by Andre Sanchez

There are many reasons why you need a website for affiliate marketing.  A major one is advertising.  Google Adwords is the most popular pay per click advertising program on the planet, but they only allow one advert to show per display URL.  That means that if more than one affiliate is advertising a product that displays the merchants URL, only the highest bidder’s advert will be shown.

This means that if you want to advertise using Adwords, you will either have to bid high for keywords or have your own website, and show your own display URL.  This is one compelling reason for having your own website, since Google Adwords is a very popular advertising medium for affiliate marketers.

Irrespective of whether you are using Adwords or not, if you send people who respond to your advert directly to the merchant’s sales page, you have lost them for ever.  Whether they buy or not, you are highly unlikely ever to come across these individuals again.  Every person you pass to another website is a lost opportunity. 

However, with your own website you have several options of where to send them after they have clicked on the advert.  The two main ones are a presales page and your squeeze page.  The presales page is where you soften them up for the sale by writing a bit about the product advertised.  This could be in the form of a review or a simple article on how the product is used and why you found it essential to your business.

The squeeze page, on the other hand, is designed with only one objective in mind, and that is to get the respondent’s email address and at least their first name.  In this way you can keep in constant contact, providing information relevant to what people interested in that type of product would also be interested in, and making them occasional product offers.  

Alternatively, the squeeze page and the review page can be combined into one page, where you provide a review of the product and offer some free information on how to use it better if they are intending to purchase it, and also some further information on the topic that they would find useful even if they did not make the purchase.  For example, if you’re marketing a golf training aid you could offer a free exercise chart and other information that might help them to make better use of the aid, and also offer hints and tips in a free e-course on how to add 40 yards to their drive.

Naturally you need the email address to provide this information, and then you have them on your list!  You cannot do any of this without your own website.  There are other benefits, such as back-end products.  The fact that you are selling somebody else’s product as an affiliate marketer does not mean that you cannot also sell your own, or even another merchant’s product that complements the original.

Once somebody has provided you with their email address, and you find that they have made a purchase from your affiliate statistics, email them with another relevant product.  For example, if you have just sold a visitor an ebook on Search Engine Optimization, you can email them with a limited time special offer on a Keyword Finder, or article distribution software.  The latter can be back-ended to many different type of product connected with internet marketing and search engine optimization.

Without a website you are restricted to the merchant’s sales page as your entire sales effort, and will consequently miss out on a lot of sales.  With your own site you can make the reasons for buying a lot more compelling, and by the time the prospect clicks to be sent to the merchant’s own sales page very little work will be needed to convince them to buy.  More people that you realize click onto sales pages just to find out what is available on the market with no real intention of buying. 

If they find a good review of a product that might be useful to them, and you explain everything that it has done for you or your business, such as how your golf handicap has dropped dramatically since using this training aid, and then they might just think that perhaps it’s worth a further look at.  On the other hand, if they only see a sales page with all the hype that goes with it, they might click away in the belief that sales pages are all hype. 

A review is generally regarded by most people as being more believable, and if you could add 40 yards to your drive using this thing, then surely I can too!

However, all these other reasons beside, if you have to bid high and a pay lot of money for PPC adverts that will send visitors to another person’s website, then you must be nuts to do so.  Send them to your own website and add them to your own list, not somebody else’s.  To me, these are several very compelling reasons why you need a website for affiliate marketing, and why most involved in affiliate marketing agree.

Why You Need a Website for Affiliate Marketing was originally published  at http://www.affiliatemarketinglife.com