3 Great Affiliate Marketing Website Models

1. Blog. This has become possibly the most popular affiliate marketing website model out there. There are several good reasons for this.

First of all, it’s not as intimidating to run a blog as it is to build an entire website. All you have to do is click a couple of icons to install WordPress on your site.

While websites are sometimes expected to be practically perfect, blogs are expected to be a little more human. In other words, you can screw up every once in a while and it’s not going to ruin you. In fact, it may even ingratiate you to your audience a little!

Blogs are also great for SEO (search engine optimization). Google search guru Matt Cutts has claimed that WordPress is “SEO-ready pretty much out of the box.” You can’t get a higher recommendation than that!

Google also likes recent content, content that keeps you with the conversation and issues the same buzzwords that people use when they talk about a subject. You’ll stay on top of your niche’s conversations much more easily with a blog than with a static website. You’ll also have great networking opportunities.

Finally, there are a variety of off-site SEO options for blogs: with blog directories (every blog should be registered with Technorati), tag pages, RSS feeds, feed directories, and pingers like Pingomatic and Pingoat.com.

In most markets, it’s essential to have a blog if you want to be relevant in your market. Should it be your main focus, or should it only play a supporting role? That choice is up to you.

2. Information website. A good information website will thoroughly cover information surrounding a problem within a niche or sub-niche. Notice that I don’t say it has to cover the entire niche!

They way you make money with niche marketing is to sell people solutions to their problems. So when you build an affiliate marketing website, you don’t have to cover every single nook and cranny of your niche (although you can). Focus on a problem, then sell people a solution.

If you’re marketing information products primarily, you want to tell the what without necessarily telling the how. However, keep in mind that you can really ingratiate yourself to your audience by providing them the “how” to either a small problem, or part of a larger multi-part problem within your niche.

3. Review website. This kind of website is simple enough–you collect a bunch of products in a niche, and then provide reviews for them!

One of the great things about this kind of affiliate marketing website is that you’ll get readers who are at the end of the buying funnel. Make sure and dedicate a single page to each product if you want to stand out in the search engines.

In addition, you might also want to list several products on a page for price or quality comparison. Just make sure each product has a single page as well, so that people who are already ready to buy can easily find your site!