How Important is the Domain Name?

23 Jul 13 11:48 pm

I am new to the affiliate marketing, so forgive my ignorance. Bu here is my question: Is an affiliate website nothing more than a glorified blog? I mean, you are not really selling anything. You are just promoting products through links....correct?

We own a webstore which sells sporting accessories and want to add maybe some affiliate links to our site. And I can see doing a blog (which we do) about some type of nutritional supplement or a new work out program, or a weight loss system, and have our links attached to the blog. But to have a separate site that really doesn't have anything physical to sell is confusing me.

Please help this ignorant affiliate understand....
by the way....love the forum. Good stuff in here.

Jason
Sports Team Maniacs

24 Jul 13 12:02 am

Hey Jason,

Pretty much! Affiliate Marketing is where you are basically pushing someone else's product, but it's different from (e.g.) an ecommerce store, because you don't actually handle the sale - that's up to the product owner; you just funnel customers through to the product's site, and get a commission for doing so.

You can integrate affiliate marketing into anything - in your case, you could definitely incorporate affiliate links as part of an existing blog, or throughout your store.

The reason you might think of affiliate marketing as a glorified blog is that, for completely new marketers, the most straightforward way to get started is with content marketing, and one of the easiest ways to do content marketing is by blogging or building an article site :)

However, there's lots of other ways, and all sorts of avenues to get success, each with their own degrees of difficulty and 'right ways to do things'. For example
- If you have a Twitter/Facebook following, you could funnel people to product sites through links in your posts/tweets
- Doing Youtube videos, with affiliate links in the video, in the annotations, or in the description
- Building your own article wiki on a niche topic, with links to relevant products
- Lots more!


So basically, the core of affiliate marketing is to promote someone else's product, and get a customer to buy *through you*. Everything else, including how to select those products, find those customers, get them to buy *through you*, can vary a lot, so teaching a 'working method' is really the core of Affilorama and our products. But, if you already own an ecommerce store, and have customers, you already have a head start :)

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24 Jul 13 12:20 am

Hey Jason

"Thin" affiliate sites, with not a lot of useful information, do not fare so well these days, but sites with proper information or useful content for readers do just fine (if they didn't, we wouldn't be teaching you how to make them :) )

Whether to do affiliate marketing on your ecommerce store is really a business decision for you, and will come down to whether or not you think that a) your customers will tolerate the changes and/or b) whether it'll boost, or hurt, your bottom line.

Your idea about having an information site linking back to your ecommerce site isn't a bad idea and, even if you don't engage in affiliate marketing other products, a lot of the principles you learn about affiliate marketing could actually be applied to funnelling customers back to your ecommerce site from an information section (imagine you're just affiliate marketing for your own products :) )

Having said all that, definitely marketing related products is a good idea, and will probably work; just don't alienate your customers.

Regarding using a subdomain - Google won't frown, per se, but they may not see it as a distinct website from your main ecommerce site;

24 Jul 13 1:32 am

Answered, on Jason's other post in the 'Website Building' subforum:
==> website-building/domain-name-importance-t24826.html

19 Oct 13 2:02 pm

Yes, domain name plays a very significant role in SEO. At the same time you may have to bear in mind that domain names with prepositions like 'on', 'in', 'with', 'about', etc could be avoided for better treatment.