This post is aimed at people who have decided to source or create their own product or service. If you are going to start by promoting other people’s products as an affiliate you might want to skip to the next section where I will be explaining how to go about promoting your affiliate product.
The reason I have done this is that essentially, if you are an affiliate marketer, your website is already set up – it is the website the product owner has created to sell the product from. You don’t need to create this again. All you have to do is send people to this site with an affiliate link (I’ll explain below).
If you have something to sell, you need a place where people will come and purchase it. In the offline world this is usually a retail space of some kind with a front door, product shelves and a cash register. Online the same concept applies. You need a domain name (front door), description of your product(s) and sales copy enticing your customer to buy (product shelves) and a payment processor to accept electronic money transfers and credit cards (cash register).
Depending on your product range, your website might be a simple page of descriptive writing with a link at the bottom connecting to a payment processor such as Paypal, or it might be a highly complex web of interlinking product pages and a complex shopping cart processor. You can also choose between hosting your site on your own domain, or paying for an integrated storefront on someone else’s website. There are many ‘online malls’ that offer this service including eBay and Amazon.
If you want to set up your own website you will need to either outsource the project to a programmer or learn some basic HTML and how to use a WYSIWYG editor. You can also decide whether you want to start a new site completely from scratch or whether to find a template that you can edit to suit your needs. Using a template is by far the easiest way to get started if you aren’t familiar with HTML.
Whichever way you go the first thing you are going to need is a domain name. If you are buying a store from another site, this will be provided to you as part of the package. However, if you are going it alone you’ll need to first register or purchase a domain name and second purchase hosting for that domain.
Having your own domain name is a sign of confidence for your market, that you are serious about your business. This is particularly true if you have a .com domain name.
Take a look at the two examples below:
www.free.domain.com/=?php2345.+product/yourfreedomain
www.yourcooldomain.com
It doesn’t take a genius to see that the second example looks a lot more professional and is going to inspire confidence in the potential buyer.
Besides, when we’re talking about registering a domain we’re not talking about having to have ANY technical knowledge or spend much money. $15 will get you a .com domain for 12 months.
Registering a domain is very easy. There are a lot of different domain name registration services operating that perform almost identical functions. I use http://www.godaddy.com.
As you can see from the screen shot above the first thing that greets you on the home page is a place to start searching for the domain that you want to register. You simply type an idea for a name into the search box here (all one word) and select whether you want a ‘.com’ or other form of extension. I’m going to search for ‘slowcookerrecipes.com’. This search will then determine whether this domain name is currently available or already registered.
As you can see above, the domain ‘slowcookerrecipes.com’ has already been registered. Godaddy then gives you some suggestions of other extensions (ie .ws, .asia etc) and other domains (ie theslowcookerrecipes.com etc). You can either choose one of these suggestions, or search for another domain.
My suggestion regarding choosing a domain name is to make sure your primary keyword is included in the domain. It doesn’t matter in a lot of cases whether you have other words in the domain, though a very long domain name can sometimes be hard to promote. The reason you want the main keyword is to do with search engine optimization – that is, you are going to get more ‘points’ from Google for having the keyword describing your product in the domain and could get more traffic that way.
If you can’t think of a good name to start with (and even if you can) that you register your own name as a domain name. This gives you a good base to begin to establish your credibility with the market and also experiment with the registration process. If you decide not to use this domain name for your online business then you can always add a blog later for your family or host pictures or simply let it expire after 12 months. The most you’ve lost is $15, but really, that’s a small price to pay for the learning experience you’ll get out of it – if nothing else.
Once you have chosen a domain you should now purchase webhosting. There are a lot of good webhosting options available and as you gain experience you will begin to realize which services offer the best products for your circumstances. If you are just starting then a little experimentation can be helpful, but I recommend simply buying hosting from the same service you use to register a domain. The reason being that you don’t have to worry about changing nameservers – which is simple to do, but another step that you just don’t need to worry about at this stage.
