Affiliate Marketing & e-Commerce Design and development
Published: 2018-03-27 07:54:11



There is no definite pattern or technology that can be connected with affiliate website development. Developers can design a single page affiliate website, multiple pages using blogs with free CMS like Drupal, Joomla or Wordpress. Professional affiliates require quality CMS that offers everything they require to manage the users, data and content easily.  Here you will learn, How you can set up an affiliate website such as a cashback, discount voucher, group deal, price comparison or other affiliate related websites.

Have you decided your affiliate website type/segment?

The most important step you need to take is to decide your website segment or type, such as if you are planning to set up a cashback, price comparison, coupons website or even a website listing single product types such as Chocolates. Make sure you have the basic knowledge of the user base and their elements.

Once you have chosen a niche for your affiliate project. Here are some questions you should ask yourself.

1 – Do you need a static or dynamic database driven website?

2 – Do you need a customised solution or a freeware CMS?

3 – Have you seen similar projects? If yes what sort of technologies are they using? If you are not familiar with programming languages then consult your friends or email some companies for a quote. Try RevGlue, Moto, Simbla.

4 – If the project is a dynamic database driven website then have you found the data sources that needs integrating? Could the data be integrated from an external source directly from the affiliate networks or the retailers? Do you have the list of the data sources?

5 – Do you have time and money to spend on the project? It may take weeks or even months to design, develop, test and deploy a decent affiliate project.

6 – Are you going to design and develop yourself or planning to hire developers from Freelancing websites or a professional affiliate CMS Development Company like RevGlue?

7 – Do you have access to affiliate networks for data integration?

8 – Do you think you can make a profit from the project? Make a yearly project plan and analyse it.

9 – Are you just testing affiliate marketing or seriously thinking to pursue as a career? If you are serious then let’s read some affiliate blogs, forums to get some insights, talk to network affiliate manager to find out what is hot, which affiliate websites are making money and how they can help you?

10 – Affiliate networks - the essential part of your affiliate project. Make sure you have affiliate accounts with them, understand their technology and offers, talk to them on phone, check their training videos and manuals. The company you may hire for design and development will not help you learn the affiliate marketing. You are apparently required to have strong relationships with the affiliate networks.

Some basic requirements for an affiliate CMS and website development

Once you are confident in finding the answers to the above questions, let’s get our hands dirty in real affiliate CMS design and development phases. 

Some basic requirements are as follows.

Let’s assume we are going to design and develop a UK based coupons project that would be integrated with the UK leading affiliate networks and is able to provide dynamic contents, coupons calculations, data integration, user and website management. You would also require the following attributes and factors to explore and retain.

1 – Money and Time (lots of it!)

2 – Define design and development strategy for the project – even in your mind with some ideas.

3 – A designer and a developer (could be multiple) with affiliate cms development experience from Freelancing websites if you are managing yourself or working with a professional affiliate CMS agency such as RevGlue.

4 – Basic understanding of affiliate networks.

5 – Understand what is a commission, cashback and payment method in affiliate marketing?

6 – What is the difference in CPA, CPL, CPC and Hybrid models? These are the types of affiliate programs you will be working with during data entry to setup cashback offers.

7 – Sign a contract with the design/development agency or individuals so you own the source code and technologies that are being customised for you?

8 – Setup a bank account and also PayPal account if you wish to make cashout payments online for your website customers. For setting up BACS, you will also need a payment gateway like Sagepay or Authorise.net merchant account.

9 – Would you be working directly with the merchants then you may require setting up direct tracking pixels with the merchants. If not then you can easily work via the affiliate networks.

10 – Have you arranged your hosting, domain name and an SSL certificate.

Finally, the design and development process of an affiliate website is not very different from any project however the complexity begins if you don’t have experience in working with the affiliate networks. There I recommend working with leading affiliate CMS provider - https://www.revglue.com Or if you want tailor-made affiliate website then visit this page - https://www.revglue.com/bespoke.


Thanks for Reading!

tags: RevGlue, CMS, website builder, Open Source, CSS, HTML, JS, Affiliate Marketing 
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