Navigation

Articles
Ebooks
Report Your Scams
Dictionary

My Affiliate Place Blog

Sitemap
Contact
Privacy Policy

 Subscribe in a reader

Website Overview - Getting Started



Where Do I Begin

If you are serious about an affiliate business or a business online, you should develop a website.  In the early beginnings of affiliate marketing you could easily advertise your information about a product or service without a website, now it's a slim possibility. With that being said, where do your begin?

The type of website you build will be dependent upon your idea/passion. If you're going to have a lot of content around a specific niche-you have a niche content site. Or maybe,  you're looking at becoming an e-commerce store owner-than you'll have an e-commerce site.  And for the ambitious, you want an authority site that it constantly relevant and is loved by the search engines. Below is a quick rundown of the types of websites and what you may need to think about, when building the site.


Types of Websites


NICHE CONTENT SITE

A niche content site is based around a theme that was inspired by one's knowledge and passion. 

However, some have researched a topic, identified whether is has a wide base of topics and learned about the topic as they were creating their website. This is a more time consuming approach to getting online, but if you like to research than you should consider it.

What is important to the niche website--relevant content. Once you have the content you can add revenue producing advertising; Such as: affiliate programs, Adsense, or other third party advertising services.



AUTHORITY SITE

What is an authority site? An authority site consists of these main characteristics.

An authority site takes a long time to build. But...if that is the direction you want to go with your website, then the planning should start when you are beginning to layout your website design. If you do it well, you'll have the search engines, traffic and advertisers coming to you.


E-COMMERCE

An E-commerce website can give you a presence online, as well as, a ready market, without a brick and mortar building for people to look at your products. However, an e-commerce site does require some standard elements.

1. Storefront should have logos and graphics
2. Links to product details
3. Shopping cart
4. Payment Gateway
5. Quality Customer Service
6. 800-number, contact number, or email contact

I've just skimmed over the basics of what you need to be thinking about when constructing your e-commerce website. Though it may seem simple, don't be fooled-it's not.

Once you have the type of website you want to build, it's time to get a website-which means getting a hosting service.


Web Hosting- What should your minimum requirement be?

You will find that web hosting is every competitive, thus, they come in many price ranges to meet everyone's needs. But there are some minimum requirements that you should consider.

1. Does it offer customer service 24/7?
2. Enough bandwidth for increased traffic 
3. Email Accounts -- At least 3, more is definitely better, especially if you want to use autoresponders (More and more are going with unlimited).
4. Does it supply you with traffic stats?
5. Does the hosting packages provide room for your site to grow?
6. Is the price reasonable?
7. Does the company have a good record of server uptime?
8. Does it offer a variety of website templates (for those will no HTML experience).
9. Are the support people fast and helpful and is the support reachable.
10. For those  not experienced with HTML do they offer a WYSIWYG program to get you up and running quickly
11. For those that have programming experience, is there asp, php capabilities.
12. Cron jobs- As your business grows, cron capabilities will come in handy. Cron capabilities allows you to schedule procedures automatically on your website