I just started working on a new project and thought it would be useful to post on how I go about implementing a new affiliate site. It will not be in great detail but at least it will give you an idea of what I do.

The first step is to look for a niche where there are buyers in a topic area that has a large group of interested people. For example, the topic area might be “automotive” where millions of people drive and have an interest in cars.

For the niche, I look for problems people are having and then look for affiliate programs and products that solve these problems. In the automotive area, the niche may be “saving money on gas”.

To solve this problem there is a top selling ClickBank product about using water to save money on gas. This pays a commission of $33.88 per sale.

Also, I look at eBay for relevant products that people are actively bidding on. In this case it might be Hybrid Cars or small economical cars or maybe mopeds. So this means I can feature these product listings to generate income from eBay referrals.

So now I have the idea for a site where I can match buyers with problems to products that can solve their problems.

The next step is to register a domain name. I always try hard to find a good dot com for US/worldwide targeting for an affiliate site.

First, I do some keyword research. This gives me an idea for what words to aim for in the domain name. Ideally, the words I use are what people search for in volume and the overall domain name is devoid of hyphens, numbers and trademarked terms.

In our example, a good domain name might be saveplentygas.com (maybe this is already registered, I don’t know, it’s just an idea off the top of my head). The keyword is “save gas” (~1300 searches monthly) plus I added a filler word so I can find an unregistered domain. I like to keep the domain name short but still make sense when somebody spots it in the search engine results. Also, in the URLs of subpages of the site, these words will help with relevancy.

You can currently save 25% (ends 25 September 2008) on new domains at Godaddy.com with coupon code: gdp0902g

During registration, I change the nameservers to point to my server. Once I paid for the domain name, I head over to my webhosting control panel and assign some hosting to the domain. Then I have a site ready to be built. I have a reseller account with HostGator so it is easy to create many new website accounts without additional costs.

The next step is to build a new custom template for the site. This is something that could be outsourced but I like to mess around with the code and graphics myself. To power the site I use WordPress, BANs or I hand code the pages.

Then I consider the content that I will publish to the site. This will be comprised of my own articles targeting buyer keywords such as “How do I save money on gas?”, “how can I improve the gas consumption of my car”, “do water systems work to save gas?” etc.

Then include prominent Ads for the “Run a car on water” Ads.

Then for the BANs pages, paragraphs of text about “cheap hybrid cars” above and below the current eBay listings of these vehicles for sale.

Most of the traffic to this kind of site will be “long-tail” so all I need to do is build a few links to the new site to get it indexed in search engines. Then all the visitors should be very well targeted to the content on the site and be just the kind of people that will want to buy the products on offer.

p.s. I did a prior post called SEO Secrets Part 1 which was about URL factors and branding, well this post pretty much covers what I was going to talk about in SEO Secrets Part 2 i.e. the importance of good content.

We need to build a themed site around our topic but target each page towards key phrases that we discover by using keyword research tools, but since learning more on this topic myself from the eBook that I advertise in the sidebar to the right, I am using key phrases that are like desperate buyers will be using.

So I am not so bothered about absolute traffic, but rather people on the verge of buying something to solve their immediate need. But the keyword research helps you understand what words you should be weaving into your article copy rather than being unsure and guessing.

Let me know in the comments if you would like me to expand on this topic in some way or you have any questions on the techniques involved …

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 by Andy and is filed under Make Money Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.