With this in mind, when you are going through the domain name registration process you would choose a hosting package as an extra. This also can reduce your costs. For example, if you purchase hosting at Godaddy.com while registering a domain the cost of the domain is reduced considerably. You can always go back and change your hosting options later and only pay by the month in most cases so upgrading later just adds a little more expense. Basically, your options for webhosting usually reflect the number of domains you want to host and the volume of bandwidth you intend to use. It ultimately depends on how many sites you want to run and how many visitors they receive.
The final step in the process of getting your own site up and running is to do a little programming and to upload the file to your hosting account. Don’t worry if you haven’t done this before. It’s easy to learn and there are some excellent programming tutorials available free on the web or templates that you can use to get you started. You could also hire a programmer to create a site for you for a small fee.
If you want to take the plunge and try to create your own site I recommend downloading a simple HTML editor (known as a WYSIWYG – what you see is what you get – editor). This allows you to draw your site and then translates that drawing into HTML code for you. When I started creating websites myself I used a free program called KompZer (which is actually an updated version of NVU – a very popular free HTML editor). You can download it free in several languages here: http://kompozer.net/download.php
KompoZer uses a main screen with toolbars to draw tables, insert text and pictures and create links that can be edited visually. You’ll see this in the example above. You can also toggle between the picture view and HMTL tags/Source view and preview what you site will look like once it’s published (see bottom of the screen above. As you become more advanced you’ll be able to edit some aspects of your website directly in source code to tweak minor aspects of your site’s performance and appearance.
There are some excellent tutorials for KompoZer here: http://www.thesitewizard.com/kompozer/index.shtml
And some great HTML tutorials here:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/
Alternatively you may want to investigate some premium HTML editors. If you do, I recommend you take a quick look at WDVL’s review of some of the more effective editors here:
http://www.wdvl.com/Reviews/HTML/
The easiest way to go about creating your first websites is to edit a template rather than starting from scratch. I often go about this in one of three ways. The first is to download free or premium templates from somewhere like www.templatemonster.com. I’ve found this method can be very easy, if a bit hit and miss. In fact, for one project I did I downloaded over 20 templates before I found one that worked for what I had in mind. It’s a case of trial an error here I’m afraid.
The second and most common way I start a new project is to pay a programmer to make a template for me. This costs a few dollars, but because I’m only asking for a template to be built, rather than a complete site, I can save money. The good thing about this method is that you get exactly what you want from the start and if you run into difficulty editing the site you have someone you can turn to for support.
The final way I’ve gone about creating new sites is by copying someone else’s straight from the source code. Of course, you may not think this is exactly ethical so I’ll leave it up to you how you approach this, but in justifying myself I never keep much of the site I’m copying, just the skeleton in terms of layout. In fact, if you were to put my site up against the site I copied to start out, you would struggle to recognize any similarities.
There is a lot more to building a great looking website than I can teach you here. You are going to have to learn how to edit HTML, use a WYSIWYG editor and find pictures and graphics on your own if you want to be able to do this yourself. This isn’t hard – just time consuming and requiring dedication on your part if you are a complete novice. I’d even recommend a community course on creating websites if your local library or arts centre offers these kinds of things. You can often do them over a couple of months in the evenings or on weekends and they are very helpful because you have someone to take you through the processes by the hand and answer questions you have.
When you have finished your website, you simply upload it to your web hosting account, just like transferring the file to a different directory on your own computer. To do this you’ll need an FTP client (simply a program that transfers a file from your computer to another computer). Depending on what kind of software you’re running on your home computer and where you are hosting your site, this may be built in, but as a simple way to make sure you can do the transfer simply download a free program like FileZilla at http://filezilla-project.org/.
Summary –there are three stages to getting a new website up and running – first, registering a domain name, second purchasing hosting for your domain and finally designing the site and adding your own content then uploading your site to your hosting account. Steps one and two are easy, but the third step can be difficult if you are completely new to website design and programming. Don’t get discouraged here. Take you time and work through a few online tutorials and experiment. You may find you get the hang of it very fast. Alternatively invest a little cash in having someone create your site for you. My first website was VERY simple but it still worked. You don’t need a lot of bells and whistles to be successful. Seriously. If you don’t believe me, just visit www.craigslist.org .
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