never fails Every time I show someone my site and tell them how
much money I’ve made from this over the years, they always say “You’ve got to show me how to do this!”. Well I’m tired of
losing my breath on this topic so i’m going to write as much as it takes and just point people to this article
from now on.
First, a bit of history may be in order. I created my site about seven years ago after a friend told me about someone he knew who was making something like $60k a year on his own account.
website. I checked the website and saw that it was an affiliate site. An affiliate site is a site where there are
special links to online stores and if someone clicks on one of those links and then buys something from that store, the
the site owner is paid a percentage of the sale. It seemed easy enough to do and I knew enough about html to do it, so
decided to give it a try.
I couldn’t risk much trying to create a new business since I didn’t have a lot of money. The only place that I
I had created up to that point was just a free site on Geocities, so I didn’t really have any knowledge on what was needed
to set up a “real” website. After doing some research, I found that you really didn’t need a lot of money to set up
create a site and get your own domain name. Basically, if you have $150 (a year) to spare and some spare time, you can create
your own online business site to earn extra money.
How much money? I can’t say I’ve been able to quit my day job (yet), but I have made significant amounts of money
of my site How significant? Some months I have done nothing. Some months I have made thousands. 2005 was my best year
ever- I made over $25,000 with my site! How much you really earn all depends
in the fickle nature of the search engine gods and in how much work you want to put into your site. Some people have done
fortunes from affiliate sites, but I’m assuming the ones that do have done it their life’s work and spend most of their time
working on your site, studying search engines and how to beat them. I put very little work into my site (and it shows),
but it has still provided me with a good amount of additional income.
Still want to know how to do it yourself? That is how:
Step 1 – Learn HTML
Most of the friends I’ve shown my site to already knew how to make web pages with HTML. if you don’t know anything
about HTML, don’t worry; HTML is easy to learn and you don’t need to know much to get started. If you can make a simple web page
With links, that’s all you really need to know to start building your site. If you need help with this I suggest you read a book like
HTML in easy steps. I’ve had good luck with the other books.
in the Easy Step series. They are little books that give you just enough information to get started without confusing it with theory and
They are cheap – only $10.
You don’t need to spend money on a web page builder tool. You can use any text editor, even Notepad works. If you do a Google search for
“free html editor”, you will find many free tools that you can try.
Step 2 – Set up your website
Ok, now that you know how to create a web page, it’s time to start setting up your website. To run your website, you will need to
you need a web server. That is a company that hosts websites on their servers. You can get a lot of web hosting for your money
if you know what to look for
The main things you will need to think about when choosing a web host are: price, language support, and database.
support. If you only know HTML, all you have to worry about is the price. If you need support for ASP, PHP, MYSQL, etc., you can
You’ll need to do some more research before making your choice.
What is a good price for web hosting? You can pay hundreds of dollars a month for dedicated hosting, but your site
works just as well with a web host that costs less than $10 per month. Another thing to keep in mind when comparing
the prices of different web hosts is how much they charge to register domain names for you. This can range from free (yes!)
more than $20 per year.
Setting up your chosen web host should be an easy task. In general, it does not require more than filling in some personal information.
information and your credit card number. The only hard part is choosing a domain name to use for your website. Unfortunately, most
well, the short names are already taken. Make up a new word entirely or combine two or more words into one name.
That’s how I ended up with Bargainstrike as a name.
Some sites string hyphenated words together to gain an advantage
from search engines. An example of this would be: [http://www.buy-cars-online-cheap.com]. While this may help your search ranking
in some search engines, I would recommend naming your site like that. It is a practice that is likely to be penalized by Google.
and others some day. Solving a problem with a domain name would not be easy to solve.
