When it comes to affiliate marketing website design, there’s obviously not one design that’s the best. There are many great designs that depend on your personality and your niche. But there are some important points in the affiliate website design that will help you make your website a success. Let’s take a look at some of those points. Also keep in mind that those points are based on my personal experience in different niches that I have been successful in affiliate marketing.
Simplicity, Content, Background and Fonts
The most important thing on affiliate marketing website is the content of the website. It’s not the design. The purpose of the design is to expose the content. Most of the visitors of the successful affiliate website come through the website through SEO rankings in Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. SEO optimization is the best source of the traffic, and it’s the free traffic.
To get traffic from the search engines, you need to rank well in the search engines. To rank well in the search engines you must have interesting content that people like. The search engines consider many things when they rank a page. But, the most important factors are that the content is relevant and the visitors like it.
How do the search engines know that the visitors like your content? They notice how long the visitors stay on your pages and website in general. They notice if the visitors click go back button, or go to another page on your website. So, it’s very important to keep the visitors on the website as long as possible.
To achieve that it has been proven and tested by many marketers, you need not only interesting content, but also simple design. If the website looks too crowded and complicated to browse through, people won’t stay on it for long.
The website should preferably have white background and simple black font, just like this one. The white background and the black font are easier for people to read and to read for a longer time. It’s the easiest for the eyes.
Images
Having some images is important and good, because people are visual and like images. But, people come to your website for the content, so it’s not a good idea to have huge images first, and the content pushed down below, so people need to scroll down to see the content they came for.
You should have the content first and then images, a little bit lower down, and between the paragraphs. Ideally the images should be relevant to the text.
WordPress Based Websites
- I am a big fan of WordPress based websites for many reasons like:
- They are very easy and fast to build
- There a lot of great themes for WordPress
- Because the WordPress is so popular, there are lots of different plugins for WordPress that are very useful
- It’s very easy and fast to create content on WordPress (although I don’t use Guttenberg, which I don’t like)
- It’s easy to keep things simple in WordPress if you want to
Almost all good and modern WordPress themes are mobile-friendly, which is a must nowadays (your website won’t rank well in Google if it isn’t mobile-friendly).
There are lots of free and paid WordPress themes. Some of the free themes are very good and it’s OK to start with them, when you’re a newbie in affiliate marketing. The problem with the free themes is that they aren’t always updated, not all are mobile-friendly and you won’t get the support which you’ll get with paid themes.
If you can, then it’s better to buy a paid theme. As you can see I use the Eleven 40 Theme, on Genesis network, made by Studio Press.
I bought this theme a few years ago and I use the same theme on all my websites. So, it was one time expense, but now whenever I build a new website, I just use the same theme. The theme has many different options, so each one of my website looks different, although I use the same theme. The theme is regularly updated, and because it’s also very popular, there are many plugins that allow me to further edit the theme according to my website’s needs.
Website Speed
A website’s speed is very important for two reasons: if your website loads slowly, people won’t wait till it loads, but will go to another website instead. Your website should not load longer than 3 seconds. The faster, the better. The website’s speed is also a factor when it comes to the SEO rankings.
So, it’s very important that your theme supports fast loading of your website. There are many other factors about website’s speed, which are even more important, like your web hosting, a number of plugins, images, videos, etc.
WP-Rocket Plugin
The best plugin that helps with website’s speed is WP-Rocket. It’s a paid plugin, but it’s really worth the money. There is no better plugin for website’s speed than WP-Rocket. Click here to learn more about WP-Rocket.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is crucial in affiliate marketing. Your website must be SEO optimized. The SEO is a big topic and it would require a separate article. But I want to mention here All-in-One SEO plugin. With this plugin it’s easy to optimize a website.
There’s a free and paid version of this plugin. From my experience, the free version is good enough, so I haven’t upgraded to the paid version.
Another popular SEO plugin is Yoast SEO. There are also many others, but in my opinion the All-in-One is one of the best, and it’s also one of the easiest to use SEO plugins for WordPress.
How to Build Your Affiliate Website
The days when you needed to know HTML and coding are gone. It’s very easy to build a website nowadays if you have the proper tools. By proper tools I mean a website builder. If you’re an affiliate marketer, you should rather spend your time on creating content than waste it on building a website. If you’re new to affiliate marketing and making money online, then you need to spend some time on learning about affiliate marketing too.
You can use the tool below to see how easy it is to build a website with Site Rubix.
If you tried the Site Rubix tool above, then you know that you can build a website in about 30 seconds. The Site Rubix tool is just one of the marketing tools of Wealthy Affiliate.
I am a member of Wealthy Affiliate, which is like an online Affiliate Marketing University. But apart from education you’ll find there everything you need for your online business. You’ll get web hosting, find domains, keyword tool and much more.
Click here to see what you get with Wealthy Affiliate Starter (free) and Premium (paid account). Actually, you can sign up for your free starter account easily (a credit card isn’t required) and you’ll see everything from inside.
With Wealthy Affiliate building affiliate websites is very fast and easy.
Summary
There are a few important points that you need to consider building a well-designed affiliate marketing website. If you apply the info mentioned in this article, then your website will be well-designed.
The website design is easy nowadays and though important, it’s not the most important part of affiliate marketing. The website’s content and SEO are more important. Even the best designed website won’t make you money if you don’t have the content that ranks well in the search engines.
Click here to read about the best place online for affiliate marketers.
When I started out on a website, I was so obsessed with the design layout that I wasted so much time doing this and undoing that. At the end of the day, I learnt that a simple, clean design is just what I should have started out with in the first place.
I’ve been placing my images first on almost all of my posts. Thanks for stressing out the importance of content first. And as you have said, great content will get the post indexed and ranked. Which is basically what we are after.
I find your WordPress Theme so clean and easy to the eyes. Honestly, I didn’t know that a theme plays a part in website speed. Your article is so eye opening, thanks!
Thank you for your comment Carol!
Hi! I’m so glad I checked out your post as it taught me several things. For instance, I am a big fan of images and perhaps I am actually using a few too many. I like them because they break up the endless lines of black print on a white background and in my mind, make content easier to read.
I am going to seriously look at the WP Rocket plugin as I have no doubt about the importance of speed and ease of use when it comes to websites. The problem I always seem to have is that sometimes I have plugins that are all supposed to be doing the same thing, so I’m not always sure which ones to keep and which ones to delete.
The Rocket Plugin is a good example. If I download it is there other plugins I have that might clash with it. I guess there is no way of knowing without trying it.
I’m intrigued by the fact that the images do not load all at once, and yes I do make sure they are relevant to the post and not just put there for the sake of eye candy. I can see where this feature alone would speed up a website.
I think what I will do is check my website speed. So, I just did and it appears that it’s about 4.5 seconds.
Thank you for the comment Ray.
WP Rocket plugin has very good support, so with their help you’ll know if you have any plugins that can clash with the WP Rocket.
The speed of your website is quite good, but we should aim for no more than 3 seconds according to Google.