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Beginners guide: How to build an Affiliate website from scratch using WordPress

I get quite a lot of emails from people looking to build their first affiliate site and asking just how they go about doing it. So I thought I’d write a quick and easy practical guide for beginners to point them to.

First of all, let me explain why I always recommend WordPress and not Blogger. Its easy really, WordPress is much easier to customise and has much, much more support and plugins available, all for free. Although I started this very blog using Blogger 3 years or so ago, I can say hand on heart that in my experience WordPress is the better of the 2 options and that’s why I use it now. Its what I use for this blog and on my discount code site, it works very well.

OK so here’s a step by step guide on how to build an Affiliate website from scratch using WordPress.

1. Think of something to write about:

Ideally, pick a topic/niche that you know a lot about and have a real genuine interest. That way, you’ll be able to produce rafts of unique content and hopefully enjoy yourself doing it! Take it from someone who has been there and done it, its so very much harder to write about something that doesn’t interest you.

2. Buy a unique domain name:

As I tend to only target the UK, I always buy a .uk domain name. Now, there are only 2 official UK domain extensions, .co.uk and .org.uk. Of the 2 .co.uk is by far the most popular but .org.uk will do too. As far as I can see Google and the other major search engines treat .co.uk and .org.uk’s equally and don’t give preferential rankings to either. And the benefit of owning a domain ending in .uk is that it is straight away identifiable as coming from the UK and will therefore be recognised as such in the search engines and ranked accordingly.

Personally I use 1&1 for my domains and hosting as they have been around for 20 years, are totally reliable and you can buy a .uk domain from only £1.99 a year and they even have regular offers where domains are free! Also, they have the most simple easy-to-use control panel that I’ve ever seen.

When picking a domain name for a potential site, I always try to find a URL that has 1 or 2 keywords relevant to my sector in the title. So, lets say that we are going to build a site about credit cards, head over to the Google AdWords keyword tool and also the DigitalPoint keyword suggestion tool and type in “credit card” into the search boxes. Soon you will see loads of popular search terms associated with that phrase, such as “best credit card”, “credit card deals”, “uk credit card”, “credit card offer” and so on. I then head back over to 1&1 and see which of those popular search terms ate available as domain names.

Quick note: I always try to buy the domain name with no hyphens in, i.e. bestcreditcard.co.uk, however if there are none available I will go for best-credit-card.co.uk. I always use a hypen “-” and not an underscore “_”. In my experience hyphens work better with the search engines. BTW at the time of writing, bestcreditcard.org.uk is available to register.

3. Install WordPress:

OK so you have your domain name and some hosting from 1&1 now to get WordPress installed. Go to WordPress.org not WordPress.com and simplay download the programme for free. There is extensive documentation here and a support forum here that tells you all you need to know to install it on your 1&1 domain name.

4. Customising your site:

One of the main reasons I use WordPress is because of the thousands of free themes available on the web that will give your site a unique look and feel. A good starting point is these, and a quick Google search reveals many more. To be honest though, at this early stage on your first site I wouldn’t worry too much about the theme. The main focus should be on getting your site up and running, so pick a them and then move onto the next step.

5. Install Akismet:

WordPress is great, off the shelf. But it can be made so much better by using the free WordPress Plugins that are widely available on the web.

I know we haven’t even built a site yet but there is one essential plugin that you need before you do anything:

Akismet - In many ways WordPress is a victim of its own success, as spammers will target your site using the “comments” function built into the system. However to combat this you should install Akismet, it does a great job of weeding out 99% of spam comments to your blog. So far it’s eliminated over 40,000 items of spam on this blog.

Just follow the comprehensive installation instructions and within 2 or 3 minutes you will have Akismet up and running on your new WordPress site. This will save you countless hours of wasted time deleting spam, when your site is successful and receiving loads of traffic

6. Writing content:

OK so your site is up and running its really important to add regular unique fresh content. The more you write, the more the search engines will come and index your site and the better you will do in the search engines. Some of my regularly updated sites can get indexed within 15 minutes by Google, as way of an example. Set yourself a manageable and achievable target, at the very least write once a day, but if you can write 5 pieces of content a day even better!

Its also important to write with the search engines in mind. Take this blog post about Butlins as an example, I used the title “Butlins February 2008 half term offers and free holiday brochure“. Now that may sound like a lengthy title but hopefully it will mean that it ranks well for the following search terms:

Butlins
Half term holiday
Butlins offers
February 2008 half term
Free holiday brochure
Butlins brochure

And so on.

So although longer titles for your blog post don’t always roll off the tongue, always rememeber to try and include as many search terms as you can in them. Google will appreciate it!

So by following the steps above you will have the groundwork of your very own first affiliate website. I always tell people that the hardest thing to do is to gather traffic to your site, its the most difficult process involved in making money online. BUT once you achieve this, its easy to make money. Yes easy. So with that in mind we’ll end part one of this tutorial here and in part 2 we’ll focus on getting traffic to your site once its up and running. But for now, go and build your site, and get some good content up there.

To illustrate that anybody can build a website using WordPress with no technical ability my cousin has set up a beauty and fashion blog called BeautyGlam. She has followed exactly the steps outlined above with the only exception being that I got her a custom theme designed - but only as I have access to a designer, as I said above this isn’t a necessity. At the time of writing this, the site has some good articles up, and soon she will be adding more affiliate links to start monetising it.

Look out for a follow up soon where I’ll talk about how to generate that all important traffic to your very first affiliate website.

What I’m listening to right now: Cameo - “Love You Anyway”

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Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Making Money. 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.