If there is one really popular way to start building a business online, it would be affiliate marketing.
In essence, affiliate marketing is promoting products and services of other people. When people buy from what you are promoting, you get a commission. Simple as that.
One reason why affiliate marketing gets so popular is because it has very low barrier to entry. All you need is affiliate account with some products and services you want to promote, and a website. Heck, some people don’t even have a website and still doing it although it is getting harder each day. Plus, there is not a lot of cost involved in starting an affiliate marketing based online business.
If you are here to read about how to build an affiliate website, we are pretty sure you want to start one too.
We understand that starting an online business for the first time can be very overwhelming. Yes, even for an affiliate marketing business. A lot of things to learn, so many things to implement and plenty of things to do.
We can’t guide you through every aspects of affiliate marketing business, but we definitely can guide you through building an affiliate website.
Now, let’s start working on it. For this website, we are going to use WordPress as the base.
Why are we going to use WordPress?
There are many ways you can build a website. You can code HTML and CSS from the scratch to build a static site. You can buy an HTML theme and just put it up. You can even start to program using PHP or some other web programming languages to create your own dynamic website. But here are two problems: building static website always lead to maintenance and updating problems since regular updates are a PITA, while creating a dynamic website from the scratch is really time consuming and for most people who are technically illiterate, that is just not feasible.
By using WordPress, which is an open source and free blogging system, you can build a dynamic website without knowing how to code. And you can update your website really, really easily too. And did we mention it’s free?
There are also quite a few benefits for using WordPress. Since you are a beginner, we are going to tell you some of the important benefits you are going to enjoy.
WordPress is really good blogging and content management platform. Don’t let the prominent fame of WordPress as a blogging platform fools you. It can do so much more than that. You can use WordPress as content management system too, as it can be used to build any kind of websites, which bring us to next point.
WordPress can power any kind of websites. Literally. Any. Kind. From small website with 5 pages of content to a large eCommerce website, you can use WordPress for it.
You can easily extend capabilities of WordPress. Is a function you want to implement not included in WordPress by default? There will be a plugin for it. Plugins can extend the default capabilities of WordPress to boundaries beyond your imagination.
Plenty of free and paid themes to choose from. You don’t even have to hire a web designer. Since WordPress already has plenty of free and paid themes, you can just pick one and be done with it. Heck, you can even spend your whole life just choosing them.
Ubiquitous support and community. Since WordPress is so popular and widely used, you will never have a difficulty finding people who use, love and can develop stuffs for WordPress. Like anywhere techies hang out on the Web. Do you ever want to develop a custom plugin? You can hand pick from tens of thousands of developers worldwide.
How we will help you
Most of us here at Make A Website have created plenty of affiliate marketing websites, and are quite successful at it. So we know what ticks.
So we are going to help you to build a good affiliate website. Not just any website you can build using WordPress, but rather a good one that will help you in your business endeavor.
So let’s begin!
What You’ll Need
A web hosting account with your own domain
Your web browser of choice (we recommend Firefox or Google Chrome)
A few hours of your time, probably 2 to 8 hours, depending on if your existing level of knowledge
Contents, and plenty of contents (don’t worry, we will tell you how to get them)
Oh and some coffee
You don’t need a lot of things to start an affiliate marketing website.
Getting a domain and hosting
First of all, you will need to get a domain name, which is an address for your website, and a web hosting service which is a place to house your website. Here, we are going to use the world’s renowned shared hosting service HostGator, loved and used by hundreds of thousands of people from over 200 countries in the world. You can visit HostGator here to check them out.
So here is HostGator website. Don’t be overwhelmed by a lot of options. We are going to guide you through the whole thing. Click on View Web Hosting Plans at the header image.
Now you are going to be at this page, where you can choose a shared hosting plan you want. All plans come with unlimited storage and bandwidth so you don’t have to worry about it. Right now, Hatchling Plan will be good enough for you so you can ignore other two plans.
This type of hosting service is called shared hosting. There are a few reasons why we decided to go with shared hosting, and it is also important for you to know what is shared hosting.
Basically, shared hosting is the most basic type of web hosting service. On a single physical server, there will be hundreds or thousands of websites hosted, all sharing same system resources such as memory and processing power. Each website will have a dedicated amount of storage and bandwidth. It is also the most affordable option, and great for starters and veterans alike. You can always upgrade later when you need to.
Go on and try ordering some hosting plan from HostGator.
Ordering shared hosting plan from HostGator
Click on Order Now button and you will be brought to order page. Here, at the top of the page, you can choose to register a new domain or enter your existing domain if you have one.
Since you don’t have one yet, we are going to use HostGator and register one. It will also save a lot of hassles for registering a domain and pointing it to your hosting server.
