1. Buy a domain.
The domain name is good to be a .com one. People love .coms. They remember the .coms and the browsers suggest first the .com and then the other TLDs when you mistype a domain name in their address bars.
The domain name must be short, easy to remember and if you can put your main keyword in that name. The search engines don’t give a damn about the keywords in your domain with little exceptions like trade marks, names of the big companies, own personal names etc.

2. Buy a good hosting.
I mean come on! What do you think you will accomplish with all of these free php/mysql hosting packages all over the net?!
They cut your mail server out first and then limit your databases, sql connections, ftp accounts, monthly traffic etc. etc.
You can even buy a dedicated server. It may be a virtual one too. They sell dedicated hosting for about $20/month now and you can have many different domains on it. The catch is SEs will see the same IP for all of your sites. So buy a different IP for your different sites then. It’s cheaper now too.

3. Create a site.
If you are a web designer or/and have good painting skills as well as working with Photoshop and friends, create a good looking template for your site. But remember: do not make it so colorful or hard to navigate through the pages because your visitors will leave on the second page and you will be lost.
If you are a programmer(too) make the scripts/database of the site to work fast and take the big traffic you will met.

4. Write good interesting articles or reviews.
Write them on your site or as a guest writer for other sites and advertise your name and the name of your site that way. Don’t forget to put a link to your site at the end of your article if it’s on another site. Use others’ blogs and forum for that. Put a signature with a link to your site in your profile or in your article.
If you have a shopping affiliate site, put as many products as you can on it and write original reviews for them. Structure the products in meaningfull categories.

5. Optimize your new site.
You’ll have to learn SEO. You may start here. I often put links to good sources about programming and optimizing a site in my articles. Optimize your links, put keywords in them, use the title attribute, optimize your images as well as the images inside the links and use their alt attribute too. Try to create your pages that way that they will not produce a duplicate content automatically without your knowledge: try to look from the search engines perspective.

6.Build your link campaign.
Start submitting your site’s home page as well some good inner pages in search engines, good directories, social bookmarking sites, other sites with similar theme. Be aware! There are so many black hat created sites that will give you a negative value. They are created by beginners and don’t earn much but ruin the web very well. When you learn SEO you will begin to notice such sites and avoid them.

7. Don’t stop to create new content for your site.
And don’t forget that creating a script that will add another 10 000 pages (products) to your new site is a good thing. Put your original content after you spare a good time thinking about it and do it carefully. Check your text for errors, see if your new page is visible, optimized and is not blocked for the search engines and for the visitors by something.
Continue building your link campaign too.

8. Read everyday about your site’s theme.
Be one of the first to know something. Write about it and submit it to the social sites. You will be amazed how many visitors you will get. Do it everyday. Don’t start complaining that you have a full time job and you are tired - you’re doing it for yourself, you will get money for that.

9. Read SEO articles from many different sites.
Many articles give me good ideas that i put on my sites. Look at your web server logs and trace what visitors do and where. You will get the idea what to improve in your site and what to delete.

10. Be happy with your new big site that you grow gently like a baby. Be a Rich Jerk and Get Rich Quick!

3 Responses to “10 steps to create a successful affiliate site”

1. seoscratches.com, on January 14th, 2008 at 11:10 pm, said:
   

   10 steps to create a successful affiliate site | It’s Good to be SEO…

   GoodToBeSEO gives 10 real steps to create a successful affiliate site….

2. Buy Domain » Blog Archive » 10 steps to create a successfull affiliate site, on January 14th, 2008 at 11:16 pm, said:
   

   [...] Original post by It’s Good to be SEO [...]

3. The Good SEO, on April 3rd, 2008 at 7:01 pm, said:
   

   Hey, Donald, thanks!
   I’m trying to enter the blogosphere and I’m doing it the hard(little stupid ) way by not posting regularly, not checking for typing errors, doing it in a hurry etc. etc. Now I see the site gets new visitors from sometime and I am beginning to care about my articles and I hope I’ll continue to do the right thing from now on.
   In the meanwhile my mind is busy with my new site GamersQuiz.com - making it better as a program code, battling with javascript and css, gz encoding, memcache, advertising it, porting it to many protocols and frameworks(which features are not live yet) and so on.

   Thanks again!

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