How to Start an Affiliate Marketing Website and Grow it to $100K

In this 3-parts guide, you will learn, step by step, how to start and grow an affiliate marketing website that can make you a decent income, and you can sell it for more than $100K.

This guide provides everything you need to create a successful affiliate marketing website.

Let’s start!

What is affiliate marketing, and how does it work?

According to Rakuten Advertising research, 81% of brands rely on affiliate programs. If you want to step into the game and learn what it takes to become a successful affiliate marketer, then keep reading.

And what’s the best way of gathering an audience and compellingly promoting the products to them modernly? If you answered a blog or a website, then you were right.

Examples of Profitable Affiliate Marketing Websites

Here are several affiliate marketing websites that make a fortune online. Affiliate marketing is enormous, so there are thousands of such websites, even hundreds of thousands, in my opinion. But I’ve chosen only five from different niches. This way, you will know what an affiliate marketing website looks like.

1. NerdWallet

Nerdwallet is essentially a review affiliate site for financial products. It covers everything from credit cards to mortgages to investing and insurance. It has stellar content, an exceptional user interface, and an excellent marketing team.

Their stats look impressive: 11M visitors/month, 50000 backlinks, a DR of 83, 170K Facebook followers, and 65K Twitter followers.

2. Just A Girl And Her Blog

This blog is run by Abby, who writes about DIY, crafts, and organization. It’s a trendy blog, and since Abby shares her income reports, we know she makes about $40,000+ per month.

Abby makes most of her money through affiliate marketing (mainly through Amazon Associates and hosting affiliate marketing with Bluehost) and selling her courses.

Abby’s blog stats look impressive for a personal blog: 53K visitors/month, 4000 backlinks, a DR of 65, 32K Facebook followers, 40K Youtube subscribers, and 8K Twitter followers.

3. Safewise

This affiliate marketing blog provides in-depth reviews and opinions on the best home security and home automation products. It probably earns most of its income from promoting OfferVault pay-per-call programs like Vivint, which pays up to $560 for a qualified sale. 

Safewise affiliate marketing blog stats: 485K visitors/month, 7000 backlinks, a DR of 75, 14K Facebook followers, 40K Youtube subscribers, and just 1,5K Twitter followers.

4. Dog Food Advisor

Dog Food Advisor helps owners choose the best food for their four-legged friends. The website owner, Mike, monetizes the website through affiliate links and is featured as a “Buying Tip.” No other forms of advertising exist, including banner ads or pop-ups, under or overs. The site probably has a mailing list of hundreds of thousands, so that’s another potential revenue source.

Dog Food Advisor affiliate marketing blog stats: 542K visitors/month, 5000 backlinks, a DR of 76, 280K Facebook followers, and just 2,4K Twitter followers.

5. Dating Advice

Dating Advice aims to help people improve their dating skills and find the best dating site. Its focus on expert advice and emphasis on answering genuine questions essentially mainstream dating. This affiliate marketing website makes most of its money by referring people to dating sites such as Match, eHarmony, etc.

Dating Advice affiliate marketing blog stats: 413K visitors/month, 3600 backlinks, a DR of 78,13K Facebook followers, and 14 K Twitter followers.

How to choose a profitable niche for your website?

Niche research for affiliate marketing can be dull and take time. But if you do this one step quickly, you’ll regret it in the long run. Could you take my word on this? Investing a lot of time and money in the long run in a niche that doesn’t make you too much profit or is also competitive is frustrating.

Here’s a quick tip for finding a profitable affiliate marketing niche: “Identify a niche where you can promote products with a HIGH sales volume and LOW competition.”

There is a complete section on choosing an affiliate marketing niche in the Affiliate marketing guide for beginners guide I’ve written. Read it first, and then you can come back to this guide.

Please spend enough time finding the right niche.

Here are, in my opinion, the best niches for affiliate marketing now and beyond.

The affiliate marketing niches mentioned above are selected based on the popularity and high returns for the affiliate marketers. They have worked great in their effectiveness in attracting maximum traffic and keep doing it in the long run.

Do not forget that selecting a niche is the foundation of how much money you will make through affiliate marketing. Hence, if you fail to choose a good one, all your efforts will be in vain. That’s my second warning on this matter. I have been there and done that.

Define Your Target Audience

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is trying to appeal to everyone. Instead, narrow down everyone to a smaller group of people who want to buy and have the money to buy your product.

For example, if you sell dog jumpers, your audience doesn’t include people who don’t own dogs, so you don’t want to appeal to them.

What is the target audience?

You may think that the target market and target audience are the same. They are entirely different marketing terms.

The target audience is the people you propose your marketing and advertising efforts to.

A target market is anyone interested in your products or services, and your target audience is the people to whom you recommend a specific marketing asset or ad. The target audience is a part of your target market.

