For many people, affiliate marketing sounds like the ideal setup. You simply mention a few products here and there, and then suddenly, you’re making lucrative passive money online.

The idea is straightforward enough — you include links to products and services and get a small cut when your visitors click on the link or make a purchase after clicking through. This simple setup is why the industry is projected to reach 8.2 billion by 2022.

Yet an affiliate website is far from a get-rich-quick scheme. Many profitable niches are very saturated, so it takes consistent effort and thoughtful strategy to earn a significant passive income.

With that in mind, we’ll walk you through the basics of how to build an affiliate marketing website that will be successful.

How To Build an Affiliate Marketing Website

1. Choose a Niche

2. Find an Affiliate Program Best Suited to You

3. Hosting an Affiliate Marketing Website

4. Set Up Themes and Plugins

5. Create Niche-Specific Content

6. Set Up Analytics

Final Thoughts: How To Build an Affiliate Marketing Website in 6 Steps

How To Build an Affiliate Marketing Website

1. Choose a niche
2. Find an affiliate program best suited to you
3. Hosting an affiliate marketing website
4. Set up themes and plugins
5. Create niche-specific content
6. Set up analytics

These are the must-follow steps to build an affiliate marketing website. Let’s take a detailed look at them.

1. Choose a Niche

Since affiliate marketing can be so competitive, selecting the right niche is crucial. The right niche should let you mention products easily, avoid too much competition and enable you to cultivate a loyal audience.

First, let’s talk about why a niche is vital for profitability. Not every topic lends itself to mentioning products, and not all products offer a meaningful payout for clicks or affiliate sales.

Brandon Gaille of The Blog Millionaire compiled data on which niches were most profitable for bloggers making over $2,000 a month. He found personal finance to be the most profitable niche.

There are many blogging niches, however. Here are a few more profitable spaces:

• Health, wellness, and fitness
• Technology, gaming
• Finance
• Travel
• Pet care
• Fashion and beauty
• Dating

Second, niching down is also beneficial because it reduces your competition. Within each topic are hundreds of more specific niches. For fitness, there’s yoga, Crossfit and endurance training. For technology, there are phone comparisons, gaming websites and software affiliates.

The narrower your topic, the less likely it is that you’ll be competing with a large number of authoritative websites in the space. That means fewer pages trying to rank for the same keywords and fewer pages writing about the same products as you.

Finally, niching down means you can make a stronger connection with your audience. The average visitor doesn’t take a product recommendation unless they feel the person recommending it to them truly understands all the ins and outs of what they care about.

When your affiliate site is niched down far enough, you can get more specific and helpful in your articles, building trust with your audience.

The more specific you can get, the better — up to a certain point. While home workouts for women are narrow enough, home workouts for women using just a jump rope is too specific.

There isn’t really enough content or an audience for just that, and the scope of the topic limits the kinds of products you can recommend. Be strategic about the topic you build an affiliate marketing website around.

Ultimately the easiest niche for you to create content for comes down to what you know best. If all your research points you towards starting a blog on cryptocurrency, but you’re terrible with money and numbers, you’re better off leaning into what you know.

2. Find an Affiliate Program Best Suited to You

It’s a good idea to look at the kinds of affiliate products and programs in your planned niche before you start learning how to build an affiliate marketing website.

There are generally two different ways to find affiliates — through one-off affiliate programs and affiliate networks.

When you work with one particular brand, you usually do so through theiraffiliate program. Each affiliate program may have different terms and payouts.