Now that you have decided on a theme – or niche – for your  affiliate marketing website, and you’ve checked the competition and come up with a list of good keywords to create your content for your site, let’s talk about creating your own website.


If you choose to build your website yourself rather than paying someone to do it for you, and you have little or no experience in website building, I recommend for your first one, you use either Blogger.com or WordPress.org. These are both free blogging platforms, and for the ease of use and relatively short learning curve, you can’t beat either.

Later on after you get some more experience in creating blogs or websites, you may want to purchase your own domain and hosting, but for now Blogger and WordPress are great to learn what all is involved in the process.

A professional looking, search engine optimized, content rich website is important to any online business, so it’s well worth the extra time and effort it takes to do it right.  Caroline Middlebrook has written a book explaining step-by-step exactly how to set up a WordPress website, and you can download the ebook from her website for free.

Provide Solid, Useful Information That Will Attract Visitors To Your Site…

Update your site often with fresh new content – and only link to affiliate products where appropriate.   Keep your site simple and clean, as websites with flashing banners about everything from golf clubs to exotic pets scattered all over them, and the webmaster’s favorite tunes blasting out from your speakers, can be very distracting or even annoying to some of your visitors.

Visitors just seem to linger at your site longer – and be more open to what you have to offer – if you’ve included lots of useful, interesting content that will be of interest to them to keep their attention.  People can usually tell when you have put some careful thought and effort into the organization of your site.

If you don’t have the time to do the research and write your own content for your website, or if you lack confidence in your own writing skills, you might consider outsourcing this task to a professional, or you can use articles from the internet, written by other people.

You can get free articles from article banks such as allwebcontent.com, content4reprint.com, or a host of other free article sites. Just do a Google search on “free website content” and you can find oodles of these sites.

However, if you’d rather have the freedom of re-writing your articles, modifying them to suit your website, and including yourself as the author, you will need to get Private Label Rights content. You can change these articles anyway you like, and insert your own affiliate links into them. All Private Label and PLR Content are good sites for PLR articles, and they’re reasonably priced. There are also tons of other sites where you can purchase article packs or monthly memberships, just try to get a sample of their work before you plunk down your money for them.

In the Affiliate Marketing Guide – Part 3, we’ll talk about ways of monetizing your new website.

Affiliate Marketing Guide – Part 3


For anyone who is new to doing business on the Internet, even the basics of getting started in your own web-based business can be daunting. Obviously there is much more to it than can be included here, but this Affiliate Marketing Guide series can serve as a very basic outline of the process.


In its simplest terms, Affiliate Marketing means selling other people’s products or services online – either from your own website or one provided by the merchant. Bring a merchant and a buyer together and you’re paid a commission for your efforts.

Affiliate marketing is similar to offline commission-based sales – except that all of your business is conducted online, and there are several different kinds of affiliate marketing programs which we will be covering in other articles.

Although affiliate marketing is considered to be the quickest and easiest way to start a business online – one that levels the playing field for everybody – as you’ll learn early on, there is quite a bit of time and effort involved. Once you have built your affiliate marketing business – you must be patient and persistent. It takes time and effort to build trust and make sales.

Niche Affiliate Marketing

Your first priority, if you haven’t done so already – should be to find a market – or “niche” that you have a passion for – or that you’re at least willing to learn a lot about. Almost anywhere you look on the Internet nowadays, you’ll see something about Niche Affiliate Marketing. In fact, some of the biggest names on the net swear by it – and some don’t of course.

A great tool to help you in this area is Ken Evoy’s free affiliate marketing ebook, Affiliate Masters Course. This is an instantly down-loadable ebook that has some very solid advice on carving out a niche that is perfect for you. The ebook is a 10-day course in which you are taken step-by-step through creating a very profitable online business – from beginning to end. And did I mention it’s free?

There are countless ways to find ideas for a profitable niche market. Look around your house, take note of things you see while traveling, brainstorm different ideas and see what you can come up with that you think would be a good idea for a website. Two sites that can give you a lot of ideas are ehow.com and Google Trends, and of course there are many more.

You can do a search on “how to”, using the Google Adwords Tool and get an idea of what people are looking for information on. The list of places to find ideas goes on and on, but these should keep you busy for awhile.

Check The Competition…

Once you have come up with an idea for a niche market you feel comfortable with, it’s a good idea to check the competition for that market to make sure the area you’ve chosen isn’t so competitive that it would be next to impossible to get your site seen in the search engines.

For instance, there are almost as many websites designed to give people the how-to’s of affiliate marketing  for beginners as there are affiliate marketers themselves. So, depending on what topic you choose – the competition can be tough.  Choosing a very competitive niche – or topic – will be much more time and labor-intensive  than one that is less saturated, and when you go up against the gurus who have been honing their websites over long periods of time, it can be a battle to rank for your keywords.

You can use the free tools listed below to check keywords and phrases associated with your chosen topic to get a feel for how many people are actually interested in – and searching for – that information, as well as how many sites already offer that information. You will also then have a list of good keywords to create your content around. The tools can also help you find some less competitive markets and to give you some ideas as to what might be a good area to target:

Google Adwords: Keyword Tool

Wordtracker’s Keyword Suggestion Tool

Keyword Playground

These tools are very simple to use and understand – and you can quickly get a feel for how many people are looking for your key phrases. There are others that are fee-based and that are much more sophisticated than the free ones, but these will get you started.

If there’s fairly low demand for your market – but high supply – you may need to look into another niche – or perhaps narrow down the one you’ve already chosen. For instance – if your chosen niche is Dogs – maybe you could narrow that down to German Shepherds (or whatever breed you choose).

Once you have established the topic you want to build your business around – your niche – then it’s time to start building your keyword/content-rich, theme-based website or blog, which we will be covering in the Affiliate Marketing Guide – Part 2. (Monetizing your site will come a little later).

Affiliate Marketing Guide – Part 2

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