So, you've heard that you can make money through affiliate marketing - what site should you build first?

Are you sufficiently talented to make it? Do you have enough time and energy to put into building it?

Before we even go into what type of affiliate programs there are to promote you need to establish what skills you can bring to the table or are prepared to learn before you begin so that you don't end up a frustrated and bitter affiliate.

Also examine how much time you have on your hands to devote to this project because you will need a lot of it to make it as a successful affiliate.

It's easy to make money as an affiliate right?

Well yes and no. There are certainly a lot of opportunities. More than enough for any one person. But do you have the talent to make it happen?

Whilst we always talk about the huge amount of potential for making money on the internet the fact of the matter is that unless you have a unique talent for this you are not going to get anywhere as an individual. As a group pooling your resources you stand much more chance of success but as an individual you are going to need some pretty raw talent to succeed.

First up you are going to need to know some basic HTML for formatting tables and laying out your site. You'll need to be able to build a basic site from scratch and so understanding how to build a site is going to be one of your first requirements.

You don't need to be an HTML guru for this, being able to modify a basic template is a good start but you'll need to be able to pull the header and footer elements together and use ftp to get it up to your server once you have finished. Basic HTML skills are an absolute neccessity.

Next it needs to look nice. back in the day you could get away with any old junk but now it's a much more professional business. Your sites need to look good if you are going to have any chance of converting your traffic. Do you have any photoshop or graphic design skills? You'll need these to make your sites look good.

Basic design skills are what I am talking about here. You don't need to be a great designer but being able to use the basic preset styles and filters and knowing how to import and export the different file types will get you by. Uploading a 5MB image to your server when it only needs to be 50k is a common mistake for beginners and costs in both page load time and bandwidth. OK I exaggerate but you get my gist.

Now, of course if you have some money to invest then you can use it to get people to do all of this mundane site building stuff for you, however it doesn't come cheap because building websites is a very labour intensive process. This is something that many beginners overlook - you can make a huge time investment before you start to see any money coming back in.

The problem with getting other people to build your site for you is that they really don't know what you need.

Most web design agencies don't have a clue about affiliate marketing or producing a website that converts traffic. They know how to make it look pretty but when it comes to making it convert visitors to buyers that's another story altogether.

The other problem with the outsourcing approach is that it is very expensive. The outlay isn't just in the time that your web designer spends building your site, it's also in the multiple times you are going to get a new site built because your original plan didn't work.

Affiliate marketing is ALL about testing ideas and seeing what works and doesn't work. If you spend a lot of money getting a site built for one idea which subsequently falls flat on it's face then you are going to start going through a lot of money very quickly before you get your return. This is why a huge amount of affiliates are successful individuals, it is the unique individual approach that makes them stand out from the crowd.

Sites designed by corporate committee don't make it as successful affiliate sites.

So you've got HTML skills? Check. Graphic design skills? Check.

What programming languages do you know?

You'll need a very basic knowledge of PHP to be able to configure some of the prewritten scripts so that you can enable simple contact and feedback forms. A lot of this is very basic but if you don't know where to start then this is going to be your biggest time killer. Trying to do simple programming tasks can eat up huge amounts of your valuable time and getting to know a programmer who can do stuff for you quickly and cheaply is a godsend.

The problem is that these types of people are very rare on the ground. Anyone who has talent usually get's more than enough work to keep them busy and your piddly little jobs are not going to be of any interest to them. Cultivating a relationship with a good programmer is one of the best investment decisions you will make as an affiliate.

A lot of prewritten simple form scripts now come with readable instructions that mean you don't have to be an absolute geek to make them work and it helps if you go with a hosting company that can give you a reasonable amount of support or at least has a forum where you can post your questions and get help from others in the same boat.

You'll also need to know enough about what a script looks like so that you can copy and paste the affiliate coding into your files and deal with the google anaytics code so don't underestimate the amount of time that it is going to take to learn this step.

