Affiliate Marketing for Seniors
Create Content
In the previous post Affiliate Marketing for Seniors: How to Build a Website, I covered how to progress from nothing to having your own website, indexed by Google and available to everyone in the world with an internet connection.
That's a great start, and hopefully much easier to achieve than you ever thought possible, with the aid of the Wealthy Affiliate Free Membership.
But, as I said in that article, having a website is not the same as making money from it. The first step in making your affiliate marketing for seniors website into your own personal income stream is to create and publish content.
There are four major types of content that you will create:
- Structural Content. This includes header and footer menus to help your visitors navigate your site
- Legal Content. Privacy Policy, Affiliate Disclosure and other related pages
- Fixed Pages. For starters, About Me, Contact Me and Home pages but further down the track, promotional pages for your affiliate products, including reviews
- Blog Posts. These will include information for your niche audience and, further down the track, posts with links to your promotional pages.
Don't worry if this seems overwhelming at first. Most of it is only done once and I intend to cover it step by step.
I mentioned your "niche audience" above. This is a really important concept, so let's examine it first.
Your Niche Audience
It's really important to work out who your audience is and to target all your promotions to that audience.
For example, this series of articles is clearly aimed at senior citizens who are approaching retirement or who are already in it and who are concerned about their current or upcoming financial situation and who are motivated to do something about it.
These are the people I am targeting.
They may be single women, single men or couples, but they all share the same set of fears and hopes.
I know that I can help them, not only through Wealthy Affiliate, but my own personal experience of recovering from bankruptcy in my 70's and, as a senior myself, building several successful affiliate marketing businesses. I understand their issues and it's my job to gain their trust and help them to work with me.
And there are parallels to that in whatever niche you choose to build your business in.
Once you know who your niche audience is, you can start building content.
I'm going to assume you've joined Wealthy Affiliate, as they make getting started so much easier.
Fixed and Legal Content Pages
The first fixed pages you'll create will be About Me, Contact Me and the legal content pages Privacy Policy and Affiliate Disclosure.
Wealthy Affiliate makes these easy to create with templates you can use to create the pages quickly and then make minor changes to personalize them.
You can use your About Me page to introduce yourself to your niche audience and start to explain why they should trust and listen to you. If you're comfortable with showing your photograph, this is the page to include it on.
It's important to understand that none of this is set in stone. You can come back to any of your website's content and make any changes you like. Sometimes it's better just to get something down and improve it later, rather than staring at a blank screen waiting for just the right words to come.
You don't need to create a separate Home page at this point. By default, your home page (the one that appears when someone goes to your website) will show your blogroll. Your blogroll is a summary of your blog posts, with the most recent one of top.
The legal content pages, particularly Privacy Policy and Affiliate Disclosure are required to be on your website, but no one ever reads them. When we get to Structural Content, we'll put navigation to them in the Footer Menu.
Structural Content
Structural content governs the way the site is laid out (some sites, for example, use the full width of the screen to display content while others have a main section to display some content and a sidebar to display something different). If the sidebar contains a CTA (Call to Action) such as an invitation to subscribe to a newsletter, you may decide to show it on every page.
In your website's back office (which you log into with a user name and password) you are able to set this up and change it whenever you want. Your site's structure is based on the WordPress platform. There is a menu in the left sidebar where you can easily find everything you need.
Just go to Appearance >> Themes to customize your theme and make changes to the structure. Or change the look and feel of your website by choosing a different theme altogether.
Create your menus in Appearance >> Menus and build your header and footer menus simply by dragging and dropping pages and posts to where you want them to appear.
All this is covered in detail in Wealthy Affiliate's training and, as your sponsor, I will also lead you through it.
Blog Posts
Once your website is set up (and you have some affiliate links, which are covered in another article in this series) you will spend most of your time writing blog posts,
Each blog post will target a particular desire or pain point of your target audience, so it's important for them to feel that you understand their needs and desires.
Some blog posts will be purely informative. You will provide your niche audience with useful information, without looking to sell them anything.
Others, while also addressing your visitor directly, will recommend a product that will help them to achieve their desire or alleviate their pain. It's important that the product genuinely does that but of course it will be a product that you are an affiliate for and, if they buy it, you will get paid the affiliate commission.
For SEO, your aim is for your blog posts to appear high up in Google's search results when someone searches for a keyword/search term relative to your niche. You want to capture the visitor and add their name and email address to your list.
Your List
It's really important to build a list of prospects' names and email addresses.
You can turn these into ravenous fans who will buy the affiliate products that you promote to them at a much higher rate than random visitors to your website.
To attract visitors to sign up to your list you need a Lead Magnet.
Creating a Lead Magnet is the subject of the next article in this series.
"The money is in the list" is a phrase that every person embracing affiliate marketing for seniors needs to believe and be familiar with.
See Also
Is Affiliate Marketing the Ideal Side Hustle for Seniors?
Affiliate Marketing for Seniors Work Flow
Affiliate Marketing for Seniors: How to Build a Website
Affiliate Marketing for Seniors: Create a Lead Magnet
Affiliate Marketing for Seniors: Your Lead Magnet's Landing Page
Successful Affiliate Marketing for Seniors and Retirees in the USA
