David Fiske Affiliate Marketing & Web Development

The sample site is one I suggested a while ago - a recipe site. There's a lot of buzz at the moment about healthy eating, dieting, budgeting and a food shortage so this seems quite apt.

So let's take a look through what the site should do and how it should be laid out.
 
Purpose

Okay. First and foremost, we're looking at generating money so let's take a look at what's out there.

In terms of recipes, there's not a lot. There's scope to link to cookery magazines (by means of a magazine subscription) and perhaps link to some cookery books.

In terms of food shopping, Tesco offer commission on home delivery registrations and MySupermarket do to. The reward is higher for Tesco so it would seem more financially logical to promote them over MySupermarket.

In terms of dieting, the Gillian McKeith affiliate program is the most familiar to me.

So from the start, it seems that there's no shortage of angles or advertisers. If we want to promote healthy eating, dieting programs would be sensible. If we want to promote frugality, grocery home delivery price comparison would be best. If we wanted to promote home made food, recipe books and magazine subscriptions would be ideal.

It may make sense to look for a niche and so it may become apparent later on that there's scope for advertising specialist advertisers.

Structure

The home page is going to be the main search page (a bit like Google) although it would make sense to add a bit of content so we'll have 'featured recipes'.

Each recipe page will contain a picture, the ingredients, the recipe and a set of 'top tips'. Discreet advertising in places will also be used. An option to print a PDF document would be nice although a similar effect can be sought via CSS.

A category page will break down recipes into... well, categories: things like Cakes, Beef dishes, Vegetarian Meals and Vegan Recipes.

The basic pages also need to be added - terms and conditions, privacy policy, disclaimer, about us, contact us, etc. A Google sitemap should be generated along with an RSS feed.

In terms of affiliate advertising, I'll be looking to add subtle text based links although I will also add a rotating banner at the bottom for all listed advertisers. The reason? Each time the banner shows, the affiliate network register an impression thus suggesting to them I'm an active affiliate. If I relied solely on clicks, at the beginning there may not be enough to go around and particular merchants may go months without a click. As time goes on, this should be replaced with a weighted system whereby more popular merchants get priority.

Step 1A) Register Your Domain Name and Set Up Your Webspace

There's plenty of guides around the web on how to do this. Register a good domain - something that reflects what it is you are doing. If you can't get anything decent, try something quirky. After all, what did Google mean before the search engine was created? Nowt - it was made up and has transitioned from a business name ("Google Inc") to a verb ("to Google").

If you are a beginner, you'll be better off with a web host who takes care of everything for you (domain name registration and web hosting). If you have a portfolio of around 10-20 sites, a reseller account would be more up your street.

I registered a terrible domain a while back that has yet to be used (and aptly lends itself to this tutorial) so I'm using that (I'll link to it at the end of the series). I've set up my PHP webspace with an empty MySQL database.