Affiliate Marketing 101 – Why a Blog Makes the Perfect Affiliate Marketing Web Site

When you start affiliate marketing, one of your first tasks has to be setting up your first affiliate blog. Using a blog as your affiliate marketing web site will benefit you in many ways – ease of installation, automatic notification to the search engines each time you post and a number of other automated benefits that you don’t have with a static site.

There are a lot of salespages for various traffic tools that claim you don’t need an affiliate marketing web site, but the truth is you want one permanent place in each niche you enter that can be your hub – a place where you can build your following within that niche’s community with the intent of drawing people back time and again.

Your affiliate marketing web site needs to be updated and kept current, and this is very easy on a blog – banners and buttons can be replaced site-wide in seconds just by making a single change in your control panel. And it’s much easier to blog about each of your affiliate offers in one place than to have any number of static sites that must be changed each time an offer closes or a new offer launches that you want to promote.

Further, if you’re just learning to drive targeted prospects to affiliate links, you have to start over from scratch with each new promotion. This stops you from deriving the long-term benefits provided by article marketing, social bookmarking, podcasting and video distribution, just to name a few promotional techniques. By having a blog set up in that niche as your affiliate marketing web site, your articles, podcasts, videos, social bookmarks, viral e-books, etc, will continue to drive traffic to your site for years to come, not only exposing them to your current offers, but giving you the opportunity to entice them to join your opt-in list.

A quick glance at the most common WordPress themes being used today will show you how perfectly set up they are to be used as your affiliate marketing web site – a larger column of text, perfect for product reviews or information relevant to your niche, and a narrower column or two of links and buttons – perfect for your affiliate links and graphics. So much so, in fact, that’s it’s rare to find an affiliate program these days that doesn’t provide ready-made buttons measuring 125×125 pixels, the standard size for ads in blog sidebars.

And then there are the numerous Web 2.0 sites, whole communities in themselves, like Twitter, LinkedIn, MyBlogLog, Technorati, etc, each of which gives you a simple way to tie your blog to your pages on their sites – meaning you could potentially get your information and your links in front of a huge targeted market you wouldn’t have time to chase otherwise. Even FaceBook, the current top-ranked traffic behemoth online, has an automated way to tie in your blog posts. Once you’re a little more advanced and adding podcasts and videos, you open up the doors to marketplaces like iTunes and YouTube as well.

So right now, as you start affiliate marketing, make one of your very first steps setting up a WordPress blog as your initial affiliate marketing web site – visit a few of the best-known super-affiliate blogs for ideas, and research the techniques and strategies used on these blogs. That way you can make your blog a first-class affiliate marketing web site right from the start!

Marketing mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny has been teaching companies new marketing strategies since the 1970′s, having owned and operated his own retail advertising agency before transferring to marketing online full-time since 1996. A recognized expert in how to market a product online or offline and master of these new marketing strategies, Doug Champigny is the creator of the PowerStart Marketing coaching program at http://www.PowerStart2010.com and the Affiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching program at http://www.affiliate-marketing-powerstart.info and is occasionally available for private 1-on-1 consultations and mentoring as well. Doug is a regular speaker at many of the live marketing events and conventions around North America – watch for him speaking live onstage in your area soon!