Your Affiliate Website is a Product

Product is defined as "the actual product or service offered to the customers". Product decisions traditionally include function, appearance, packaging, and extra benefits.

You might think that product decisions are irrelevant when you're running a turnkey affiliate website, since you don't really have a product, but in some ways, they are more important than for a traditional business. Sure, you might not be able to control any of the details of the sites you are promoting (although you can often select what landing page you send your visitors to), but you can control which sites you promote. Stock your "store" (site) with good "products" (affiliate partners) and you will make more money.

Even this metaphor is thinking too small. Really, it is your own website that is the product. That's right. You shouldn't be thinking about selling other people's sites, you should be thinking about selling your own. I don't mean literally selling your site as in transferring ownership for money, I mean building your visitor's trust in your site and making them see you as a valuable resource or community rather than just some webpage they visited once.

There's an old poker saying that you can only kill a sheep once but you can shear it many times. We shouldn't be looking to trick our visitors once to get a bit of money now but destroy the relationship, we should be looking to help them now and keep them coming back whenever their fleece gets too heavy (in other words when they have a need to fulfill).

There's a much newer Internet Marketing saying that "the gold is in the list". You don't have to set up a newsletter, although if you have things to share with your visitors once a month or so, you should definitely consider it. The idea behind the saying is that repeat customers are where the real money is. Get someone to trust you and you could get a dozen signups out of them rather than just one. Now that's effective marketing!

So how do you build this trust? Well, it takes many of the same attributes to build websites that make money that it takes to make a traditional offline product good. We've done a lot of the work on the functionality and appearance of your site, although you can and should tweak your site to better serve your particular type of visitors.

The big way you can help build your visitors' trust in your site is content. The core of your site is information so the more you can offer the better. Content is King. You can add new reviews, articles, news items, poker freerolls, or other competitions for your visitors, or maybe a newsletter. I think you get the point - the more you can add to your site, the better it will be as a product.