I was setting up a new affiliate marketing site the other day and thought the steps I took might be of use to someone new to the game. Bear in mind I am no expert and these are pretty basic steps but they should get you over the first hurdle if you are just starting out and have picked your niche and domain name. This site uses WordPress.

• Register your domain name. Try and get the .co.uk version but if not go for the .org.uk I use 123reg.co.uk to register my domains.
• Get some webhosting. I have the Hostgator shared hosting account which allows multiple domains (sites). Some people prefer to use a UK hosting company for their UK sites but this costs more.
• Now you need to link your domain from 123reg to your Hostgator hosting. To do this login to your 123reg control panel and go to the domain your just registered. Change the nameservers in 123reg.co.uk to the nameservers listed in your Hostgator support email.
• Now go to your Hostgator control and find the Add on Domains button. Now enter the name of the new domain.
• Now instal WordPress on the domain.  This is easy using Fantastico on the Hostgator Control Panel.
• Pick a theme for the WordPress site.  I use a custom built theme I made for most of my sites but there are many free ones on the web. If you are unsure of what theme to use leave it with the default one for now and come back to this step later.
• Now instal the WordPress plugins for the WordPress site.  After they are installed set them up in WordPress. Some I use include All in One SEO, Statpress, Official Statcounter, Max Press Blog Ping Optimiser, Easy Privacy Page and a few others.
• Now WordPress is setup its time to start adding content.  For nearly all my sites I write (or get someone to write) 300 – 500 words on the niche.  This usually a pretty general peice explaining what the niche is, maybe with some tips for someone looking to buy an item in this niche, mentioning brand names can be good as people often search for them in Google. I put this content in a new post in WordPress and make it a sticky so it is always the first post the visitors and Google sees when they arrive at the site.
• Next I add some products to the site.  The first products I add are usually displayed using Easy Content Units.  I make a unit that displays a range of products from the niche and just shows the image, the title, the merchant name and logo and the price.  I add this ECU to the post I made in the previous step so it is at the top of the site and the first thing a user sees when they arrive at the homepage. 
• Now I start adding individual items from the niche to the site.  I usually start off with the best selling items from the niche and then I tend to write about 200 words about the product with a persuasive tone.  These mini reviews are added to WordPress as new posts.  Each post has the 200 or so words of content, an image of the product, a graphic button for the user to click on to go to the merchant and sometimes an Easy Content Unit comparing the prices of the item at different merchants.
• Once I’ve added a few posts for some products I setup the contact page, the privacy policy and the about page.  These are setup as WordPress pages rather than posts and in each page I use the keywords for the niche and link back to the home page.  For each link I use the keywords I am targeting as anchor text and title text.
• Next you need to get some back links but that is whole other post!
• Now just keep adding new content in the form of product reviews on WordPress posts and getting back links and you should slowly rise up the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).

If you found this guide useful or got lost along the way or think it is wrong please leave a comment!

How to Setup an Affilaite Marketing Website is a post from: How I Got Rich

I am soon going to have  go at financial leads and life insurance affiliate marketing in particular.  As I will be paying per click I need to be sure my website is of high quality and converts well.

Looking for a Web Designer is a post from: How I Got Rich

After work and between the gym and my Thai class I wrote a few more bits of content about an older site which is finally climbing the Google tree and is at number three.  These were two 250ish word product reviews that I have done as separate Wordpress posts.

I’ve also decided to split apart my big site I am working on into two smaller big sites as the two areas are not that closely related.  After deciding this I spend some time looking for a UK based host I could host the site with as I want to move away from having all my sites on one server based in a different country to the one I am targeting.

After I’ve picked the host I will look for a WordPress theme that meets my needs and get cracking on the site.  I want it ranking well for at least one product before Easter so I’ve not got long to get something up.  Hopefully I will have a quiet weekend and get some work done.

One of my newish sites made its first sale netting £10 commission which was nice.  A few more of those this month will make me happy.

What I done did today is a post from: How I Got Rich

February was a poor month for me and I only made about 300 pounds and I had to spend about 80 quid on AdWords to get there.  This was my worst month for probably about six months and the first real big drop in profit.  But onwards and upwards as they say.

I have started proper work on a ‘big site’ but am only focusing on one type of product for now and will then start adding in more products once I am ranking ok for the first product type.

I’ve started paying for content and reinvesting some of my earnings from affiliate marketing now I am working full-time again.  I’ve been buying content in lots of 500 words and having the content focused around my niche keywords.  I had a site that had been at the bottom of page one in Google for ages and after adding the content it moved to number three in Google so hopefully I should see a return on that investment shortly.  Before that the site was languishing on page two and sometimes further out but after moving it to WordPress and separating each product review/description into a separate Wordpress post it moved to the bottom of page one in Google.  So moving to WordPress plus adding good written content can equal a decent jump in the serps for a site.

As for my big site I am having trouble finding a decent WordPress theme that is suited to an affiliate site.  I’m using a magazine theme at the moment and I do like it but it doesn’t quite meet my needs and I am having trouble deciding how to structure a site that is bigger than my usual one type of product site.

Can anyone recommend a good WordPress theme, free or otherwise, for a decent sized affiliate site?

How was February for you?

Monthly Round-Up: February 2010 is a post from: How I Got Rich

I didn’t much like WordPress when I first started out in this game of affiliate marketing.  I thought it was too restrictive on what you could post, the themes weren’t that great and it seemed like a bit of an overkill for a small niche landing page.  As my dreams of being a web design were never realised building affiliate marketing sites using HTML and CSS gave me an opportunity to indulge my creative tendencies.  Due to all this I decided WordPress wasn’t for me and I would build my own sites.

