4.WordPress setup

Setting up your website

In theory you can be an affiliate marketer without a website by just sending your links by email but I am sure you will find it much easier to organise yourself and build your list by having a website. The next step is therefore to add some web pages to your hosting package. I have spent a lot of time building websites since 1995 and I will have to say that I could have probably spent my time better with regards to making money on-line. It has paid me to learn Internet technologies. In the early days I made simple websites for customers and had an on-line holiday booking service which brought in some cash. Later my know how landed me a good job in the City of London and I made several hundred thousand pounds doing it. However, in reflection, I think that if I had been happy just to understand the basics of HTML and concentrated on Internet Marketing, I would have made much more. I guess that is why I am getting on with it now. There are a lot of factors to consider when making a website from scratch and probably more work than you realise. One aspect usually only considered towards the end of a web project is SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. In a nutshell, this is about getting your website to the top of the search engine listings. To be frank, you could spend years training to be an SEO expert alone and still not have learnt much about Internet Marketing. SEO is actually quite technical. ‘On page’ SEO is about getting the right keywords in the right quantities in the right parts of the page and in the right HTML tags. For more information have a look at this: http://www.seoconsultants.com/seo/guide/.??’Off page’ SEO is harder in many ways as this involves getting inbound links from other websites from the right?neighbourhood. Which means asking people to make links to you. This requires a lot of?organisation and dedication. You can buy links but you could get black listed from Google and other search engines who frown upon the practice of link selling. See?http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/information-about-buying-and-selling.html for more information.? It is not just about getting inbound links. By talking about SEO in my content and adding the links above I am indicating to Google that I am some kind of authority site about SEO which should help my rankings too. Here are some sites you should keep your eye on:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/default.aspx

http://www.ysearchblog.com/

Here are some books about SEO that have good rankings:

how to make money

The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice)how to make money

SEO Help: 20 Steps to Get Your Website to Google’s #1 Page

Okay! Although you need to have an understanding of SEO, having said all that, I want to show you a way to avoid having to do a lot of SEO. One of the SEO industries dirty little secrets is WordPress. I don’t know what they do exactly but whatever they do, it works. Have you ever noticed websites with very little content at the top of the search listings? I have, and much more often that not, it was someone what had started a blog and not done much with it but because they used WordPress, it had found its way to no 1 position for keywords in the page. George Brown used WordPress as the centre of his Google Sniper Project which is well worth a look. I am not going to try and sell you on the idea of WordPress, for one reason it is free software, but what I will say is that it is easy to install and it is easy to use. Some basic HTML knowledge is useful as part of the editing interface allows you to write HTML directly. To download and install Wordress click here:?http://wordpress.org/download/.

Link Cloaking

There are a number of good reasons why you may want to hide your links from view not least stop your commission from being hijacked. Here is a link to a free plug in to help you:

http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/07/28/link-cloaking-plugin-for-wordpress/

 

There is plenty of information on the Internet to help you but if you find that WordPress is very slow then you are probably short of memory on your hosting server and you will need to contact your ISP and upgrade your plan. Not only is WordPress simple to install, it is also easy to keep up to date. I have just updated the software on this site today in about 3 or 4 clicks!

 

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