So, now that you can get a site built and place all of the relevant scripts in the right places, what should we build as our first affiliate site?

At this point you can take two routes. You can build the presold advertising site (usually referred to as an adsense site) or build a site that sells other products. Which you choose depends on your talent.

To build a successful adsense site you will need a lot of original content and so if you are confident in your writing ability then this could be a good start for you. Placing adsense ad's are a relatively simple coding job which most beginners could learn in a few hours.

To build a successful affiliate site you need more in the way of programming and web techie skills to make it work properly.

Whichever site you decide to build know the following:

The success of your site  is going to depend on how much traffic you can generate. If you are unable to generate any traffic then you can have all of the above skills and still not make any progress. Now you can start to see why this is not so easy as it all sounds.

It's possible to build an affiliate site that has a small amount of tightly targeted traffic and makes high commissions although this is not normally the case. Usually you need copious amounts of traffic to make it generate any revenue. Figure on 1% of traffic converting to sales and you won't go far wrong. Anything else is gravy to begin with.

Even after you have invested a huge amount of time building and refining your site if you don't have any traffic building skills then you are stymied.

For those that believe they can write interesting and absorbing content then you have a big advantage over everybody else. Writing content is one of the talents that you can have that will tip the scales in your favour. If you can write good compelling content then slowly over time people will link to your stuff as your site grows. This means you can spend more of your time writing content and less doing the off page promotion of your site. If you can write sufficiently good content then other people are going to do the marketing of your site for you by word of mouth and recommendation.

Conversely if you are unable to contribute original content to your site then you are going to have to get traffic by other means which normally means spending inordinate amounts of time gaining backlinks from other sites and doing free directory submittals and the like to increase the visibility of your site.

A couple of years ago it was in vogue to simply add as much content as possible to your site by any means. This included and was not limited to reproducing articles from other authors and getting articles written by other people by paying a few dollars per article.

I'll tell you why this is a flawed approach.

The thinking behind producing an average site is that when the visitor starts reading your content and gets immediately bored they will click out of your site by way of adsense ad's thus adding to your revenue.

In the short term this works but in the long term it means you have nothing substantial to market. You have no individual leverage and nothing of any long term value. You are building a samey samey site the way that everybody else builds an average site and you have no unique selling proposition. You are not creating any reason for other people to link to your site either.

Building an original content site is massively time consuming but it's the most rewarding way of building this type of site. Once you have fourty to fifty pages of good original content your visitors will start to recognise a quality site and you will pick up the odd link here and there, from then on it's just a matter of time to keep writing and gaining traffic.

Building an affiliate site using content feeds and widgets from affiliate offers is perhaps one of the easiest sites to build and one of the hardest to make a success of. What you make up for in time saved writing content you will pay for in time spent building links. If your site just has shopping feeds for example then it has no original content and so you'll need to find other ways of generating traffic.

Of course you can put together an affiliate site with good product feeds and then compose a pay per click campaign to send traffic to it. In this fashion you don't need any other traffic building methods. This is introducing another talent into the mix though because being good at pay per click is a hugely rewarding talent in itself and marketing PPC direct to affiliate offers is another article that deserves attention all by itself.

Building affiliate sites requires unique talent. Building average affiliate sites is very easy but you'll end up with exactly that - an average affiliate site that won't let you escape the day job any time soon.

Figure on spending a year building your affiliate offering. If you try rushing it you'll end up frustrated and internally mixed up. No matter what all the gurus tell you it requires a lot of dedicated effort to make a successful affiliate site.

If you spend the time and effort to build something unique and offers added value to your visitors then you won't go far wrong. If a year sounds like a long time to spend building a business system then just think how long it would take you to do something similar in the dealing with people world. Plus you have all the disadvantages of commuting, offices, slow payers, bank overdrafts etc etc.

Affiliate marketing is the most rewarding business system there is but it takes time to build and do it properly. But once built it can last for years.

General Marketing - Affiliate Marketing