4 Essential tools in Affiliate Marketing
In this article, you will read about the essential tools in affiliate marketing and –
- Importance of website in Affiliate Marketing
- Domain Name & its importance
- Reliable Hosting Service
- Why not choose a hosted platform for your website
There are many tools available for an affiliate marketer to use to be successful in affiliate marketing. In this document, we will discuss the most important tool you may need to become a successful affiliate marketer. We all go through each and every tool you may need to bring success to your new business. If you want to learn what is affiliate marketing and basics of it please read Affiliate Marketing and You
Website - The Most essential tool in affiliate marketing
Website is the easiest and fastest way, a beginner can reach its goal in Affiliate Marketing. It is the most important foundation of your affiliate marketing business. There are other tools which really depends on you having a website. So basically a to make a website you must have three things in place and these are Domain name, Hosting Service and Platform you choose to build your website on. So let’s talk about them one by one.
Acquiring a Domain name
A domain name is an important factor of your affiliate marketing business. It is crucial for the domain name to resonate with the niche. Niche is the topic you selected or passionate about for example some people are passionate about yoga and they decide that their topic will be yoga so basically that is the niche. The domain for yoga can be like myyoga.com or yogatrainer.com or yogatips.com and should not be away from the topic. Always try to have a name which can be branded.
It is also important that the domain name consists of not more than three words. If it is more than three words it might be difficult to remember it or rank it. The golden rule is the shorter the better. The other important factor in the domain name selection is that it should not contain any special character. I have seen a lot of people using a dash (-) in their domain names which is a big no-no.
Another important factor in selecting a domain name is the extension you may want to choose when you buy your domain name. It is an important decision which will shape your business and therefore one must always try to get a .com domain name if it is not available to try a .net or .org these are called TLD’s which means Top Level Domains. The other way around to buying a domain name is that if your business is local or you are targeting a local affiliate system then you may try domain names specific to your region, for example, .in is used for India and .us is used for the United States.
Tip
Do not try to buy a local domain name if you do not have address proof of that location. It has been observed that there have been cases when people tried to buy popular domains with local extensions of regions they did not belong to and later their domains confiscated.
There are many domain name providers out there in the market but I strongly suggest you stay with the ones below.
Hosting your website
Hosting is again as important as your domain name. The work of the hosting company is to make the website live on the internet. To have a better understanding you may think that hosting provider is like a landlord whom you are giving rent to host your website. The importance of hosting is in its speed and security. When we talk about speed it is about how fast the website loads on a computer or a mobile device.
For a beginner, it is advisable to buy shared hosting and once you start getting results you might want to upgrade. In my 12 years of experience with websites, I have tried many hostings from different hosting providers and it actually made my understanding more clear that if you want your website to rank high in google you must ensure that it is properly optimized. Hosting service also provides a great role in website optimisation.
It is your hosting provider which keeps your website up and running on the internet. Now the question is which host should you go for, so before I put my recommendation here I want you to know that there are many good hosting providers and there are some which are not. Normally people say that the one which provides you with good support is a good host but as per my experience with service, they should be able to run your website properly.
My recommendation for hosting provider will be Fastcomet.com Click here to visit Fastcomet.com. Fastcomet is a shared cloud hosting and this is what I use as my hosting provider.
THe last component
The last component of building your website and that is the platform you choose to build your blog or eCommerce store. There are many website builders which are present in the market but the most known ones are WordPress and Drupal and if you are building an online shop in addition to WordPress, Drupal you may also make an online store on Magento & Prestashop. Out of all the above, I strongly suggest WordPress for both occasions whether a website or a store. WordPress is CMS which means content management system and the reason I recommended WordPress is because of its ease of use, great forums to solve issues, there is a specific hosting for WordPress which is called WordPress hosting and above all it has loads of free plugins and themes which increases its functionality to next level and overall it is the best setup for your affiliate marketing website.
Tip: Please avoid the website builder you get from the hosting provider or something like WIX as they are restricted to the host and if you want to migrate your website later to bigger host you might not be able to or end up paying a hefty amount to get it done. Also do not get confused with wordpress.com and wordpress.org the one you are looking for is wordoress.org and you may download it via Cpanel using an application which is provided via your hosting provider. WordPress.com is a self-hosted platform like Wix or Shopify which I do not recommend.
Conclusion
With the above insights in essential tools in affiliate marketing, I hope I was able to give you basic insights about the tools you require in affiliate marketing is and what you need to do to be a successful affiliate marketer. Furthermore, each of the tool is essential for the success. These are a very basic structure you need for Affiliate Marketing.