First article in a series on ”Making Money Through Affiliates”.

The first rule of most Internet marketing sites is to find a niche.  As part of an experiment I am creating my own niche marketing site.  I say “experiment” because each stage of the way I am going to follow different online advice.  At first I will not reveal the URL or niche so I don’t contaminate the results.  As the experiment progresses further, I will be sharing my site’s URL with various Internet marketers for their opinions.  The goal is to create an SEO optimised site that brings in affiliate sales through organic search engine results, while requiring minimal updating. 

Finding a Niche
I had already tried the tech route and coupon code route with previous sites.  At my fingertips were the affiliate databases of both Commission Junction and Shareasale.  My goal was to sell actual products, not financial services.  I needed something specific to design a site around.  It had to be colorful, useful, and something I could promote in good faith.  A couple of funny ideas came to mind.  One I rejected was selling vintage bathtubs.  Great market, except the merchant was a little too good at marketing.  Nice for a Pay-Per-Click campaign, but I wanted to do the converting this time.  Finally I found a niche that showed promise, was very specific, and didn’t lock me into a single merchant.

Choosing a domain name:
First I went to my old Google AdWords account and used the keyword tool.  I ran through a couple of prospective keywords seeing which ones had higher traffic.  I then checked out the competition and searched for an available .com domain name.  The shortest one containing my most important keyword was what I was looking for.  By adding an “S” to the end of the keyword, I was able to grab an available 8 letter domain name.  I learned my lesson after typing the 13 letter “turnipofpower” over and over.  I purchased the name for 5 years and set it to auto-renew.  If things go well, I could sell the whole site or just the domain name down the road.

All of this was accomplished using the Bluehost Control Panel.   Next I made my new site into an add-on domain, so it would appear independent of Turnipofpower.com.  Using Fantastico I set up WordPress and began looking for themes.  There already was an image in my head of how I envisioned the site to eventually look.  Trick was finding a theme to match.  Once chosen I headed over to the site of a marketing guru.  I’d return to tweaking the theme later.

SEO ROB
No, he didn’t take my money.  But SEO Rob over at Technet News had recently written an article on optimising WordPress.  I liked his idea of changing permalinks structure to /%postname%/ from the default.   Then I remembered the All in One SEO Pack.  It also changes the structure and a few more details.  I went ahead and entered Rob’s suggestion into the plug-in.   Changing blog structure is best done before your first post.  To be continued.