Facebook is an excellent example of what you should do. They allow you to narrow your audience based on demographics and other characters. You can set an income range, target males or females, or exclude anyone with children. It all depends on your marketing plan.

A marketing asset can be a landing page, Facebook post, email, or product page.

Try to establish empathy with the audience you are planning to target. Know their difficulties, how they feel about them, and what they do to figure them out. In my experience, the best way to learn this is through monitoring conversations in groups, forums, blog comments, and social media.

I know you want to learn more about everything, so I have a link to help you. Join HubSpot Academy for free. Get free online certifications, product documentation, and training videos to learn what you need to succeed.

Find Affiliate Marketing Programs

Now that you know the niche where you want to build an authoritative website and set up the target niche, it’s time to find affiliate marketing programs. When we look for affiliate marketing programs, we look for products to review and advertise on our website and make commissions through their affiliate programs. Let’s make sure we are on the same page.

There are three places I use to find affiliate programs:

1. Find affiliate programs through affiliate networks

Affiliate networks bring together thousands of publishers (bloggers) and advertisers. Signing up for an affiliate network gives you access to thousands of affiliate programs. You get performance details, advertising creatives, etc.

Our Top 21 Affiliate Marketing Networks, PROs and CONs for each network, how to sign up to get accepted, and other helpful information.

I recommend looking into ShareASale, CJ, Amazon Associates, and Clickbank. You will find several affiliate programs unless you are into a tiny niche. The advantage of using an affiliate network is that all the earnings are centralized in one place.

2. Find independent affiliate programs

Believe it or not, many more affiliate programs are run independently by product creators without using affiliate networks. That’s because they have proprietary affiliate software, want complete control of their affiliates, etc.

There are many places to find affiliate programs. I would start with affiliate program directories, doing some Google searches on the most available products in your niche + affiliate program. Then, you can visit your competitors, see which products they advertise, and search for their corresponding affiliate programs.

3. Select the best affiliate programs

Now, you should have a pretty good list of affiliate marketing programs. Don’t jump in and sign up for them. Before affiliate managers accept you as a publisher, they want to see your website and traffic sources.

Some affiliate marketers are very picky about choosing blogs. They don’t want their brand advertised on shady or questionable websites, so we must first build an excellent affiliate marketing website.

We can apply with our blog and at least 200 visitors ready.

Find The Most Important Keywords

Discover the best topics for your content, find the best keywords, drive fast traffic to your website, and get quality backlinks. If you do it right, all of that will skyrocket your rankings.

You have probably seen that most guides mention keyword research as the most important thing for creating content. But no one tells you that even if you optimize your blog post for important keywords, there is no guarantee that Google will rank you for that specific keyword.

My advice is to concentrate on creating content for the audience. Please don’t focus on keywords because they will be natural in your blog post. Later, you can optimize it for keywords you already rank for.

Don’t get me wrong. Keywords are essential, but not like they used to be. With this tactic, you’ll find only content that is proven to work. You need to create a better version of it. But first, let me show you how to find keywords.

How to find keywords for your website?

You’ll do this with a free tool called Ubersuggest. You can do it with any other free or paid keyword tool, but I like this one because I can do it all in one place. This is how you do it.

Go to Ubersuggest. The first thing you’ll see is a search box. If your website is, for example, about coffee tables, then type coffee table in the box.

As you can see, it will show your keywords, suggestions, and related keywords. I wasn’t aware that coffee tables are so popular. In 10 seconds, you already have some right keywords and ideas for your future blog posts. I usually write down keywords and content ideas on paper. It’s easier to keep an eye on them while writing posts.

When you scroll down, you’ll see a list of top pages for that particular keyword.

Click on Show Keywords to see which are driving visitors to those pages. You’ll get this.

I write down all the valuable keywords on paper. Aim for the long-tail keywords. Remember, you are looking for high volume and CPC keywords but low SD(up to 50 is good). I include keywords with high SD and spread them across my blog posts where applicable.

How to do keyword research with ahrefs

Here is a video guide created by the ahrefs team to help you learn how to do keyword research to find keywords you SHOULD target.

The result? More rankings and organic traffic for your website.

Affiliate Marketing Websites FAQ

Conclusions on how to start an affiliate website

Congrats on reaching the end of the 1st part of our guide. Now you know how affiliate marketing works, how to research a lucrative niche, identify the right keywords and content and create a buyer persona so you will learn how to address your content.

Check the second part, where I will show you how to set up the blog, add content, design necessary pages, connect social media profiles, etc.

If you already have one, go to the final part, where I show you how to optimize your blog to rank well in search engines and find other ways to bring traffic.

Do you look for multiple methods besides affiliate marketing to monetize your blog? Check out the sequence of this article to learn how to monetize your blog.

Do you have an affiliate marketing blog or want to set up one?

Let me know in the comments form below.