Beginners Guide to Affiliate Marketing

rosegirl36

Really interested in this and i understand the concept etc, but i dont quite understand the hosting and domain names issue, for instance if i had 10 seperate sites would they have to be hosted seperately eg 10x £4.99 a month, which is £600 A YEAR just for the hosting? or could they all be hosted together eg £4.99 a month for the lot?Would'nt the cost be prohibitive if you host them seperately.Are there distinct advantages either way?

Mayday

grayslick wrote: »

A really informative thread, thanks to everyone!

Ditto - I agree

MikeyMacbeth

rosegirl36 wrote: »

Really interested in this and i understand the concept etc, but i dont quite understand the hosting and domain names issue, for instance if i had 10 seperate sites would they have to be hosted seperately eg 10x £4.99 a month, which is £600 A YEAR just for the hosting? or could they all be hosted together eg £4.99 a month for the lot?Would'nt the cost be prohibitive if you host them seperately.Are there distinct advantages either way?

There are plenty of hosting packages that you can get where you can host a fair few websites. I've currently got a hosting package that costs around £17/month and gives me 50 domains (I think? - don't make a smuch use of it as I should! - time for me to start looking into AM a bit more!:embarasse) and 500+ emails.

You can do the domain registration separately for the fixed domain fee / year/ bi-annually and then "point" the domain at your hosting provider.

So short answer - research a reasonable hosting provider and get the domain registration done seperately (eg 123 reg et al - not a specific recommnedation just the 1st off the top of my head!). - your costs are then the monthly hosting package + each domain you register (remember you'll have to renew them every so often though! - can get addictive spotting potentially lucrative domains if you never use them!...)

Doing it this way has a couple of advantages:-

• avoids having eggs all in one basket if host/domain registration co goes bust
• You, and you only own the domain with no complications (but watch you are not infringing anyones trade mark as previously mentioned)

'part from that - I just want to thank SunnySusie for what seems to me to be some excellent advice (I used to work as a buyer and as a programmer for an electrical online retailer that did use affiliate marketing so can see the value of what Susie's said for anyone looking at going in to this - plus I'm a bit of a tecchie and a am now a full time developer)

Hmmm, definitely time to dust off my AM ambitions - getting enthusiastic about this again now - It's all your fault Susie!

PS look carefully at what your hosting package offers in relation to how technical you are - some will allow you to install databases, run certain types of script etc, depends on your technical ability as to which you choose, but look for stuff like easy wordpress install from the control panel and so forth - If I get time later I'll try and post further on these - I know Joomla was mentioned earlier as well as wordpress... there are varoius easy content management systems that hosting companies support with various capabilities and it can be difficult to decide what's right for you... best to start simple I guess(!?)

Anyway best of luck!

danielle1977

Ok, I have my basic blog set up with blogger-have done anything to promote yet, but I wanted to check the ads on it, if clicked on I will get paid? ANy thoughts on how I can do this, is it as simple as nipping to my dads, getting on his computer and clicking, coming home and checking?


Added a few mins later-Ok the reason I wasn't seeing clicks was cause I'd inserted the code but not added to my adsense or something like that

LA2019

stevew8975 wrote: »

I little bit of basic SEO knowledge, a couple of "grey" hat methods of indexing, and I earnt my first commission within 12 hours of the site going live. For around 3 weeks I was taking over 3000 hits per day from natural searches, I had top placement on google on countless related search phrases, and i was converting visitors into sales at a spectacular rate.

However, O2 and Carphone Warehouse were awarded the UK distribution contract, and them and their affiliates had a much larger SEO budget than I did, and within another 3 weeks, I was down to single figure daily traffic - but by then I had made the money.

How did you get past their sandboxing? Or, if you managed to get good ad placing in google for your site?

rosegirl36 wrote: »

Really interested in this and i understand the concept etc, but i dont quite understand the hosting and domain names issue, for instance if i had 10 seperate sites would they have to be hosted seperately eg 10x £4.99 a month, which is £600 A YEAR just for the hosting? or could they all be hosted together eg £4.99 a month for the lot?Would'nt the cost be prohibitive if you host them seperately.Are there distinct advantages either way?

I saw mentioned earlier that advertising to companies is frowned upon here (luckily I read it here ) so will point you towards webhostingtalk.com it's a free forum that discusses nothing but hosts, how they work and will allow you to ask any questions you have by people who know the industry best, hosts or those wanting to be hosts and those running or wanting to run websites (as a majority anyway).

Mostly, now, even the most basic hosting come with a control panel (a control panel that allows you to control your hosting in interesting ways) called cpanel that allow you to add add-on domains, you have one primary site, and the add-on domain section in your cpanel allows you to tack on other domains as sub-folders in your main site, so that site1.com is the main site and site2.com is your second site created as an add-on domain which appears as a subfolder in your /public_html/site2.com/ folder (the folder that is visible to all internet users) Also many hosts grant a discount if you buy hosting say for 6 months or one year in advance, saving you more money. And, some of the better hosts will even upgrade your pre-paid hosting for free should they upgrade all their standard plans

And although if you want to get tricky with SEO it can be best if you are targeting UK market to use UK hosting with a UK domain and without hiding your whois data via nominet, it's best just to go with a reliable and trustworthy USA hosting company as these tend to be bigger and cheaper.

