One of the most popular ways to make money online with an affiliate marketing system is by creating content for a website with a topic that’s similar to the affiliate network which supports it. It gives individuals the opportunity to be creative or to be critical in a way that also encourages them to spread the word and maybe even make some money. This money isn’t likely to be anything more than pocket change unless you concentrate on spreading the word and advertising your site for several months or even years, but it’s still nice to have.
However, this does mean you’ll also need to keep up a good production rate of new articles, blog posts, and whatever else your website is for if you want people to stay interested and keep coming back for more. And while you don’t need to be the next Shakespeare or Hemmingway to get people interested in your writing, it won’t hurt to understand a few things about the skill before you begin.
Write Conversationally, Read Out Loud
For most people, writing and speaking involve two different parts of the brain, and so we’ll write a sentence that makes perfect sense in our heads but which turns out to be hard for other people to understand. Mistake like these can be very difficult to catch, even by experienced authors who should know better, but one easy way they use to check their work is to speak it out loud.
By using this auditory approach to check their work, authors can give their writings a casual, conversational tone that’s easy to read. A casual tone might not be appropriate for every situation, but you don’t need to be particularly formal on an affiliate website.
Love Your Topic
It’s hard to underemphasize this: if you want to make a serious amount of money with an affiliate website, you’ll need to spend a serious amount of time writing for it and promoting it. It needs to become your profession, and as such you may spend more time writing and pumping out articles and blog posts than you would have if maintaining a website were still more of a hobby.
As such, you really need to love what you’re doing with your time if you want to commit to it. You need to have a bottomless well of ideas and opinions you can draw upon to fill your website, and you need to want to go back to that well time after time, because if you can’t you’re only going to wind up hating a hobby you used to enjoy.
Grow A Thick Skin
Few things in life are as nerve-wracking as putting your time and effort into something creative and then presenting it to the world for all to see. Writing a product review or an informational article isn’t quite as personal as writing a short story or a novel, but there’s still a little bit of yourself in that article and it’s not always easy to listen to people criticize your opinion or the style of your writing.
Criticism is never easy to take, not even for the most experienced authors, but some of the ways you can handle this public feedback are healthier than others. You need to be able to listen to honest criticism even if it’s rude or mean-spirited, because even if someone isn’t nice about it they could still be right about something you need to change. As for unhelpful negative criticism that doesn’t bother explaining what you did wrong, you simply have to learn to let it go.
Write Constantly
Not only does writing all the time help you fill out your website, it also allows you to constantly improve your skill through practice and try out new ideas on a regular basis. Constantly writing means constantly publishing, and getting plenty of fresh, new content is what gets people to come back to your website for more.
Of course, there are plenty of other things you probably need to do on a given day, especially if you have a day job that pays the rent and dominates most of your week. That’s why writing constantly can be a goal you can work towards, or something you can schedule for around half an hour to 20 minutes each day with hour-long sessions on the weekends. Writing under these conditions can feel boring and repetitive, but professional writers can often spend 40 hours or more each week on nothing but writing.
Know Your Audience
Whom do you want to read your articles and reviews? Whom do you expect to be interested in learning about the same things you spend your time thinking about, such as sharks or dog food? Knowing your audience is a basic concept that professionals use all the time to tailor their message. A pet owner is going to worry about the health and the happiness of his or her pet, and so an article aimed at a pet owner should emphasize these factors.
If your audience is casually interested in astronomy but mostly don’t study it in great detail, you should remember to define your terms if you start talking about something more in-depth than planet names and orbits. And you’ll need to repeat them as needed in each article, since you can’t be certain that your audience is reading them all in order.
So if you want to make money online with a website and an affiliate program, you should first learn how to write well and write consistently. Because even if you manage to create the prettiest website in the world, you won’t get many repeat visitors if there’s no content to keep people coming back.
