Launching a Simple Affiliate Site – Part 1
Over the coming weeks, I’m going to provide a step by step guide for launching a fairly simple affiliate site from start to finish. We’ll cover brainstorming ideas, keyword research, picking a domain, monetization methods, hosting, Wordpress as a CMS, Wordpress plugins, on-site SEO, and promotion. Let’s get started…
The first step for developing any website is picking a topic or theme. Building a site about something you enjoy isn’t absolutely necessary, but it will go a long way towards helping you stay motivated throughout construction and promotion. For my example site, I’m starting with the broad topic of football. Personally, I can’t wait for football season to start back up.. I promise, it has nothing to do with the beating I’m taking in the office fantasy baseball league. However, we have one small problem, “football” is way too broad of a topic – so we’ll need to get more specific.
There are a lot of ways we can go at this point. We could cover any of the following:
- The history of football
- Rules of the game
- NFL teams/players
- College teams/players
- NFL draft
- History of the Super Bowl (Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, etc)
- Greatest moments in pro/college football
Essentially, anything related to football can be turned into a website. However, which topic is going to most easily lend itself to a monetization plan? With our football example, online ticket sales and memorabilia are where the money is flowing. (By memorabilia I’m referring to everything from shirts, hoodies, jerseys, hats, blankets, collectibles, etc) Since this is meant to be an introduction series, we’re going to chose a fairly specific topic: Philadelphia Eagles Jerseys.
So, before we launch into keyword research and buying a domain, let’s make sure we have an idea of how we’ll actually make money from our jerseys site. For a site like this, we can use any or all of the following…
- NFLShop.com’s affiliate program (CJ)
- Dick’s Sporting Goods affiliate program (CJ)
- Champs Sports affiliate program (CJ)
- eBay affiliate program (Internal)
- Adsense
- Lids.com affiliate program (CJ)
- GrillsDirect.com and iGourmet.com affiliate programs (perfect for tailgating or game parties) (PJN)
Overall, I’d say 9 separate options means it’s a pretty safe bet that we won’t be short on ways to monetize our traffic. So, we officially have our topic – the next installment will cover keyword research, purchasing a domain name, and getting our hosting in order.
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The bald author of this post is Ian Howells, Director of Search-Engine Optimization for Pepperjam. Ian has been with Pepperjam for 1 1/2 years and most recently assisted Pepperjam’s CEO Kris Jones in writing “Search-Engine Optimization: Your Visual Blueprint to Effective Internet Marketing.” Aside from Search-Engine Optimization, Ian has been involved in internet marketing since 2002.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Ian – excellent introduction to selecting a topic for building out an affiliate site.
This is the process I went through when I first got involved in affiliate marketing in 1999 and I still recommend it today.
Because at that time I was in the process of growing a gourmet food business it made sense to me to stick to that area. Therefore, the first two Web sites I built were for gourmet food, as well as cookware.
Anyhow – this step is sometimes overlooked by affiliates marketers of differing levels of expertise.
However, if you can get this process down and stay dedicated to a few topics, you will be well on your way to making a decent living with affiliate marketing.
I look foward to this series developing.
Thanks!
May 15th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Launching an affiliate website is unexplored area for me. Thanks for the intro.
I am waiting for your next post.
Greetings from Macedonia!
May 16th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
I bought the domain http://www.YellowSweaters.com, and plan on monetizing it with affiliate programs from Amazon, CJ, and eBay, and also Adsense.
I probably will have to hire someone to write posts on it, as i am strapped for time. But i think it has good affiliate potential, as it gets Google traffic already, and only has like 2 posts on it. Zero promotion.
Any tips for this site? I look forward to your step-by-step series. Will RSS now, before i forget. Thanxs!
Missy.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Those few are a good start, Overstock seems to be another good bet, along with the macy’s affiliate program. If you want to branch out into recomending products that would match yellow sweaters, zappos is a great shoes program if you can get accepted, and there is a slew of purse websites within CJ you can promote (ebags.com springs to mind immediately).
I would add, being strapped for time shouldn’t be a big deal. Take two hours on a Sunday and schedule a couple posts for the week within Wordpress, and you’re good to go. Time should only be an issue if you’re trying to run multiple websites at once, and hand-updating them all.
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:47 pm
[...] In my last post, “Launching a Simple Affiliate Site – Part 1” we covered selecting a topic, as well as making sure we had multiple ways to potentially monetize the site. This week, we’re going to cover keyword research, buying a domain, and getting hosting. [...]