Quick Guide to Building Affiliate Sites and Promoting Via Social Networks
An absolute beginners guide.
I presume that the reader has some knowledge of how to use wordpress or blogger. If you can install wordpress or drupal on your own site all the better.
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Pick a topic, something you know loads about or you just find interesting.
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Content always wins, without interesting, funny, relevant content why would anyone visit your site?
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Use a Blog package (blogger or wordpress) or CMS (Drupal) to organise your content. (Cost effective web hosting for multiple sites can be found here with fantastico control panel so it takes seconds to add blog or cms software)
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If you are using WordPress or other CMS / blogging software RTFM – Read The Flaming Manual. Read how to guides and search support forums for the best configuration options. Especially SEO. Make sure you have any relevant SEO plugins and SEO URL options ticked etc. Get a google sitemap tool if possible
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Pick titles carefully. These should contain keywords relevant to your subject and ultimately what you are promoting.
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Build your content for a few days / weeks then get started with submitting to sites and services.
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Sign up with google webmaster tools, claim your blog or website, submit the sitemap – what no site map? If there is not a sitemap option for your software you can submit the RSS feed as a sitemap.
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Sign up with google analytics its free and it will tell you where your traffic comes from.
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Claim your blog at Technorati. Look at and add their widgets to your site
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Add more content. Keyword and keyphrase loaded content is great for search engine fodder, but I would prefer if it was readable to the site user.
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Look into using other social network software
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Set up a profile with your URL and add content relevant to your site – mentioning your site where you can, linking where you can. Add URLs to videos and images.
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Go to Squidoo and set up a Lens ( this is a page that takes RSS feed from sites and blogs.) Think about the message that you want to achieve and write some unique content for this page. Add the RSS feed from your blog or CMS to squidoo. Look at using the other tools on squidoo to build a lens relevant to your site. (you can add your Flickr photos and Youtube videos here aswell. - If you ebay you can also add your products here)
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Take your blog feed and any other social network feeds you create (Youtube, myspace, flickr etc) and add it to
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Being lazy – you can add your feeds via software. See here for more
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Add submit link tools to your blog / site. Wordpress and Drupal have social bookmark addons.If you have no addons that cover this try http://www.socialbookmarking.marketersgiveaway.com . See below for a list of some of the top social sites. (in no particular order)
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Get your friends to bookmark your site.
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Look for sites covering a similar topic, email for a link request – or submit a unique article with a link back to yoursite.
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Use forums, but with respect. Contribute but don’t spam. Add your URL to your forum signature (if allowed) and only post your URL when it is relevant. Make sure that you don’t blatantly plug your url on every post.
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Add more content – fresh content a couple of times a week is a must.
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Revenue – ah yes you actually want to make money from your site. Getting relevant adverts from affiliate networks is easy, just sign up to each network and carefully select products and merchants that are relevant to your subjects. By all means add banners, but be sparing with these. In context links convert the best.
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Affiliate Networks: List for starters:
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(Back to getting traffic) Check out Yahoo Answers for your subject – answer questions and make sure that you site your own site as the source for the answer, what your site doesn’t cover that exact question, well you should feel another blog post coming on.
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Look for Wikis – sites like wikipedia, add relevant content and links back to your site.
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Did I mention keep the content up to date?
Well that is a little food for thought. The social media sector is for ever expanding and new sites become more important and some of the older sites less important each week. This is just a starting point and I hope that it helps some people out there.
That is a really good guide.
Personally, I’ve never been that good at SEO and I do better at PPC. I think what you describe above is ideal for someone who loves to write and is good at it and can write fast.
It does sound very time consuming though, but on the plus side you could end up with free traffic for a long time, I guess.
Tony
Comment by Tony | January 22, 2008
Brilliant guide, nice one; this has been bookmarked. Isn’t it amazing how easy it sounds?
Comment by Phil | January 22, 2008
Hi Phil
Hard graft is what is needed. Some people can spend time writing amazing content, but it never reaches the light of day.
The above guide does stress that content is key. But adds some of the basic techniques to improve the visibility of a site or blog.
Comment by admin | January 22, 2008
Great how to guide! What do you think about commission junction and Amazon associates? I use both and they are seem to be working pretty well for me.
Are there any affiliate sites comparable to commission junction?
Comment by Erica DeWolf | January 27, 2008
Hi Erica
Mainly UK based - but I suggest you check out
Comment by admin | January 28, 2008
Great peice! very helpful!
Been trying to get into affiliate marketing and building websites for last couple of weeks - yeah I’m a real virgin!
I’ve tried to incorporate all the best practice advise I have read, but I can get sooo bogged down in the detail, I think I’ll never get the sites up and running?
Any encouragement or advise out there?
Comment by Paul | January 29, 2008
Great- thanks for all this info - will get started asap
Comment by Style Eyes | January 29, 2008
And I liked, will be looking at your site.
Comment by Alexander | November 6, 2008