Create Content First or Find an Offer First?

You have decided that you wanted to enter the affiliate marketing world, but you don’t know where to start.  Do you find the offers first and then create content around those high converting offers?  Or do you create content and then find offers that are relavent to the content that you are creating? Well, the best answer that I can give is, either or.  Let’s discuss both situations.

Find the Best Offers and Create Content Around That

Once you have signed up with an affiliate network and scour through all of the merchants and different offers that are out there and you do your industry and competitive research, you now find a few offers that you think are great.  The next part is figuring out how you are going to get traffic to your site to start getting people to convert on these offers.  You may decide to start a blog based upon the industry offers that you now have on your site.  If you are not the best at copy writing, then outsourcing the content creation may be in your best interest.  There are content creation services out there that are inexpensive that can help you create compelling content.  Now that you have good content being produced, it is time to make sure that it is being optimized and that your site is fully optimized for search engines.  Start your link building efforts, start capturing your visitors information, and have clear call to actions on your site.  If you are not passionate about this specific offer that you have and not a professional copywriter, then the next option may be a better choice for you.

Create the Content and Find Relavant Offers

The other side of the coin is that you wake up one day and realize that you are extremely passionate about something.  You take this thing you are passionate about, let’s use an example of myself, and say diabetes.  You decide that you have so much to say about the subject that you decide to start a diabetic blog. You just start writing, and writing, and writing until you have months worth of content and you have been engaging with the community.  Now, you decide that you are going to put some sort of ads on your site and start making money off of it.  You put up a few affiliate links that are relavant to the subject of your blog posts.  Notice how I said that they must be relevant.  An affiliate link about running shoes on this blog would not be relevant, so why would I waste real estate on the site for such an ad?  This way may be easier for you if you can write and you are able to use the passion that you have for the topic to create compelling content.

Here are two ways to approach affiliate marketing.  Which one is the right one?  I don’t know.  It depends on too many factors.  It depends on the industry, the community, and the market.  Decide if you are in it just for the money or because you have a passion and making money from your passion is just a bonus.

Affiliate marketing is right around the corner for you.  Just get passed the first step and figure out which path you would like to take and get a domain name.