5 Reasons Why Your Affiliate Site is Failing

Affiliate marketing is an effective way to make money online.

You tell someone to buy a product. They buy that product through your affiliate link and you get commission from the company that created the product.

Unfortunately, building affiliate campaigns is rarely as easy as people think. Today, Google is harshly cracking down on affiliate websites. It’s getting tougher and tougher to launch an affiliate website and rank high on search engine results pages for that term.

So what’s an affiliate marketing guru like you supposed to do? Here are 5 reasons why Google hates your affiliate marketing website:

1) Your site is built around a single offer

This is the biggest mistake today’s affiliate marketers make. They base an entire website around a single product offer.

That may have worked (well, it did work) five years ago. Today, that’s not the case. Google has cracked down harshly on exact match domains, which means you can’t rank for “Product Review” keywords simply by buying “ProductReview.com”

Instead of building your site around a single affiliate offer, create a website that reviews multiple offerings from the same niche. Build a website about diet product reviews, for example, or rank multiple dating websites on a website that features lots of other non-affiliate info about online dating.

2) You only have one revenue stream

Just like with investments, it’s important to diversify.

Create multiple revenue streams for your affiliate site and you have less chance of failure. Instead of only having AdSense, for example, add a few product affiliate offers into the mix.

When you have multiple revenue streams, you protect your site from being negatively affected when a single offer goes down. It’s that simple.

3) You’re producing ‘filler’ content

This is another tactic that may have worked five years ago but no longer works today. Today, Google is really good at differentiating between high-quality, sharable content and low-quality filler content.

Guess which type of content your site should use?

Avoid producing filler articles that don’t solve any problems. Instead of confusing visitors with walls of text, engage them, ask questions, be controversial ,comment on recent events, and do all of the other things a smart content marketer should do.

4) You’re not building a community

Online communities are something that every smart website owner wants to build.

It’s one thing to attract traffic to your website. But to get that traffic to stick around, revisit your site, and trust you requires a solid community.

Building a solid community is not as hard as you might think. Put a Facebook ‘like’ box somewhere on your site and regularly post entertaining updates over that Facebook account. Do the same with Twitter or whatever other social media sites you enjoy.

5) Be friendly with backlinks

Some web developers never link away from their website. They only build internal backlinks that keep the ‘link juice’ concentrated within the site.

This may be an effective SEO policy, but it can frustrate users. Instead of avoiding backlinking to other sites, encourage it. Link to small websites, large websites, and any websites you think are relevant to your users.

If you’re just starting out, this can attract attention to your site from fellow websites owners. Reach out to websites you’ve backlinked to and ask to write a guest post or share links.