Moving Forward – Developing Your Affiliate Website
Last time I suggested that Wordpress or XsitePro or a combination of both would probably be the best way to approach marketing an affiliate business. If using the ebay affiliate program, Bans or PhpBay pro.
I won’t go into how these programs actually work because the information that is supplied on the companies own website is very comprehensive, and in the case of XsitePro there are some great videos as well.
Suffice to say that in the case of XsitePro a lot of the donkey work is done for you and /or leads you to complete certain tasks, then you can run an analysis to see how your site stacks up. This is a major time saver, particularly if you are new to all this. There is a large selection of professional templates available to choose from, or once you are proficient you can design your own.
I also use an FTP progam, this is required to upload/transmit your newly built website to your hosting company. I have a preference for Cute FTP but there are plenty to choose from. In the case of XsitePro it has one built in. I use both because I build a range of different websites with different software. The choice is yours.
To get your website to start to rank well you need content. This can be your own or it could be supplied by a third party, but it should contain your keyword phrases that you wish to rank for.
In an earlier post I mentioned the use of your keywords in the meta tags. Title, description and keywords. This is not seen by the visitor to your site but is picked up by the search engines.
In addition we now need to add our title in the content of our site. This is contained in html tags for example <h1>Elottery</h1>. XsitePro makes this easy for you to do. The content should be of a reasonable length and should have your keyword phrases throughout, although take care not to overdo it. More information on html
If you are not sure what keywords or keyword phrases to use you can goto Seobook. This will give you an indication of the amount of searches being carried out. Wordtracker offer a free trial and Google Insights also will give trends. Use any of these with caution always using your own judgement as the final word.
You will need to build additional pages, each one using a unique keyword phrase and optimised accordingly. The affiliate program or programs should be linked from your newly built site. Take time to do this you’re not in a race. Putting that bit of extra effort will pay rewards in the long run and if you have a professional looking site visitors will be more likely to stay longer and either join you in your affiliate program or purchase through your site.
We should now be at the stage where we have our website ready to upload using an FTP program, or in the case of XsitePro, the built in one. Once it has been uploaded we need to check that everything looks ok and all links to internal and external pages are working as they should.
Depending on the approach I wish to take will determine the software I wish to use. In the case of our site Gaming Junky I used a combination of XsitePro for the front end and Wordpress for updating content for elottery. You can use Wordpress on it’s own if you don’t want to splash the cash, there are numerous plugins for all sorts of different scenarious, either way it will work ok if you go about it the right way. You will see people all over the Internet complaining that it takes weeks or months to get indexed in the search engines but I regularly have pages indexed in a few days and if you are using Wordpress sometimes within minutes.
Affiliate marketing and website promotion evolves daily that is why I continue to try and test new software to find what works best for me. For eBay Bans is a superb product that builds pages quickly and is easy to get to grips with even for someone who has had no prior experience. Here is an example of a site on Archery and Compound Bows using a combination of Bans and Wordpress. Here is the front end to Gaming Junky using XsitePro with an existing template and minor modification. As you can see the blog has used a different template entirely.
A quick word here, only use Wordpress if you believe you can add information on a regular basis otherwise you are defeating the object of using this software.
If you want a full content management system that will grow as your business grows then the Memberspeed CMS could be the one for you, not cheap but arguably the best on the market. Here is an example of a website I built a couple of years ago using this software.
We now have:
- Our Niche Market
- Domain Name
- Hosting
- Web development Software
We have built, uploaded and tested our site. We now need to submit our site to the search engines.
More in the next post……………