Blogs and articles are a great way for you to attract buyers, but if you are serious about affiliate marketing and getting tons of traffic to your merchants, you must build your own website. It does take a little work, but it pays off huge! It costs about 10 dollars a month to have a website, but it is well worth it.
The first thing you want to do is find a reliable, reputable host and domain name seller. A good place to buy a website from is HostGator (which i use). They have good service and good rates. They offer more benefits and tools than any other hosting company. Check them out.
Before you buy a domain (website) name, you want to think about what you want to promote. You want to make sure that the domain name that you pick matches the item you are selling. You can promote pretty much anything. The easiest way is to go through MYR. Making you richer (MYR) offers the best support out of any affiliate program. They have tons of tools and knowledge to help you on your way. They put it all together for you.
Once you have your website and you have your product, you want to create a layout for this page. You can either learn some basics of HTML or you can buy a program that lays it out for you. Dreamweaver and frontpage are useful programs, but if you have some time, you can learn how to do it yourself. HTML is very basic and if you do decide to go through HostGator, they have a little site builder that is very useful.
So, lets go over some basic HTML, which stands for hyper text markup language.
First, you create a new text document under notepad. This should be under “start”, “all programs”, “accessories”. Type or paste in the following code.
<html> <head> <title>Title of page</title> </head> <body> This is my first homepage. <b>This text is bold</b> </body> </html>
Save the file as “Homepage.htm”.
Now, go open the page and see what you have created. You have made your first HTML web page. Yes it is very bare and there is not much to it, but this is just to show you the basics and to give you a general idea of how it works.
You always start a page with the “<html>” tag and always end it with the “</html>” tag. This is telling the page what format you are using and that this is the start of an HTML file. The “<head>” tag is designated for the title of the page and other things that we will go over later.
The “<body>” tag is where the text of your web page will be. This is where everything goes that you want people to see. You can use <b> </b> to make text bold. <i> </i> to make text italic. And <u> </u> to underline text. Everything you put in between these symbols (tags) will come out in that format. If you want to separate a line to start a new paragraph, you use “<p> text goes here</p>”. Here is another example. Copy this and paste it in to a new notepad document like before and save it as something new like “homepage2.htm”.
<html>
<body>
<p>This is a very short paragraph.</p>
<p>This is an even longer paragraph.</p>
<p>This is a really really long paragraph.</p>
<p>Paragraphs are separated by the p tag.</p>
</body>
</html>
Now go open it and you will see that it has separated the lines. If you do not use this command, the text will continue on the same line, even if you hit enter in the notepad.
Make sure you always use lower case text in HTML. Some web browsers will only recognize lower case text. If you do not have it, your page will be jacked up.
So, you have the basics and now you want to add some pictures, links, etc. to make your page look better.
To insert a link copy the text below into one of the pages you made. To insert it into a page you have already made, open the page and click on “view” from the toolbar and click “view source”. You will see the html writing you have done. Insert the text below.
<a href="www.getricher247.com">Make Money Online</a>
Save the file and close it. Now refresh the page browser and you should see the link highlighted. That is a highlighted link. It will say “Make Money Online” and it will direct you to getricher247.com.
Ok, so now you want to insert some files. There are two types of files. Imbedded in the page itself or inserted and “live” from a different location like a folder on your hosting site or from another website like photobucket.com. They will store photos for you and you can link to them for free.
Below is an example of an imbedded image. (you must have a picture file on your computer, under your C drive named image1.gif. Just make one up in paint brush).
<html>
<body>
<p>
<img src=”c:/image1.gif”
width=”144″ height=”50″>
</p>
</body>
</html>
Here is how to insert images from webpages like photobucket.<html>
<body>
<p>
<ahref=”http://photobucket.com”target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f137/russ237af/dumb21.jpg” border=”0″ </a>
</p>
</body>
</html>
Do not worry about all the text in between <p> and </p>. This is text that photobucket will give you when you upload photos to their site. So go ahead and paste that into a new htm file and see what picture i have put there for you. You should get a good laugh from it.
Once you have a photo, you can also add text that pops up when you roll your mouse over it. This is called the “alt” tag. Using the same image as before, i am going to add some alt text . Look below and see if you can find it.
<html>
<body>
<p>
<ahref=”http://photobucket.com”target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f137/russ237af/dumb21.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Dumb and Dumber”></a>
</p>
</body>
</html>
As you can see, i added
alt=”dumb and dumber”>
to the source. When you roll your mouse over the image, you will see text that appears and says “dumb and dumber”. This is not that useful now, but when it comes to search engine optimization, it can be helpful.
Do not over load you page with images. You do not want people to get frustrated with load time and click off of your page.
Here is how to add a background image to your page. (Don’t forget, you must have the files on your C drive or on a hosted site). I have added a few other tags like headers and paragraphs as a quick refresher.
<html>
<body background=”mybackground.jpg”>
<h2>I have a background now</h2>
<p>gif and jpg files can be used as HTML backgrounds</p>
<p>If the image is smaller than the page, the image will repeat itself. You can try to resize it in MSPaint</p>
</body>
</html>
So you have a good amount of skill with HTML now. There are a few other things that you can do to make your page better, but for now, learn what we have covered here.
If you really do not have time to do all of this work, you can buy products that will help you build a web page much quicker like Frontpage or DreamWeaver.
Once you have your webpage designed, you upload it onto your hosting service. It is quick and easy.
After you have studied how to make a general web page, you will want to learn how to optimize the website you created for search engines to find. You want search engines to find your page so it can get more visits. With some simple guidelines you can make this happen. SEO