Step 3 – Sign up with Affiliated Businesses
The affiliated companies are the intermediaries between the online stores and you. They provide you with the links.
to different stores, record the amount of traffic and sales your links send to those stores, and send you
your payment for this. You can’t really run an affiliate site without signing up with at least one affiliate company like
very few major stores have their own independent affiliate program. There are many different ones you can sign up for.
with, but there are only three main ones you really need to sign up with. They are Linkshare,
Junction Commission and Performics. And of
Of these three, Linkshare is by far the most important to belong to. At least 90% of my money comes from Linkshare links
since more major stores with affiliate programs use Linkshare than any other affiliate company.
After registering with an affiliated company, you will need to register with the companies you would like
to join. This can be tricky, especially when you’re just starting out. Some companies review each applicant
on hand to make sure your site meets their standards. Since your website is not built yet, it will be rejected
by these companies. The good news is that there are many companies that automatically accept all applicants without
checking anything. These are the ones you are looking for at this point in the game. Later, when your site is really
up and running and getting some traffic, please go back and try to sign up for those who declined your request earlier.
After you are accepted into a company’s affiliate program, you can get the links pointing to that company’s account.
products and promotions. These links contain the affiliate tracking codes that are necessary to give you credit for
sending them for sale. Take care that when you copy them to your site you get the full code for the link.
Step 4 – Create your site
Ok, this is where it all comes together. If you haven’t built a website before, it can be a daunting task. That
should it look like? What colors should everything be? What fonts should I use? The best advice I can give about the look.
and the feel of your site is to search the internet, find a few sites you like, and try to copy the look into your design.
One thing to remember is that since you only get money for sending people to another website, your website is not a
Final destination. is driven. It must be functional and fast. The best way to achieve this is to keep your layout
simple and keep graphics to a minimum. When in doubt, look at how Google or Yahoo design their pages.
Your home page should contain links to the rest of the pages on your site. Its main function is to allow the search
engines to easily crawl your entire site. It should also be easy for users to find what they are looking for, but not
duped: most people will never see your home page. If you build your other pages correctly, users will go to them much more
often than your home page.
All the other pages on your site are where you make money. Create a separate page for each company’s affiliate program
to which you belong Enter the company name along with any search terms you wish to enter in the TITLE element
Page Title The page title is by far the most important thing on which search engines will rank your pages. now
get some links to your site from the affiliate site this company uses and place them on the page. Add text describing
the company you are linking to and perhaps your banner image. Do this for each of the stores you want to link to
and your basic site is done.
Once you’ve finished your site, ftp everything to your web server. There are some free programs to do this, but usually
just use the one built into Internet Explorer.
One last thing, don’t use pop-ups, pop-ups, or any other devious tricks on your visitors. Don’t spam people with
emails. People who do these things are assholes. Do not be an idiot.
Step 5 – Promote your website
Now that you have an affiliate site up and running on the web, the money will start rolling in, right? Not quite.
First of all, no one will find your site until it is listed by search engines. To get started, use a free automated URL submission service like Sitesearchsubmit [http://www.sitesearchsubmit.com]. Fill in your website URL and email address and Sitesearchsubmit will submit your site address to many of the major search engines automatically. Next, you’ll need to manually submit your page address to search engines that don’t allow autosubmission, such as MSN and Yahoo.
Now be patient. Some search engines may take 3-4 months to list your site. Some will have their site indexed within a month. Just look up your site name once a week on each search engine to see if it’s already listed.
Once your site has been listed, you can start testing to see how it ranks for the keywords you are using.
If you want to find out which keywords are important for ranking high, do a search here for suggestions.
Do some research on how to optimize your pages for search engines. I won’t go into that here as search engines are constantly
change the way they rank pages and such information becomes out of date quickly. Make some changes to your site and wait until they get re-indexed
(Google will usually index your site every month) and see if your changes made a difference or not. keep doing this
until you get the rating you want or give up in frustration.
Search engines are fickle beasts. Be patient, as it will probably be at least a year before you see your first check.
Also, don’t give up when search engines leave your site high and dry sometimes. I’ve had a whole year before where
my traffic dropped to almost nothing and then the following year it skyrocketed, all without me making any changes to
the site at all. Stick with it for the long haul and you’ll make money.