Here is the process.
Choose “Register a new domain” and fill in the domain you want. Keep in mind that someone else may already have taken the domain you want. If it is the case, you can still pick from different top-level domain extensions: .com, .net, .org, .info or .biz extensions. So even if a .com is taken with the name you want, you can still pick from the others.
In Package Type, pick Hatchling. You can choose others, but Hatchling will be best suited for your small website.
In Billing Cycle, you can pick from 1 month to 36 months. If you pay for 36 months straight, you will get at $3.96 a month ($142.56). If you choose to pay monthly, the cost is $7.16 a month. If you are not sure about paying for 36 months straight, you can start with 1 month and later upgrade your billing cycle.
In Username and Security PIN, key in as required. Make sure that your PIN is not easily guessable.
In Billing Information, just fill in your name, address, contact information and choose preferred payment method, either PayPal or credit card.
Under Hosting Addon, you can pick from three options. Don’t choose Search Engine Visibility as it doesn’t really help anyway. SiteLock is not really necessary either but good to have, but you should really consider adding CodeGuard as it will backup your site daily.
And now you are all set.
After that, you will get an email from HostGator. It will contain information such as your username and password, link to access cPanel, name server information and server IP. Some information like name servers will not be same for you as HostGator has tens of thousands of web servers.
Take note of the link to access cPanel, which is a control panel where you can control every aspects of your hosting account.
Now that you have read the whole process, let’s start ordering by going to HostGator website here.
Done? Okay, let’s get down to business now.
Installing WordPress
Your web hosting account will come with cPanel. If by any chance you are not using HostGator and another company, most likely they will have cPanel too. Some other control panels are Plesk and such, but for this tutorial, we are going to stick with cPanel for the sake of simplicity.
You can install WordPress either manually or through auto-installer in cPanel. We are not going to do it manually since it just takes more work and it is a bit complicated for beginners. So we will use auto-installer.
Now, log-in into your cPanel using username and password provided by your hosting company.
Above screenshot is what you have to find for in your cPanel. Do you see two icons we highlighted? Both can be used to do one-click install of WordPress. Here in this tutorial, we are going to use QuickInstall.
This is QuickInstall interface. See WordPress at the left? Click on it.
Here, you are going to key in where you want to install your WordPress, email address, blog title, username and password. Congrats! Now you have your own WordPress installation done.
Getting the basics done
Finally, WordPress is installed. So let’s start with setting it up.
WordPress Dashboard
You can login to your WordPress admin panel through http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/, and this is what you will see, a Dashboard. We are using the latest WordPress version 3.8 and we believe all web hosting firms using cPanel auto-installer will be installing latest version too. If not, your Dashboard interface maybe slightly different but not vastly, so it is essentially the same.
This is where we are going to do all of our works from now on. Get yourself familiarize with it. It’s really easy.
Installing a theme
Now, we have to install a suitable theme for your affiliate website. WordPress default installation comes with a few themes, and with WordPress 3.8, the theme is called Twenty Fourteen. Previous WordPress versions come with Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Twelve, both of which are pretty good and simple themes and still included in WordPress 3.8. However, none of those themes are suitable for an affiliate site.
You maybe tempted to use Twenty Fourteen, which is a pretty magazine theme. But keep in mind that such themes are not for affiliate website.
So what makes a good affiliate theme?
A good theme for affiliate marketing website should be simple one with a lot of white spaces, and easily customizable. Why? Because in the world of affiliate marketing websites, content is king. You can’t have a theme with a lot of bells and whistles that distract visitors from your contents.
Plus customization is really important. You may not want to customize it so much to look like Forbes website, but you still want a level of customization capabilities so that you won’t have to worry about your theme not being flexible.
There are a number of paid and free options. We are a big fan of Genesis Framework and Thesis Theme. Genesis is a theme framework and it also comes with a lot of child themes based on the framework itself, while Thesis is fully customizable and really amazing theme. We are actually biased towards Thesis Theme though, since we all have really good experience with it. But you will be in good hands with either of them.
However, if you don’t want to part with your money and just prefer a free theme, here are a few free options that will be good enough for an affiliate marketing website.
WPExplorer’s Best Free WordPress Themes
WPMU List of Free Themes
Site5 Free Premium Themes
WooThemes Free Themes
You can also check out ThemeForest for thousands of WordPress themes. Just remember, simplicity and minimal themes work the best.
After you have chosen a theme you want, you can go to
Otherwise, you can go Appearance > Themes at the left menu in WordPress admin panel and here you can install new themes by clicking on Add New Theme.
We are going to assume that you don’t want to use themes in WordPress.org database. So click on Upload at the top, upload your theme zip file, and voila, you are done.