For basic hosting in the USA (Sorry if I inadvertently upset any UK hosts here), you can get such accounts for a few dollars a month, so you pay less with the exchange rate

LA2019

danielle1977 wrote: »

Ok, I have my basic blog set up with blogger-have done anything to promote yet, but I wanted to check the ads on it, if clicked on I will get paid? ANy thoughts on how I can do this, is it as simple as nipping to my dads, getting on his computer and clicking, coming home and checking?


Added a few mins later-Ok the reason I wasn't seeing clicks was cause I'd inserted the code but not added to my adsense or something like that

Whatever you do DON'T click your own ads, especially google. They have specialised techno magically enhanced software that tracks "Click Fraud" as it is known in the industry. If click fraud was so easy, people would be setting up their own sites and just spending all day clicking their own ads and, do you think the people paying for those ads would continue paying for clicks like that? Would you? Sorry if I sound a little harsh, am not really, just want to post this really quickly so that hopefully you haven't clicked your ads 30 times and get banned by google.

LA2019

I've noticed that there was an amzon.com thread here, the other day I was reading posts about how to swign up for amazon.com and amazon.co.uk Well, although I cannot find that thread I thought I would add here that you can join Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (and more than likely Amazon.ca too aswell as the foreign language sites if you speak those languages fluently). Go to each countries amazon associates page and use the same email and password for each of the extra associates pages you are signing up for, when you are signed into both and you have the Site Stripe turned on, you can navigate easily using asscoiates between Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk from the main entry page of your associates account (the one you log into when you login) and in the site stripe top right

theinsider

SunnySusie wrote: »

Many affiliates swear by PPC

I'd be one of those! I use PPC to drive traffic to all my niche sites and find it provides superb % returns.

e.g. for a new site I launched towards the end of last month, I spent £2.29 between 19-31 October on AdWords resulting in 12 sales in the same period earning me about £90 in affiliate sales. I make that almost a 4000% return.

A word of warning though, PPC is also the easiest way to simply burn money...you will make mistakes with it and it will cost you money to learn how to use it properly, so it's not for everyone.

Adam09_2

competitionscafe wrote: »

You could go for a basic hosting package with somewhere like lunarpages or justhost for example, which works out at about £2 per month (£24 per year when paid 1 or 2 years in advance) - but if you go via a cashback site like topcashback you get around £60 cashback which means effectively you get 2 years or more of free hosting!

I agree that buyng the domains (I use 123reg) and hosting them yourself is a good choice as if the site proves popular you control the domain name and can also change hosts.

Boy oh boy.

I started to open an account for a friend tonight with JustHost, and stopped after filling out my personal details - name, email, postal, tel. number... I decided against it when I saw the real hosting plan prices (they say £2.95/month...but really it's 48 months up front - seriously).

So, form filled out but didn't press Submit or Continue.

Tried to close the window, and two pop-ups appear with a Yes/No dialog box ("STAY PLEASE WE'LL GIVE YOU 50% OFF" type message).

Oh dear, here we go. Now you know they're not someone you want to host with.

So, I had to close it. I hit cancel then quit the browser the hard way.

Five minutes later, I get this:

> Hi [censored],
>
> I can see from our records that you attempted to place an order with Just Host today, but for some reason you ran into difficulties and the order was not completed.
>
> To apologise for any problems you may have experienced, here's a special link to receive 50% off the usual cost of our unlimited Just Plan!
>
> So to receive Half-Price hosting please go to: (url removed)
>
> Note: This link is only valid for 24 hours, and can only be used once.
>
> Feel free to contact me at any time if you are still experiencing any problems.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Sophy Gasson
> Product Manager
> www-JustHost-com
>
> email: sophy@justhost.com
> phone: 480-304-5442

First question: "How the hell did they get my email address?", then "...and my name...?"

These creeps are snooping on their own application forms. Which means they have my name, email, postal address, telephone number... and thank god I didn't enter my credit card details.

This is irresponsible (for network privacy reasons), unethical and downright reprehensible: JustHost are snooping on their customers, before they're even customers. DO NOT TRUST THESE PEOPLE.

My encounter with JustHost has left me absolutely furious and more than a little worried.

If you want to know more about this company, just try googling "justhost scam".

rosegirl36

I am a newbie to AF and started to build a self hosted blog with wordpress using Justhost as the host with their promise of unlimited domains bandwith etc, this was just 2 weeks ago.I have been building it up nicely and managed to get indexed by google and fairly well ranked.
However completely out of the blue my account was suspended, i have only done 4 posts and hardly had a visitor as it was very early stages.
Just host said i had exceeded my 10% cpu allowance whatever that is.So much for unlimited domains if i have exceeded my allowance after only 4 short posts.Anyway i have demanded a refund on my hosting and domain which they have agreed to .It seems to me that because i did not sign up to all the expensive extras as outlined in the previous post that they couldnt wait to get rid of me.So i am back to square one, can anyone recommend a good reliable hosting company that i could put a few domains on without the threat of being suspended with no warning?