But as time went on I kept reading about how Google loved blogs and WordPress blogs in-particular and how well they ranked and were easy to update and customise.  After a while I decided to try WordPress on a few sites.  Besides, my web hosts, Hostgator, gave me access to cPanel and Fantastico which made installing WordPress a breeze.  I installed WordPress, picked a free theme that looked nice and started building my site.  It took me a while to work out the best way to setup the site including how to use the tags and categories in the best way, how to organise the posts and pages and which plug-ins to use.  But once my sites had been up and running for a while I noticed they started to rank quite well.  Once I had seen this for myself I started putting more effort into understanding WordPress and soon after I started work on my own theme.  I found a blank theme that I could modify and shortly after I had my first WordPress theme which I would use for my keyword domain niche sites.  I also created a version that is suited to atomic or micro niche sites.

This has all worked out rather well for me and I can now have a site up and running in less than a day with a few posts of content and all the relevant admin pages (contact, privacy, discliamer, etc).  I am now in the process of migrating my existing older sites into WordPress sites.  So far this has gone well as previously where I had 10 or so product reviews on an HTML page I have now put each product review into a separate WordPress post.  As Google sees each of these post as a seperate page my sites have all grown a lot bigger in page count even though the same content is being used.

The move has been positive for each site I have moved over so far and they have either held their top position in Google or moved up in the SERPS.

From now on I am a WordPress only affiliate marketer.  Although I’ve yet to look at Drupal or Joomla.  Am I missing out on anything?

Moving Old Sites Over to WordPress is a post from: How I Got Rich

I’ve recently ‘launched’ a few new sites built using WordPress and none of them have fully indexed.  The home page is indexed but none of the other posts or meta data is indexed in Google.

Thanks to gary_ap on the A4U forum I have found out that there is a new setting in WordPress that by default is set to ‘I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors’ to view the site.

I have since changed this setting to ‘I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers’ and my robots.txt file has been updated and hopefully my sites will be indexed fully soon.

This setting can be found under:

• Settings
• Privacy

WordPress Sites Not Indexing Correctly is a post from: How I Got Rich

As the maid was coming I went to the Starbucks over the road with my Netbook to do a few hours of affiliate marketing work.  Unfortunately I couldn’t get on the Internet over there so had to work offline.  This gave me a good opportunity to develop a new WordPress theme for my single product, micro nice sites.  Previously I had been making these sites by hand using HTML & CSS but I thought using WordPress will make it easier to add more content as I can just do a new post rather than a new page and also I can benefit from the supposedly favourable way Google ranks WordPress sites and blogs.

I modified an existing WordPress theme I had developed and changed it to one column with three side bars that sit below the last post.  I built the theme then started adding content.  This was a bit of a mistake as to copy a WordPress installation and its content from a local machine to the online installation looks quite hard and something I decided not to attempt which meant I had to copy it manually.

I finished the site yesterday which took two days including the design of the theme.  This was longer than I hoped to spend on one of these single product sites as they are very hit and miss as you are definitely putting all your eggs in one product.  I also had problems with the ECU price comparison widget as some of the merchants were not showing in the search results which could potentially lose me sales if the visitor goes off to check if that merchant has the product in stock.

I’ve  setup an AdWords PPC campaign for it which should get me some traffic and some sales – fingers crossed.  I will let it run to £13.75 of clicks (which is the amount of commission I will get from a sale) and if it has not made a sale pull it.

Working Offline is a post from: How I Got Rich

I do like using WordPress for the ease in which new posts/pages can be added and the feeling I have that WordPress sites get indexed quickest and ranked better than normal sites.

The only downside for me is the lack of control I have over the design of the theme.  I’ve had a go at customising a blank WordPress theme and it turned out ok but now I have made a new website template in HTML and CSS what I would like to turn into a WordPress theme.

I don’t want the site to look like a blog but I want the features Google seems to favour in blogs to be present.

I’ll let you know how I get on over the next few days.

Also, does anyone know of any good, free WordPress themes that are well-suited to displaying photos?

Making a WordPress Theme is a post from: How I Got Rich

Went shopping with my girlfriend yesterday and she bought an item of clothing I had not seen before.  This gave me an idea for a niche so I checked the search amount on Google which was 4,400, so far so good, then checked if the domain was available.  The .co.uk was gone but was not being used so I took the .org.uk

Today I installed WordPress which I will be using for this site (#18) and added an Easy Content Unit which I have put in the first post which I will make sticky so it is the first thing users see when they land on the site.  All other posts will be positioned beneath.  The ECU has about 20 items ranging from £5 to £80 from three merchants.

Each post I add will be based around a single product and hopefully it will get indexed within the next few days.

This is an item of clothing that is suited for the summer and this will be the first summer they have been in UK high street stores as far as I can tell.  I’m guessing it will probably be the last too!

Also done a couple of blog posts today but nothing major.  My girlfriend is away for two weeks from Saturday so I will be making up for lost time and getting my existing sites up to scratch whilst she is away.

Today’s Progress is a post from: How I Got Rich

Today I registered a new domain and build a niche landing page site.

The domain is just one keyword where as my previous sites have been two or three keyword domains.

I think it is niche enough and it only gets 3,400 exact searches a month and is a low cost item similar to another niche I am working with.

I have based the site on my most profitable site so far so it will be interesting to see if it is the format of the site or the niche that has lead to the sales.

I’ve also setup this blog today and posted a few posts on another WordPress based niche landing site.

Was in meetings for most of today and have a job interview tomorrow so haven’t had much time today or this evening to do much affiliate marketing work but should be able to make some more progress tomorrow evening.

Today’s Progress is a post from: How I Got Rich