Building Your First Affiliate Blog

Build the Blog
September 30, 2009

Creating a Home for Your Affiliate Marketing Campaigns

It’s time to start making your mark on the online world with your affiliate blog. In this chapter, we’ll run through all of the important pieces of creating a blog online.

Thank you, Wordpress

Don’t worry if you consider yourself to be a technophobe. Thanks to the Wordpress blogging platform it’s easy for even the newest person online to make a great looking site that is easy to update.

Start with Your Domain Name

In the last chapter, we referred to using your top ranked keyword as your domain name. You’ll want to use a phrase that has several searches but also not too much competition.

Use keywords or phrases

Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo take the domain name into account when determining results ranking, so it’s a good idea to use a competitive keyword phrase when you are registering a domain.

There are several choices in domain registrars, but I prefer GoDaddy for several reasons. They offer very good prices for domain names and they often have special discount codes so you can get your domain for an even lower price.

Domain name preferences

Start by visiting their site and typing in your top level keyword phrase. The system will spit back out all of the potential domain names. Try your hardest to get a .com name, with .org and .net being the next top choices.

If you can’t get your keyword phrase as is, try using hyphens or underscores in order to register the domain.

For example, if howtomakesolarpanels.com is taken try how-to-make-solar-panels.com. It’s better to have a domain with hyphens and a .com than the exact phrase and an .org.

All you need is the domain

Go through the checkout process and buy the domain. Ignore the offers for hosting and all of the other “one time offers” that they throw your way. All you need is the domain for now. There are better and cheaper solutions for hosting that you’ll appreciate much more.

Get a Hosting Account

The domain name is the address for your website, but the hosting plan is where it lives. It’s the space online where you’ll store the files that will make your website work. For hosting, I suggest you use HostGator (affiliate link – affiliate status disclosure).

You can get unlimited domains hosted for just $9.95 a month, plus you get a $50 Adwords credit in case you want to use pay per click marketing to promote your site.

Sign up for the hosting plan and then have a technician walk you through attaching your new domain at GoDaddy to your hosting plan. Their tech help can walk you through everything via chat or on the phone, so I’m not going to waste space by going over these steps.

You could of course watch this Hostgator support video: Changing Name Servers.

(You’ll find a huge collection of Hostgator instruction videos by clicking here.)