Building an Affiliate Marketing Powerhouse with a network of microsites has proven to be pretty simple. But it’s a “breather” day… All that math on Tuesday, research on Wednesday, and setting up servers, registering domains, loading software on Thursday… That’s alot of work. Some fun, some not… But it was all work.
It’s time to build out a single site and get the procedure down. If we’re going to start building and doing the initial site promotion on a daily basis til we have our 25 sites built out and deployed we need to get it right. So today I took a dedicated server, created the first domain, installed Website Baker, dropped in a couple plugins and started fleshing out how the first site will look and work.
The beauty of using a CMS like Website Baker is that we can reuse content on other sites. “WB” builds the menus however the template says to.. So if it’s a horizontal menu, vertical, AJAXed, etc. the CMS will deal with it. And content is easy, menus are a pain.
So here’s what I did. I got everything ready for the first site. I took a datafeed from one of many discount eyeglass programs (This one is the www.39dollarglasses.com program managed by AffSpotter Heather Paulson ) and generated the basic page for our sample. It took 18 minutes. The result of that 18 minutes looks like this:
Pretty cool huh? Oh, it needs work. What would you do? Add some stock photos? Get some graphics in the header, etc? You bet… All things that need to happen. But we’re doing 25 of these so I wanted to get a handle on it and “get in the groove” so to speak. And we needed to get the content text right!
Do you see (in the image) where I got Dallas, Ft Worth, and Metroplex all in there? That’s right, we’re going local! So I didn’t go crazy, but I did localize it quite a bit. Add some graphics, get some “transport links” together with my affiliate codes, etc. and this site is nearly ready to go!
So, there’s a little bit more to do on “breather” day. I want to map out how I’m going to target Dallas Ft Worth, and get local with it. I may need to build an email address per site (just to help keep it all straight), plan the promotional text for Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. local focus areas, build banners for our own internal OpenX advertisement system, and more. But things are shaping up.
Still some work to do… But we’re getting somewhere. Next time… Promoting the Minisite!
Start discussion.....