much work you are prepared to put into it. It helps if you are technically capable of producing the site you want to produce. A basic html site is the simplest, although Blogs can be very easy to set up if you have a webhost that offers hosting with Cpanel, which features the automated installation of the free blogging program Wordpress, and other content management systems.

What type of traffic is the best?

The best type of traffic is free, organic search engine traffic. If you want to kick start your site, you could consider using Google Adwords or other pay per click search engine models. However, it is very easy to spend more money on advertising than you actually make for selling your products, so you would need to keep a very close eye on your return on investment. Other ways of getting traffic to your site include getting links from other sites and advertising your site or products on social networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube. I have a site that sells Step Aerobics DVDs that I have created myself (yes, really!) for other fitness instructors to use. I have uploaded a few free videos onto YouTube, the end of each video features the URL of my website where the DVDs are sold. This form of advertising is completely free and I know that if somebody actually types into their browser the URL of my site, they are genuinely interested in purchasing my super DVDs, or at the very least subscribing to my mailing list.

Should I have my own domain or just have a free hosted site?

I would recommend having your own domain and hosting if you want your site to look professional. Having said that, I have seen some excellent niche sites with great search engine rankings hosted on free hosts without having their own domains. So if you have no money for web hosting or a domain name - go for a free one, what have you got to lose?

Having said that, you can get very decent website hosting for between £30 - £50 a year (it's usually cheaper in the US than the UK), but hosting your site in the US can have implications for the geotargetting of your site by the search engines, depending on the domain name extension you are using for your site. .co.uk domains can be purchased for around £6 for two years, so the total investment is very low compared to setting up other types of businesses.

You've lost me now, what do you mean by geotargetting?

Put simply, you need to decide where your target market is and choose your domain name and / or hosting package appropriately. If you have domain ending in .uk, no matter where you host the domain, it will always show up as being "within the UK" in the Google search engine results. If you have chosen an .com domain name, then if you want it to show up as being "within the UK", you will need to physically host it in the UK. The same applies to domains ending in .info, .biz, .net and .org.

Other country domains are a different matter. Some of those that have a generic meaning in English, eg .tv, will appear within the UK search engine results if the site is hosted in the UK. Some other country domains do not show up within the UK no matter where they are hosted. However, as certain country domains become more popular as we run out of home grown domains, this is likely to change.

If you really want to target the UK, buy a domain that ends in .uk and you can't go wrong.

How can I increase the ranking of my site in the search engines?

You need to get backlinks, ie links from other sites. This will happen naturally if you have a great site with unique content. You can also help the process along by writing to webmasters of sites that you think might be interested in the content that you are offering, and ask them for a link. Another way is to write articles that contain a backlink to your website and submit them to websites that specialise in featuring articles written by other webmasters.

Some webmasters choose to pay for backlinks to their sites. This is generally frowned upon by Google, so they have algorithms in place to detect what they believe to be paid links, eg a link from an educational site to a gambling site. However, if you purchase back links from sites which host content on the same topic as yours and don't overtly appear to be covered with inappropriate links, you will probably get away with it. But don't say you haven't been warned!