Choosing your affiliate market.

Some of the most successful in affiliate marketing make their money by targeting smaller niche markets where the competition is lower, therefore making it easier to get good search engine positioning. For example, its not adviseable to start trying to sell flights or hotel bookings straight away as these marketplaces are so full of large companies and affiliates it would be very difficult to beat the competition. Although obviously the rewards are large, if you managed to rank number one in google for 'cheap flights' then with just a simple page and an affiliate link to a decent airline you would no doubt make a fortune. But thats the point, everyone knows this, and hardened affiliates will have a few years advantage, so its best to start small. Infact its adviseable to start with 'minisites' which if done correctly could also net you a fortune. For example, particular fashions, fishing equipment, tennis rackets etc will have much less competition. Now, another important thing to mention, that many affiliates forget to tell you, is that you actually need to know your subject, or be prepared to learn something about it. This is for one reason. Content. Good content is the key to getting good search engine placements. Of course many other factors figure, but without unique written content about the subject it is very difficult to get well ranked.

For your first affiliate marketing project, pick a subject you at least have some interest in!

Buying a domain name. (website name) for your project.

Think of a name for your affiliate marketing website, as an example, lets say we want to market tennis rackets. You want to find a name that if possible contains the name of your subject. Ideally you would register www.tennisrackets.com obviously this would have been registered, so you need to play around a bit. Firstly you need to think of the first main keyword you want to use. The search term you want to be found with. ie if I wanted to find tennis rackets on the internet I would type in something like 'professional tennis rackets'if this was your no1 keyword you would want www.professional-tennis-rackets.co.uk or something similar. Although it doesn't hold as much weight as it used to, it is still easier to get ranked if your website is the search term. There are several reasons for this, one being link anchor text, which we will cover later. A good free tool to use for finding out how many poeple search for a specific term is :

http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

This uses overture, but to give you a rough idea, multiply the search numbers by eight to get an idea of the number of searches on google. (this link is specific to the UK)

When you have got some ideas, go to google and type them in to see how much competition you have for those keywords. Now, for this part you need to have the google toolbar, a free toolbar from google that gives you the google pagerank of a website when you visit it. You can download it for free from google.com.

Now, go to the top five or six sites for your keyword and see what the pagerank (PR) is for those sights. The higher the pagerank, the higher google rates the page (theoretically) if they are all PR 6 and above, you havn't got much chance, but if some are below PR 5 then its very possible for you to rank higher. Its not that hard to get a PR 5 website. Obviously there are other factors that help your ranking but we will get to these in a while.

Buying a domain name.

Buy your domain name, this is done online with a credit or debit card from any one of many different companies. Personally I find the cheapest and best service is from 123-reg.co.uk as they give you full access to the nameservers (when you come to hosting your site) and are the cheapest I have found, just over £3 inc. VAT for a .co.uk per year. You can go there and search for your top choices of domain name and they will tell you if they are free and you can then register them. They do tend to go pretty quickly, so if you find a good one for your affiliate site, for the sake of £6 odd for 2 years, snap it up. You don't have to do anything with it until your ready, they just hang on to it for you.

Hosting your affiliate website.

Next you need somebody to 'host' your affiliate website for you, in other words, give you space on their internet connected server for you to put your website (files). There are some good free ones like freeola.net, if you buy your domain name through them, but unfortunately you generally have to use their ISP to upload files and you cannot get the statistics you can get from paid hosting. In other words, you won't be able to see who has visited your website, and with what search phrase on google, yahoo etc. Invaluable when fine tuning your affiliate marketing website. Their are many alternative companies, and its worth checking reviews before you buy because I have had some bad experiences with some of them. I personally use ultradev because they are cheap, use x-control panel (a peice of cake to use), have great stats and plenty of add on scripts should you want to play around. But if you don't fancy them have a look around, or take up the hosting from 123-reg if you like to keep all your eggs in one basket.

Once you have ordered you hosting you will be given the nameservers from your host. Go to 123-reg or whoever you registered the name with, and get them to add those nameservers to your domain. (in 123-reg just go to your control panel and add them yourself, its easy) a day later and your website is ready to go online!

Page 3 - creating your affiliate website