Why It’s Crucial To Have Your Own Website As Internet Affiliate Marketer

You Cannot Succeed In Building Your Online Affiliate Marketing Business By Only Sending People To Replicated Website Copies

If you know me you will also know that I’m a vociferous advocate against the all too many “fully automated money making” programs many of the so-called internet marketing gurus push down the throats of innocent but ill-informed aspirant or beginner internet marketers. These so-called automated systems normally promise you the moon and the stars proclaiming that all you need to do is drive traffic to your replicated website copy of this “money making system” and voila! your riches are guaranteed.

It’s hogwash! These systems are designed with one goal in mind and one goal only, and that is to put money in the pockets of their owners’ and not yours.

The truth about sustained and progressive internet affiliate marketing income is to build your business, promote you and build your own list of targeted email subscribers.

It’s impossible to this by driving traffic to a replicated affiliate website. That website is not yours, it belongs to the person who sold it to you. You have no control over it and what’s more, it can never be associated with your name, your unique contents, your business brand and you can never build an online reputation and credibility with it.

The saddest thing about these replicated, cookie-cutter copied affiliate websites, of which their could be thousands floating all over the internet, is that there is no way in the world that you can search engine optimize it for your business and for what you’re promoting!

Why? Because, first of all you don’t have access to the content for internal search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. Secondly and most importantly, unique and keyword relevant content is the single most important prerequisite for SEO. SEO is driven by unique contents, which your replicated affiliated website obviously does not offer, not by any stretch of imagination.

* Side Note: I know the term Search Engine Optimization sounds like a frighteningly advanced internet marketing method to many beginners, but the concept of SEO is actually quite simple. The goal you want to achieve with Search Engine Optimization is for a link to your website to be displayed on the first page of a search engine’s search results when someone has entered into the search window the words for whatever information he or she requires. These search words are also referred to as keywords and you want the keywords in your web page and the information on your web page to very closely match the keywords the person has entered and be able to provide the specific information he or she is looking for. For example, if you have a website about Swiss Chocolate Recipes, you would want the search engines to display your website link when people search with keyword phrases like “how to make chocolate”, “swiss chocolates”, “delicacies from Switzerland” etc.  Now, there are many actions and strategies that can and must be implemented (internally on your website as well as externally with, amongst others, links from other authority sites to your website), but quality content is the foundation for SEO. * End Side Note

The other major business flaw in driving traffic to a replicated website, is that you can’t build your own list of email subscribers by doing that. You leave money on the table and you have lost prospective customers forever by not getting people to opt in to your own email list. Every successful internet marketer would agree with me that list building is a pivotal component of doing business online. And of course, to get people to opt in to your email list so that you can follow up with them with your newsletter and your offers, you need your own website from where people can sign up for it.

Many affiliate marketers seem to think that since they don’t have a product of their own to market, they also don’t need their own website. I hope I have made it clear that this is simply a wrong and counter productive assumption. In fact, it is a serious business building mistake. As much as your prospective customers need to be sent to your affiliate sales page, as much do you need them to get to know you first, to first hear from you what you have to say in honesty about how the products you promote could help them and be an asset to them. People need to get valuable and quality information from you first, they need to able to confide in you, identify with your business, your online identity and your brand. By doing this with your own website, your chances of successfully promoting affiliate products are dramatically enhanced.

I know many marketers shy away from building their own websites because of the technicalities involved and because they fear they wouldn’t be able to build their own sites. But did you know that your blog can serve as your primary website? The importance of blogging for earning online is undisputed. In fact, your blog (a dynamic, web 2.0, data base driven website) should be the nerve centre of your business. For this purpose nothing beats a WordPress.org blog.  A WordPress.org blog is distinguished from a WordPress.com blog in that the former, although it is an open source product and totally free, is wholly yours and hosted on your own domain with your own unique website address as a top level domain name! (See Domain And Web Hosting Services). There are also excellent resources available to help you with everything you need to set up and maintain a professional looking and profitable blog.

The technical difficulties of building your own static website, to prevent spending the time on building it from scratch and to ensure your website reflects quality and professionalism, can be painlessly overcome with a comprehensive website package tailored to your business.

There are also good resources available for high-end, top quality website templates offering a very wide selection of different types of templates which you can select and download based on the nature of your product or project. Templates Monster is highly recommendable, due to the quality of their templates, the variety offered and they offer free downloadable templates as well.

So, dear reader, after reading this blog post and absorbing the information, you no longer have an excuse not to accept the importance of your own website as an internet affiliate marketer. So get cracking on it. The resources to help you achieve this goal easily and correctly are plentiful, with most of them being free. All you need to do is add your unique, quality contents to it, flavour it with who you are and what your online business identity is all about and you are set to join the ranks of the (successful) online marketing community. This may sound harsh, but it’s true: without your own website you and your business is a faceless, unrecognizable online entity, a non-entity for that matter. Would you like to do business with a vague entity, or would you prefer to buy something from and through a person with a real presence online offering you some valuable and trustworthy information?

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