affiliate marketing blog  

Building an Affiliate Marketing Powerhouse (if you’ve been reading along) isn’t that difficult.  Oh, it took some work.  On Day One we did the math and figured out how many sites (25), on Day Two we learned how to find niches, local markets, and offers in an efficient manner (still work).  Today we need to do some prepwork for actually beginning the deployment of our niche network of minisites and to make some money with them.

Domain Names, your gonna need at least 25 of them.  You can use whomever you already use or are comfortable with but since you have that big list of locales you researched already..  I’d take that list and see if I couldn’t get all these domains from GoDaddy in their “just expired” discount site.  These are all domains that were active until recently, the domains have a little “age” behind them.  You may even get lucky with some very cool names too.  If your really lucky the site would have had a terrific PR that you’ll inherit as well (usually PR will drop after you deploy but it won’t go to 0 like a complete new site does).

You can buy hosting, get free hosting, etc.  But nothing..  (and I mean nothing) beats having your own domains running on your own server.  It’s easier, cheaper, and your in control.  Don’t believe me?  What’s a dedicated server cost these days?  I have a couple that only cost $30/month.  A couple bigger ones at $59/month, and a couple monster sized ones at $88/month.  They’re cheap!  And when you have the whole server, you can do things to make your life easier that you can’t do with traditional hosting.  Take even a larger dedicated server and divide the cost between 25 sites and your still paying less than if you do traditional hosting.  In short, get a dedicated server, a reasonable one with a standard P4 a couple GBs of RAM and a 80G drive is under $60/month.  Go for it, that’ll work.

Then we’re going to need to manage all these sites.  They may be minisites but you still want to put your best foot forward and you need to have the ability to control it all from the backend efficiently and easily.  Here’s the layout for our example:

Dedicated Server – P4 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM, 80GB Disk loaded with Centos Linux

Virtualmin Open Source Server Management (www.virtualmin.com)

Website Baker CMS (www.websitebaker.org)

Website Baker Plugins/templates/etc.  (bakery shopping cart, advert system, rss feeder, etc.)

That’s the list, that’s all it takes.  Here’s why….

Virtualmin is an easy to install, easy to use control panel.  It will create your domains, set up your webserver, email, ftp, etc. for you.  It only uses the existing configuration files native to the Linux you installed it on.  You can automate backups.  And it just flat works.

Website Baker is an easy CMS to learn and use, it handles the basic drudgery of admin work, lets you use easy to build templates, and has good quality plugins to add features and make your life easier.  It’s also very simple to install and configure.

OpenX Advertising Server – You can either download OpenX and run it on your dedicated server or use their free hosting service.  With 25 minisites your not going to go beyond their minimums so if I were you, I’d use their hosted package..  But if you want to download it and run it that’s fine too.

The single biggest piece of work your going to have is building the graphics, banner adverts, and templates.  And Website Baker has a number of templates you can use (for free) that will let you truly have 25 completely original sites with a minimum of work.  You can install the first copy, download a pile of templates, edit to get your logos for each site in them, then just copy/paste your articles, copy, etc. then edit to customize it for each site.  If you take a little time learning (a day) you can then deploy a site per day and promote each site in that same day.  So within a single month you can deploy the entire network of minisites.  Not too bad.

So, here’s what you do…  Get the dedicated server, upload a small install script for Virtualmin and run it.  Then you have a control panel, use the Virtualmin control panel to install your first domain.  Install Website Baker on your first domain and a template for it (you upload and install templates in Website Baker from a webpage, couldn’t be easier).  then you build the homepage, add the plugins you want, etc. and learn how to do it.

Then every day for the next 25 days your going to deploy a site per day.  Do basic promotion on that site, and that’s it, your done for that day.  Pretty easy stuff.  Boring, drudgework, repetitive, but it’s how you get things done.  This isn’t magic, but it is work.

Now, let’s go over a few “features” that WebsiteBaker plugins can handle for you, and will help your sites stay relevant and unique as well.

Random Image – Lets you rotate an image in your template

Bakery – A shopping cart system (if your selling products directly)

F.A.Q. Baker – Builds FAQ’s for your sites

NewsReader – Lets you display RSS feeds..  Like your Twitter Feed!

So, you can use these plugins and since these are minisites (few pages) you can include a twitter feed in your template, have a FAQ section, display random images, and even have your own shopping cart in each site.  Not too bad.  And with OpenX, you can display banners from your other sites (and some other affiliate offers too) within your network of sites.

The graphics part is the killer as far as work goes.  I sublet my graphics work out and concentrate on content, articles, etc. myself.  If your good at GIMP/Photoshop/etc. then knock yourself out.  If your like me, pay $100 and have someone do your 25 sets of graphics for you.

This is a TON of info for a single blogpost..  click that “Discussion” link in red (below and to the right) and we’ll talk about it in more detail on the AffSpot Affiliate Forums if you have questions.  Trust me, this one post could have been an exercise in extended writing lasting days.  don’t be afraid to ask questions.  We’re here for you.