“I need something New!” is something I’m asked about alot.  A new approach, new offers, new networks, new whatever.  Most of the time a new website layout, new advertising, etc.  And that’s good.  Writing new fresh articles, better product descriptions, rearranging those adverts and affiliate links.  Constantly testing and tuning to get better results.

But sometimes, tradition is what’s needed.  For as long as I can remember as a youth the Opening Day at Busch Stadium in St Louis always included a parade around the ballpark of the Budweiser Clydesdales.  When natural grass was introduced in the 90’s that tradition ended for a bit.  But not for too long.  In 2006 the “new” Busch Stadium was ready to go and the last game at the old Busch Stadium saw the return of the Budweiser Clydesdales.  They opened the new Busch Stadium, gave a lap at the World Series (and the celebration following the Cardinals winning that series) too.

Just as certain traditions in your own efforts need to be observed as well.  Obviously, holiday promotions, your new product/offer areas, etc.  It’s tradition…  Your site visitors/customers expect you to have Mothers Day promotions, new products, etc.  Sometimes I see affiliate marketers skipping certain holidays because last year wasn’t great.  To their great peril I think.  You see, when your site visitors expect something, even if they don’t buy, they do expect to see it again in the next cycle.  Just because your Mothers Day promotions might not have been terrific last year doesn’t mean thatt they won’t this year.  But if you skipped last year, a whole bunch of your customers and site visitors may have just written you off.

And I’ve noticed other traditions of late as well that could be important for your efforts.  Namely, traditions of your own making.  Some websites pull an April Fools stunt every year…  draw great traffic…  build their lists and give an excuse for their customers to return for that tradition.  Same with other things as well…  One of my sites has a tradition of marking the first day of Spring / Summer / Fall / and Winter with special content.  And my sites visitors expect it.

Don’t deliver on your customers expectations and what do you think will happen?  You will have dissapointed your customers possibly losing them forever.  So as your tweaking and tuning the new don’t forget to honor the traditions of your site as well.

Oh, and speaking of delivering on tradition…  First day of Baseball season is today.  And you guessed it..  I have to mark the occasion properly.

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.

(This is the first in a series of blogposts describing one of many methods of establishing a business in Affiliate Marketing.  Consider this an instructional foray into an example that hopes to deliver value no matter what approach you may take with your own Affiliate Marketing business.)

So you think you can be successful in Affiliate Marketing?  You think you can make a living at it?  Some side cash?  A little extra cushion each month?  Well, yes you can…  IF

The big IF is if you can organize yourself, work hard, work smart, not confuse twittering with work, etc.  Lots of people (a whole lot of people) make a good living at Affiliate Marketing.  And there’s no reason you can’t IF you can take care of the big IF.  This is the first of a series that hopes to give you some actionable information and tools so that you can get rid of IF and take Action.

The first thing you need to do is understand the economics of affiliate marketing and the dynamics of the Web.  A website that makes $100,000/yr is rare.  Very, very, on the endangered species list rare.  If you think your going to just jump in and make 100 large well, I have an e-book I’d like to sell you…  Because if you think that then you need some serious education in Affiliate Marketing.

How about we get realistic?  What if we set an attainable goal..  $30,000/yr.  Lets see if theres a way to make (after expenses) $30,000/yr with a little work and alot of smarts.  And lets not put all your eggs in a single basket either.  There are alot of niches out there.  Let’s spread the risk in ways that will let you research niches by trying them out.  Successful ones you scale up, unsuccessful ones you replace with successful ones.  Let’s do it all with minisites that are focused at local markets!

Now, how many minisites will this take?  That depends on how much your minisites can be expected to make.  So lets do a little math.  $30,000/yr / 12 = 2500/month.  And lets just say we can build a minisite that will make $100/month after expenses.  Then you’ll need 25 minisites (everything is averaged here, one sites gonna tank, another will do more, less, etc).  in order to reach your goals at this rate.

25 minisites X $100/month = $2500/month

Cost to host + domain registration = $500/month = Gross Revenue Required $3,000/month

Now, do you think you can build a minisite that will earn $3.00 per day?  If you find a niche that you can go local with and it proves to bring in a minimum of $3.00/day do you think you can replicate that minisite for another local target (city)?  25 times?  Well, yes you can.  With planning, organization, and good recordkeeping a single individual can easy keep track of about 100 minisites.  (btw.  100 minisites x $3.00/day = $300/day x 365 days = $109,000.00/yr).

Here’s how we’re going to do this.  We’re going to hit a functional area every day til you’ve got a resource you can use.  We’re going to cover discovering niches, finding offers, necessary tools, elements of minisite design, tracking performance, testing for success, and replicating success.  We’re going to cover it all.

Today’s Lesson…  25 sites for $3,000/month is realistic.  We’ll continue tomorrow.

Across the State Road that I live on are a few cornfields.  Pretty big ones, actually.  This year has been very different in that they’ve been hybridizing for seed.  If you’ve never seen this before once the corn reaches full height special wagons are towed through the field with ros of corn being either detassled, or with their tassles covered with a bag.

This preserves the genetics of the particular strain of corn they’ve planted.  Then, either various rows of corn are left with their tassles (to pollinate all the rest of the corn) or they use blowers and corn pollen of the chosen variety is dusted over all the tassles.

What does this have to do with Affiliate Marketing?  EVERYTHING!  You see, most of us affiliate marketing types have more than one website.  In more than a few niches.  And we’ve created a mess for ourselves if we havn’t been careful.  The mess being that we arn’t harnessing the strength of all of our sites working together.

Let’s say you have three sites…  T-Shirts (CafePress Store), Stickers (Zazzle Store), and a coupon site.  And they’ve proven to do pretty well.  And the principles of cross-pollination can take these three sites and turn them into a powerhouse for you.

Let’s say you take your t-shirt art on CafePress and reuse the designs (that work) for stickers on Zazzle.  You’ve now cross-pollinated those two sites with your product.  Then you take it a step further and create adverts that point between your CafePress and Zazzle sites.  Now you’ve enabled the hybrid to grow.  And how about you add in coupons to your coupon site and wrap it all up in a pretty bow by building out a blog where you feature items from the three sites.  Now your building a powerhouse set of web “genetics”.

Don’t tell me you havn’t thought of it.  You may have even taken a few minor steps in that direction.  Now how about we take this even further.  You see, your CafePress and Zazzle sites are your designs, your products.  Add some Esty into the mix?  Go set up that ShareASale account, AffiliatePLY for video creatives, Webgains, buy.at, etc…  And now your mixing affiliate marketing with your own creative products and with only four sites (CafePress, Zazzle, Coupon, and Blog) your exposing site visitors to your other sites and to affiliate products that you don’t build yourself (but you’ve chosen because it fits with your sites).

No, it’s not easy.  If it were easy everyone would be doing it.  And many that do this do it poorly because they just throw a bunch of stuff out there thinking it won’t be work.  No, this is real work.  You have to choose the affiliate products as carefully as you do when you decide that one of your pieces of artwork will make a good t-shirt or sticker.  But if you are consistant.  Choose affiliate products with care.  Be smart about your cross-pollination.  And keep up with the extra work it will take.

Image by kmakice via Flickr

We think a big reward will be in the offing for you.