Do you know what the single most important thing is when building out affiliate marketing sites? If your answer was to include your affiliate links you'd be way off track.

In fact...

How some of the top marketers online will build out their affiliate marketing sites is to start with the on page SEO. For maximum effect and search engine exposure, the only aspect focused on here, is to bring the search engines to the site and keep them roaming around the content you put on there.

Now, that's only one area to focus on and the easiest platform to do this is on Wordpress. It's a multi purpose blogging platform, but you do have the option of making your website static, if you just want to build it up and then move on to another project without having to maintain it.

So the first thing you'd want to do is focus on the on page SEO factor you're creating. This helps navigate the search engines around your new website. Placing your affiliate links and promotions on there in the early stages doesn't do you much good.

Why?

Because you're essentially setting yourself up as a bridge website. It's no secret that Google, among other search engines aren't a fan of affiliates. If you have a static home page, and after a hundred or so words, you fire in an affiliate link...

Guess what happens...

Yep, the search engines off to crawl the site you just sent them over to. How important is your site now and how likely do you think it will be to rank highly in the SERPS?

Not Very!

So the workaround that a lot of affiliates are using to build out their affiliate marketing sites, is simply to first, place important and relevant content on the website. Using internal linking strategies which benefits your website visitors as well as sends the search bots around your site without them disappearing to a vendors page.

Doing this is able to get you 2 things

Firstly...

Provided you set up the site correctly for maximum on page SEO perks, (something that wealthy affiliate teaches in depth) you can build out your affiliate marketing sites that will rank highly in the search engine results for the primary keywords. That means you can obtain first page listing for free traffic to your offers.

If you're thinking without you're money links on the site you have no way of making money from them...then relax. You can have front page listings or often times page 2 listings (Then do the off page SEO to bump it to page 1) and then start to receive traffic to your site.

Resulting in: Real people navigating around your site.

It's only when you have traffic (which the search engines send to you for free) that you actually churn a buck from your affiliate marketing sites.

As with anything else.

Slow and steady wins the race.

So the next project you work on...try building out your site with some patience. Get it indexed, bring people to your site, offer them valuable content and then put some offers on there.

Traffic first...then monetize.