As I said in my previous post about building an online business, I started out with a network marketing company in 2006 and turned it into an online business in 2008 with an affiliate marketing website. Network marketing just isn’t for me. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit here that I was a web developer before I started all of this. But that job was writing software that ran on a server, not creating websites like this. All that I brought with me from that career was the ability to not be afraid to try things. The important thing is to back everything up periodically so that if you mess things up too badly you can reload the backup and start again.
Having a website provided some distinct advantages over traditional in-person network marketing at the time. Network marketers have to go find people and convince them to listen to their spiel. If they’re lucky, they get them to buy or sign up right away. Otherwise they try to get them to agree to come to some sort of meeting. All of their efforts are focused on this group of people right now. Once the encounter is over, it’s over. All of the effort and energy put into that encounter is gone.
A Website is Better
With a website I didn’t need to be in front of anyone while I was working. I wrote my content and published it on my website. And it stayed there 24 hours a day 7 days a week. People could discover it in their own time and take action without me having to actually be there. All of my effort and energy continues to exist and continues to work for me long after I moved on to something else. I have posts on that website going back to 2009. I’m not saying they’re any good, and they are grossly out of date by now, but they are still there. Much better than a one-and-done chat in a coffee shop for drumming up business.
Setting up an affiliate marketing website is easy. First I found an inexpensive hosting company. They provide the actual server hardware and software that makes it possible for you to see this page. I registered my web domain, the online address to my website, through them as well. So they manage registering my domain, getmywellness.com for that business, with the international authority that manages website domain names, ICANN. They turn the name getmywellness.com into an IP address so that your browser can get to the server at the company that hosts my website. Then that server returns my page to your browser. Those are the only pieces that I spend money on.
A Website With WordPress is Even Better
When I started, I wrote the actual HTML for my website by hand. It’s easy enough to do for simple pages but is very tedious to maintain if you have more than a few of them. Static HTML pages are also very boring. I eventually learned a little PHP to make my site more interactive.
Then I heard about WordPress. It is a content management system that makes managing my website content so much easier. It’s free software, easy to use, and you can customize and extend it with a variety of plugins and themes. They handle all of the compatibility across browsers and various browser security issues. All you have to do is keep the software up to date, which is done at the click of a button. I installed it on my hosting account and converted my pages over. With WordPress, creating a page is similar to writing a document with a word processor. It handles converting the ordinary text that I’m writing to the HTML and PHP required to display it on the Internet. I no longer have to mess with writing my own code unless I want to.
Now I Need Visitors
Once I had a website I needed traffic. That meant figuring out how to get people to find their way to my website. I wanted free organic search traffic from Google. These are the visits you get from people going to Google and searching for something. Back then there wasn’t an AI to get in the way. People searched for something and Google displayed two paid results followed by a list of natural, unpaid results. My goal was to be one of those top free results because they received the most clicks.
The work to get into those spots in the search results was called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
Without going into great depth, the important things for SEO are keywords, readability of the content, images with alt text describing them, internal and external links, and referral links from other sites. Keywords, readability and images are easy. SEO companies try to make it all sound complicated but those first three items just come down to making it easy for people and bots to understand what your content is about.
The links direct your readers to where you want them to go and show the bots what’s most important. Internal links direct people from one page to another within your site. External links point to relevant resources outside your site. And referral links are the links from other sites that direct traffic to your site.
I created pages on my website for each of the products from the network marketing company. My only goal for the site was to get people to these pages so that they click my affiliate link to the company’s website. Then they can place an order and I will get credit for it. That’s all.
An SEO Plan for an Affiliate Marketing Website
My SEO plan was simple. Those product pages contain text about the products and focus on specific keywords, like the name of the product, the primary technologies, and the benefits. The pages had images of the products with alt text naming and describing the product. The external links were my affiliate links to the company’s website. Any internal links pointed to related products or a post about how to use and maintain the item.
Over time I would write several blog posts about the products and link to the relevant product pages. I would focus on alternate keywords in the post then link to the product page with the primary keywords. For example, I might write a post about some aspect of sleep then link to the mattress page. Sleep is a keyword related to the mattress, and mattress is the primary keyword for the product page.
Multiple blog posts related to sleep matters all linking to the mattress page tells Google that the mattress page is the most important page for sleep products. So that is the page they serve up the most. They might serve a link to the blog post, but then it’s still easy for the reader to get to the mattress page.
Then I share the blog post on social media. At the time I used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (long before it became X), and Pinterest. These provided external links to my website.
Commenting
I was also a member of a blog post sharing group. When a member posted a new article we would all visit and leave a meaningful comment. When Google scanned the page, it would see the comments and count that as social proof that the article had value. And our names attached to the comment linked back to our own most recent post to create another external link.
I never cared if anybody ever read any of my posts. They only existed for the value of the links and keywords pointing to my core product pages.
The Next Step
And that’s where I am now. It’s worked pretty well over the years with minimal effort, but I’ve decided that it’s time to grow it. My wife wants to quit her job, so I need my online activities to generate more income. AI has changed how search works, and therefore how much you can rely on traffic from organic search results.
As I said last time, I never had any real business training in the past beyond what the network marketing company offered and what Google searches could tell me about SEO. Now I have found a program called Modern Wealthy to help fill in some of the gaps. Next time I will share what I’m going to build from here.
Also, a little bit of disclosure. I shared links above for the company that currently hosts my websites and for the business training that I’m using. They are affiliate links and I may earn a commission if you click them and buy something. Any affiliate commission I receive does not affect the price you might pay for the services they provide.
Please leave any questions or comments below. I would love to have a conversation about these topics.
