Step 1 - Choose an industry to promote
This is going to be one of your hardest steps of all, and could impact on your success. In fact it so important that we have dedicated an entire section to it - Read Things to Consider first. Take your time deciding, as everything you do will build from here.
Our suggestion: In our experience, a perfect industry as an affiliate (as long as you are not against it for religious or other reasons) is the Online Gaming industry, for the following reasons
- High commission structures - starting from around 25% and going up from there
- High transaction values -average spend is around $750 /month
- Ongoing revenue - you get commission on the lifetime of the player transaction
- Electronic distribution - no physical delivery issues, immediate delivery and income
- Addictive - Players keep coming back for more
- Excellent Conversion rates - Most of the online gaming sites are created for just this reason, to get players in. This works for you
- Fun / entertaining industry
- etc
The industries we have successful affiate programs for are
Step 2 - Get a Domain
Your first step to having an internet presence is to get your domain name. This will be the name of the site that your visitors will enter in their browser to access your website.
Our suggestion: Try and get a domain name that is relevant to what you are going to be promoting. This will add 'relevancy' in the eyes of the Search Engines and will help you rank higher, ultimately generating more traffic and hence conversions. for Example if you are going to be promoting widgets, then try and get the domain widgets.com (which is most likely already taken) or something with the word widgets in, for eg top-widgets.com
In order to research and purchase your domain, we recommend Its Your Domain
Step 3 - Get Web Hosting
Now that you have a domain, you need somewhere to set up your site to be hosted on your new domain.
Our suggestion: Look for a webhost that can offer an uptaime guarantee, allow full acess to your sites (so that you can easily configure them for many of the advanced scripts you may want to run) allows php or other as required hosting facilities and ensure they have good customer sevice, as they will be hosting your 'life blood' and you want to be sure to be able to resolve issues / support 24 hours a day.
We can highly recommend Speedhostingz as they meet all the above criiteria (and their pricing is good to)
Step 4 - Sell links from your site
Now we all know that you need as many inbound links as possible to your site in order to get listed and Google Pagerank, but what few people know is that you can easily make money just from having a website, by selling one way links from your site to other sites. You site can easily generate $100 or more per month, just by selling links. Do you have 10 sites ? If so do the math. As you can see this can add to quite a substantial amount. Ok so you are interested, but don't really feel like going about trying to sell your site and links, no problem, simply make use of someone like . They are arguably the best link advertising system on the net and the quiker you list your site, the more chance you have of selling links (remember they will do the selling part, you simply put the links on your website and get paid by Linksworth Monthly)