I’ve been involved in affiliate marketing since 1999 and most of my work has been involved in creating and promoting my marketing sites and helping others start up and run their own affiliate marketing businesses. But there are a growing number of people who aren’t all that much interested in selling goods and services as they are sharing information and ideas about a particular passion of theirs. These folks are creating what I call “Advocacy” websites.
Thanks to WordPress that makes creating an attractive and highly functional website a snap, more and more of these advocacy sites are springing up. Probably the most popular topics for this genre are health related. In a sense these sites have become online support centers where people can find specific information but also share experiences.
My wife Arlene runs a successful advocacy site called EpilepsyMoms.com. The idea was inspired by our struggle to deal with our son’s epilepsy and the 200-300 seizures a day he was experiencing. No matter what we tried, no matter how many medications the doctors would prescribe nothing helped reduce our son’s seizures.
Then one day Arlene ran across a diet specifically for epileptics. The diet was over sixty years old but neither we nor our doctor had ever heard of it. Arlene put on son on the diet and within seven days his seizures stopped…and they have never returned.
Passion – The seed that grows advocacy sites
As you might imagine we were ecstatic over the results of this “miracle” diet. Through Arlene’s previous research she knew that there where many other families who had an epileptic child and she was passionate about reaching out to them and sharing her experience. She wanted to share the diet and the remarkable results it had for our son in hopes that it could help another Mom with an epileptic child.
It’s this passion that is one of the distinguishing traits of successful advocacy website and it’s that “commitment to the cause” that keeps it vital and growing .
Unlike the typical affiliate marketing site, the visitors to advocacy websites have far more passion and get more deeply engaged than say visitors to sites promoting infrared photography do. It’s this combination of a passionate webmaster and an equally passionate set of visitors that really distinguishes these sites from others.
It all starts with a plan
You know how passionate you are about the topic but to really be effective you have to know how your passion will resonate with your visitors. Before you even start thinking about drawing up a plan for the site you have to take a moment and:
Identify your ideal visitor
- What is your ideal visitor really looking for? What problem do they need help with or what question is on their mind. Try to figure out the root cause of their visit.
- How are they feeling when they arrive at your site? Hopeful, desperate, angry…their mood will allow you to best guide them through your content.
- What’s their goal when they first arrive? Does it match your own goal for them?
- What do they think they can accomplish by visiting your website.
If you can answer those questions the site will nearly design itself. Just take these elements into consideration when building your blueprint:
- Keeping the answers to the questions about your ideal visitor in mind, what do you want the visitor to see and/or hear when he or she firsts lands.
- If you’re building in WordPress, control the urge to slap every cool sounding plugin onto the site. You only want features that will address the ideal visitor.
- Advocacy sites thrive on interaction. Make sure you have the ability to openly communicate with the visitor be it via comments, forums Twitter etc. Successful advocacy sites get visitors for the long run not just a single hit.
- Stay personally involved. This is not the kind of website that you can build and forget. You and your voice are an important part of the brand.
That last bit about staying involved is one of the greatest differences between advocacy sites and sites that sell physical products and services like digital infrared filters. A typical affiliate website needs attention but not nearly as frequently or as “on page” as a site promoting a cause.
So identifying the ideal visitor’s profile, providing a website that meets their expectation and then staying engaged with the audience are the secrets to a successful advocacy website.
If you have a site with a cause I’d really be interested in what you’re doing to both attract and retain traffic. Please share your ideas with the rest of us in the comments block below.
About the Author
James Martell held the first-ever training classes on the subject of Affiliate Marketing in 2001 and has since become a popular affiliate marketing trainer, speaker and podcaster. By choosing an online career, James has found plenty of time to spend with his wife and four children in their coastal home just south of Vancouver, BC.
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