5 Critical Features Every Affiliate Marketing Website Needs.

Affiliate marketing continues to be one of the most widely adopted business models for online entrepreneurs. In fact, some estimate that affiliate marketing in 2019/2020, is already a $7B dollar industry in the United States alone.

This all makes sense to most affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketing requires hard work and discipline – just like any other business or profession, but it is fundamentally a reliable business model. One doesn’t need to raise capital, and can start a blog or Youtube channel from their homes.

The risks associated with an affiliate business keeps going down every year, as we learn best practices from each other. We know a lot more today about running ads, SEO, website building, blogging and more than we did last year. Gone are the days when one needed to invest a $100K on a website or hire expensive marketing agencies. The online marketing community has dramatically improved access to information, making it easier for affiliate marketers to avoid common mistakes.

We discovered after talking to our customers, that most affiliate marketers still struggle to find the key features their websites need. Given that a website is possibly the most important asset for an affiliate marketer, mistakes here could be expensive.

This article attempts to summarize best practices for affiliate marketing websites and provide a checklist of features for affiliate marketing sites.

So here is our checklist for the 5 most critical features we think every affiliate marketing website needs:

1. Performance Optimizations 
   You cannot have a slow website. It is absolutely essential to have a website that is fast.There is a famous study by Amazon, which claims that ever second lost in slow page loads, costs them $10M in revenue.However, keep in mind that affiliate marketing businesses are not as big as amazon. While it is important to have a fast website, you don’t need a 90+ in google page speed cores.Your website needs to be fast enough, so it isn’t perceived to be slow. You want to get at least 50+ on google page speed, if not aim for 70 or more, which we believe is ideal. The performance optimizations that will get you there are using a high quality CMS, Javascript and CSS optimizations, quality hosting and server side optimizations, a quality CDN and cache.
2. A high quality WordPress™ themeThere are some great themes out there, which are highly suitable for affiliate marketing and online business. Some of the best WordPress™ themes for affiliate marketing include Astra™ & OceanWP. We love Astra™ so much that we configure, optimize and preinstall the premium version of Astra™ for all our customers.It is absolutely critical to choose a WordPress™ theme that is suitable for the needs of online business. There are far too many low quality WordPress™  themes flooding the market, that are full of bugs or unmaintained by the developers. A poor choice of theme upfront can become a headache to manage later.Note: If you new to marketing, and too shy to ask what WordPress™ is, there’s nothing to feel dumb about. WordPress™ is the Internet’s most popular content management system for websites – or in simple language, a user friendly platform to manage the content on your website.WordPress™ is the gold standard for internet marketers in 2019. Almost all marketers and online businesses swear by it. If  If you are wondering why, you can check out the 4 reasons we think WordPress™ is the king of online marketing.
3. Integration with email marketing
   As an affiliate marketer, one of your main goals is to get your website visitors to subscribe to your email list. Marketing is not easy, and it costs money to get people to visit a website. You want these visits to count, if you are to increase your ROI.One of the easiest ways to keep every visitor engaged, is by email. Your affiliate marketing blog should prompt your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter.

   

   As they say – the money is in the list.It is your weekly newsletters & your special offers that are going to engage your audience, get them to visit your blog again and purchase the products you are promoting.There are some great creative ways to get your users to subscribe to your mailing list, including offering them something in return (like special discounts on your products). This feature is so critical that at Hustly we offer free email marketing integration with popular providers like Mailchimp™.

4. Analytics, tracking and retargeting
   Few businesses are more ROI driven than Affiliate marketing. You want to track your funnel so that you can effectively measure how many sales you are generating for your partner. Let’s talk about a scenario where you want your affiliate website to drive sales for Amazon™. Your website must have the ability to tell you the touch points a visitor has had with your website, and which of these touch points converted to sales. You want to be able to reconcile your Amazon affiliate report with these touch points. For most affiliate marketing businesses, we recommend a combination of Google™’s analytics suite and tracking IDs provided by Amazon™, eBay™ and others.

   

   If you are also using social media, which you most likely will, you will want to integrate this setup with tools like Facebook™ pixel too.Keep watching this space, or subscribe to our newsletter for a detailed guide on the subject that we will be publishing soon.The Hustly affiliate marketing package makes this entire process easier by configuring and pre-installing the required tracking and analytics plugins and integrations with Google™, Amazon™ and others. This package also includes an easy to read Google™ dashboard to monitor the performance of your affiliate marketing website.

5. Ability to make quick changes to your website
   Every affiliate marketer must have the ability to make quick and inexpensive changes to their website. Even if you are not tech savvy yourself, you want your website to have the tools and plugins required, so that you can hire someone else to do it for you without wasting a lot of time.
   There are some amazing tools out there, that make it incredibly easy to change websites on the fly. Elementor™ pro, a powerful visual website builder which is preinstalled on Hustly websites, makes it easy for non-technical users to add, remove or edit pages without the need to write code.

   

   There are many other powerful plugins out there, which make it very easy for affiliate marketers to run a powerful website without having to hire a dedicated engineering or design team.

So these were the 5 features, we thought were most critical for affiliate marketing websites. Please let us know if you found this article useful in the comments below.

Getting started with launching your affiliate marketing blog? Start with our premium WordPress Hosting Plans. Our hosting plans are tailored for online business and include all the features and tools you need to launch your affiliate marketing website. With our beginner friendly Website Management App, you can launch your website in 1-click, and easily manage your website and domain names. Don’t have a domain name yet? Try our Domain Name Generator tool to find unique and interesting domain names.