5 Questions to Ask Before Starting an Affiliate Website

From a technical perspective there are a couple of things that you should research before the create the website and buy the domain name. These questions can be seen further in the article and explained more thoroughly.

1. What CMS should I use

Today there exists a lot of content management systems that allows beginners to create a website without any previous coding knowledge and therefore has made the entry barrier to affiliate marketing way easier than before.

WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, and so forth are often deemed very easy for a beginner who has yet to make their first website.

The CMS’s mentioned above can have a low entry barrier for newcomers, but some of them also allows for more exploration and development on your website.

WordPress allows people to use premade themes where users only need to change images, text, and so forth to have an ideal website.

2. Hosting

Therefore, it is often recommended to start small since you will not get a lot of visitors from the start. After I while it will be ideal to upgrade your package or move hosting company if you start experiencing limitations due to the hosting.

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3. How do I make my website live up to today’s standards

In a couple of years, the standards for a good website have risen a lot on the visual part as well as how to manage user data.

First, you must make sure that your website looks on par with your competitors, which makes sure that your visitors do not choose your competitors from a visual standpoint.

So beforehand it might be a good idea to inspect other websites in the specific niche to see what they do and learn from their mistakes.

Regarding GDPR and consent management you will have to ensure that your website lives up to these standards and laws.

If you do not become GDPR compliant you can start creating a lot of mistrust and in the worst case, you can get fined for a significant amount of money.

Therefore, it is recommended to look up different data regulations rules throughout the world and make sure that your website lives up to those standards.

4. What kind of keywords are within my niche

If you have found a specific niche that you want to rank on, then it might be time to look through the keywords that you want to rank on in different search engines such as Google, Bing and so on.

There exist a lot of tools that can be utilized to research those keywords. The problem with those tools is that a lot of them cost money is they are good.

If you want to do it for free, then you can use Google Ads’ keyword planner that allows you to see and estimate of the search volume on different search terms.

Besides that, you can also use Google auto fill whenever searching for specific questions and so forth.

These tools are often very beginner friendly but can give you a skewed point of view regarding what keywords have a lot of volumes and so forth.

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5. Analyze the Competition on the Specific Niche

When you have found all your keywords it might be time to analyze your competitors on these specific search terms.

The reason for this is that your website might not be able to rank on everything due to a lot of competition from other websites and it is, therefore, important to prioritize well.

There are a couple of ways that you can do the competitor research and it can be done free, paid or a combination of both.

Using paid tools such as Ahrefs it is possible for you to analyze different estimated metrics such as the Ahrefs rank or the Domain Rating, which has been made by Ahrefs.

These numbers allow people to quickly get an overview of whether you can rank on the specific term or not.

It is also possible to do a quick analysis of specific search terms without spending a penny and these require a bit more thinking. I big indicator that a niche is highly competitive is that many well-known and authoritative websites appear whenever searching for these terms.

For this, you need basic internet knowledge to have a feeling on what websites are authoritative and famous.

An indicator can a niche is not very well filled up is if the search results on the niche are filled with a lot of old websites, blogs, forums, and so on. All of these are indicators that there are not up to date content within this niche or there might not be authoritative content to fill out this niche.