Getting Your Site Up, Running, and Making Money


Getting affiliate links is the easy part. Having a place to host
them is a little more involved. Having a place to host
them where people will convert to buyers—that's even more work.


You need to create a place where people can find you, where they'll
want to come for information or assistance, and where they'll leave
only to go complete the sale (even though they may not realize
they are 'leaving').

Nevertheless, it can be done. But before you
do anything, you need to structure a game plan. You need to write
the plan that gives you all the potential for selling that you need.


I'm not going to go into detail about how and where to get an actual
website—that's information you can find out easily enough and
quite possibly already have.


GoDaddy and HostGator, but also know that there are numerous
hosts and website building templates ranging from the freebie that
came with your ISP to being your own host.

The only point you need to know is that anyone can build a workable, attractive website; and even if it's not the best looking on the block, if it's
built so that traffic can come, they will.

What you need to focus on more is the structure of your website
and/or websites. First off, let's talk about the individual sites
themselves.

If you will be promoting more than one product—and to make
money the way the Big Shots do you will need to—each related
group of products should have their own dedicated site; out of that
group, you will focus on your one most promising product most of
the time.


This site doesn't need to be huge, it can be just a few
pages in total—say between ten and twenty, depending on the
number of products you'll be selling; but it does need to
incorporate all the elements that will gain you attention from the
search engines, and thereby from visitors and buyers (targeted
buyers with a need!).

Eventually you will want to build a master website that directs to
each of your smaller, product-focused websites. This will be the
website you use to "clean-up" the rest of the traffic generated by
the keywords you haven't targeted—those generalities that aren't
necessarily on the verge of buying anything. But that can come
later. First, build the sites that will sell and start making money
sooner.

So initially, your plan will look something like this:

• Target markets and keywords
• Choose specific affiliate products
• Build a website around a specific group of products
• Build more product-grouped websites for each affiliation
• Create a master website that captures traffic, then links
traffic to smaller product-specific websites

Let's try to put this into perspective and give you a real-world
example.

Okay; let's suppose that you are selling fitness-related products—a
variety of sorts from body-building supplements to fifteen minute
workout routines. The buyers who are looking for muscle-building
supplements and powders could probably care less about your
crunch-time workout videos. And you don't look like much of a
reliable authority by just slapping up one ad next to the other.

So you break down each of those product types into groups, and
market five or six or so together on one website dedicated to each.
So instead of having a catch-all website with fitness products, you
have two dedicated websites that specifically serve the needs of the
visitors ready to buy. You have

• A 10-20 page website selling body-building supplements, and
• A 10-20 page website selling workout videos for the too-
busy-to-exercise crowd

Each site gives your buyers what they need—not what the other
needs. After those sites are established and doing their thing, you
can go back to that model of the fitness-products store, and create
sections and virtual "aisles" that point to these smaller dedicated
sites.

Now here we need to clarify a bit. This structure is one of the
number-one things that Big Shot affiliates do, and small players do
not.

What you will see many times is that small players collect a number
of products, usually related, sometimes not even, and group them
all on one website. They market their affiliate site as a sort of one-
stop-shopping storefront for everything. And they create so much
confusion and competition amongst their own affiliate products that
they never maximize the potential of the sales traffic that is coming
in.

What the Big Shots do in contrast is start by focusing on the small
sites. They build up products in a way that clearly sells each one.
They create choice for buyers by comparing their own like-products
against each other, so that whatever product is chosen, the sale is
theirs. Genius, yes?


Then they get the traffic going to and buying at those sites. Later
on they'll build something more akin to the storefront, and link to
these smaller sites when visitors click to learn more, just to clean
up the rest of the lookers.

In the end, eventually anyway, both the Big Shots and small-timers
both end up with catch-all parent sites, but the Big Shots have that
added layer of sales protection that gives the customers what they
need to make the sale, and also brings traffic in at both ends.


Now build it and they'll come


What you most need to know, then, is how to build that small-niche
site.

To reiterate, the purpose of this site is to develop a very consumer-
specific website that provides information and resources for the
person who is looking to buy a product of this type. That's from
the buyer's perspective. But you have search engines to please,
too, so that content will need to do double-duty and also help you
be found and ranked well for your target keywords and target
audience.

There are two basic components to these small sites. Those are

1. Articles and buyer-centric information
2. Products

The pages of your website will be split amongst these two
components. It probably should not be a straight 50/50 split. The
division should be weighted more in favor of information than
products. This will serve two purposes:

1. Information gives the buyer all the supporting information
and details they need to decide to buy.
2. Information provides more feed for search engines so that
buyers can find you.

However you decide to structure the actual website, it should have
a simple division—information and products.

The product pages are simple. Create a page for each individual
product that gives the specifics on the product (often the
information provided by the affiliate).

You need to give enough detail without overdoing it. Set up the product pages so that when the visitor performs the desired action— clicks a 'buy' button, or opts for a free sample or service—they are taken to the affiliate
website, where they [hopefully] will order and purchase your product.


The informational pages require a little bit more work, but not too
much. Each of these pages should host one piece of supporting
information which helps your visitor decide to buy. It should be an
article, product review, or product comparison.

Doing this will really draw the very specific and
targeted ready to buy consumers that you want. This is the
information that they are looking for just prior to purchase, and so
it is the information that is most likely to net serious buyers, and
not just curious visitors.

Back to our example, if we have five muscle-building supplements,
we'll have five pages of products and perhaps ten pages with
articles and comparisons.

Use the articles to address the concerns
of people in the market for supplements, and include topics
important to them. They might be side-by side comparisons,
reviews of specific powders, or topics such as "Five Tips for Building
More Muscle."

Now you've given your already needy buyers the two things they
need to decide to buy your products—additional information, and
the place to make the purchase.

I hope that this blog post has made the process of building a money making affiliate site a little less confusing.

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