Installing necessary plugins
No affiliate sites will be complete without some necessary plugins. WordPress is great, but there are still some functions that you can only acquire from third party plugins. But always keep in mind that you shouldn’t install more plugins than you need, as it can slow down your website.
WordPress SEO by Yoast. The most important plugin for WordPress which you should install immediately. It is also the best SEO plugin for WordPress too. It won’t automagically make your site SEO friendly but after you tweak the settings, it will.
Digg Digg. Social sharing is very important for the success of your affiliate marketing website. Digg Digg will let you have the floating social sharing buttons that scroll along with your content, enabling your visitors to share your contents easily.
W3 Total Cache. Caching is extremely important to have a fast website, even if it will speed up only slightly. When there is no caching, your PHP server and database server has to generate a new page over and over again whenever a new visitor comes, wasting precious system resources. When there are so many visitors, it can cause slowdowns as well. So unless your site has super dynamic content which is always refreshing (which is not the case for most affiliate websites), you should enable caching. Every bit counts.
Pretty Link. Every affiliate links tend to be ugly, with long links and variables in it. Something like (amazon.com/product.php?1238&var=blahblah&id=1238&integer=yadayada) is not really a good link to put up on your site. Pretty Link will help you avoid that by allowing you to create customized redirection links. So you can redirect www.yourownsite.com/recommends/this-product-on-amazon to above ugly link. Oh and it is free too. Neat isn’t?
404 Redirected. Most websites are not taking advantage of 404 Page Not Found errors. Broken links are bound to happen as a site grows, or visitors may just have entered wrong URL when they visit your site. Regardless, why not take advantage of this by redirecting broken URLs to working pages? 404 Redirected will help you do just that.
Contact Form 7. Every website needs a contact form, and what’s easier than creating using Contact Form 7? It will let you define what fields are required, and then generate a short code which you can place on any post or page. Oh and it is free too.
Akismet. Spams are always been a problem. Fight it with Akismet, one of the best anti-spam system for websites.
Google Analytics for WordPress. Many affiliate marketers say that we shouldn’t use Google Analytics on affiliate sites because it will give away more data to Google about your link building activities. What a load of craps. Google already knows everything they can know. Plus, Google Analytics is one of the most powerful analytic suite that can help you track every aspects of your site. Best part is it is free. So why not take advantage of it?
Better WP Security. While this plugin won’t make your WordPress website super safe from dedicated and skilled hackers, it will definitely strengthen the security of your default WordPress installation.
WordPress Backup to Dropbox. It is important to backup your WordPress website regularly so that you won’t lose your data in case something happens. There are a few solutions, both paid and free. This plugin will let you backup your entire WordPress site including database to your Dropbox account.
Basic setup to get it up and running
After you have configured and activated the plugins you installed, now is the time to setup your site to start running.
Here is a checklist for you to do.
Delete “Hello World” post.
Delete “Sample Page” page.
If your theme lets you have a custom home page (not showing the blog posts), then create a new page according to the guide from your theme, and go to Settings > Reading and set it as your home page. Some themes won’t require you to do this as their index.php coding will already include a custom layout other than just showing blog posts.
Create an “About” page. This is where information about your company or yourself goes.
Create a contact form using Contact Form 7, then create a Contact Us page and insert the short code generated by Contact Form 7.
Go to Settings > Permalinks, and change the Permalink to to Postname (/%postname%/)
Activate WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. We won’t go into details here as it calls for another guide, but if you feel adventurous and want to figure out in details, check out WordPress SEO: The Definitive Guide by Yoast.
Put affiliate links of the products and services you want to promote in Pretty Link.
Now start putting up contents
What about content?
We all know that content is king on the Web. This is especially true for affiliate marketing sites. Your website is not an exception either. You can’t really get any sales without good content.
There are a few ways for you to get good contents.
Write it yourself
Outsource to writers from sites like iWriter, Elance or oDesk
Hire your own dedicated writing staff with monthly salary, preferably from Philippines
Whatever path you choose to do, remember to start small and think about future growth. Don’t spend unnecessarily. At the same time, don’t try to waste your time writing if you are bad at writing. Outsource that and focus on what you are good at.
What’s next?
Congratulations! You are now firmly on the journey of affiliate marketing. This is only first leg of the journey though.
You need to now focus on marketing your website, through social media and SEO so that people will know about your website, visit there and start buying products you are promoting.
Don’t be afraid to test. Read a lot, and test a lot. But when you find something that starts giving results, stick to it. Just don’t find a new method and jump ship. Most important of all: be persistent with what you do.
We will be talking about WordPress SEO in our next article. Stay tuned!
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