Once you’ve identified the niche market and its potential profitability, your next step would be to set up a simple direct response website to market the selected affiliate program.
"We Call This The “Affiliate Leads Capture Page”.
You’d want to do this for long-term success as a money-making super affiliate. This is the website where you can capture leads and make profits from over and over again.
We’ll briefly cover the essential steps for you to get started below (You can readily find tons of information on these from the search engines and free tutorials online).
Choose A Suitable Domain Name:
Before you go to register a new domain name, it’s very important that you sit down and generate a list of potential names for your affiliate leads capture page. There are two approaches to doing this:
- Brand a site for the promotion of one affiliate product
- Brand a site for the promotion of multiple affiliate products
In the first case, coming up with available domain names is quite simple. Let’s say that you’ve chosen to promote a product like CheapCarFinder.Com as an affiliate. You can create variations on this domain name until you come up with an available one.
Some examples include: mycheapcarfinder.com, thecheapcarfinder.com, findacheapcar.com, etc.
The second scenario takes a little more brainstorming, but is worth the effort for the sake of leverage and cost savings.
Rather than purchase a domain and hosting account for each product you promote, you will choose one domain and set up each of your products in subdirectories like:
www.mydomain.com/product1
www.mydomain.com/product2
The trick is to come up with an appealing and descriptive name that is still somewhat generic. Here’re two powerful domain-branding tips:
- Register your full name, for example, www.EwenChia.com.
- Mix in words like ‘info’, ‘marketing’, ‘tips’, ‘publishing’, ‘ebook’, ‘news’ or ‘secrets’
as these words imply content.
Visit NameCheap.com or GoDaddy.com to register your domains for less than $10.
Domain and Hosting Resources:
Decide on the best host by doing your research. However no matter which you choose, a word of caution is in order here…there are a couple of situations I have to recommend you avoid:
- Paying too much for hosting. The industry standard varies. There are dozens of power packed hosting accounts available for $25 per month, and you may want to upgrade to one of these further down the line. However, I’d recommend going even cheaper than that as a newbie. We want to get you into the profit zone on a shoestring budget.
- Domain/Hosting Combos: These are deals where you register a domain with hosting included for one flat fee. The reason I don’t recommend these is because you often don’t have control over the administration of your domain name. This makes it much more difficult for you to transfer that domain to other hosts at will.
Creating Your Affiliate Leads Capture Page:
Once you’ve decided on your hosting provider, it’s time to create a simple direct response driven website with just an opt-in form on the main page.
In fact you’ll need only ONE page for this site. This is as lazy and easy as it gets. It will consist of:
1. An opt-in page
2. A redirect to the affiliate program sales page (you don’t need to create this)
In this section, we will assume little to no knowledge of HTML on your part. If you’re familiar with how to code pages, great. This step will be easy for you.
If you’re a complete newbie, you’ll need to acquire some tools to make this whole process as painless as possible. What You Need:
- A free or low cost WYSIWYG web page editor. WYSIWYG is an acronym for “What You See Is What You Get”. These are visual editors which let you type, cut, paste, drag and drop all of your elements just like you would in a word processor. You can also try 1st page 2000 which is available free from www.EvrSoft.com.
- The code to create your opt-in box. Generate this from your autoresponder account. Simple instructions to do that would be found in your autoresponder instruction manual.
- Your hosting account login information.
- An FTP program.
Direct Response Design Principles:
While there is no one “right way” to design your opt-in page, there is a basic format which most marketers follow – using direct response principles to generate specific actions from visitors. An example is my sales page for Secret Affiliate Weapon.
Here are the key elements of a direct response page for this purpose:
- Bold, attention capturing headline
- Simple, uncluttered design with no or few graphics
- Compact and centered formatting. You can achieve this by placing your text within a “table”.
- Similar to a standard sales page with bulleted benefits and important information bolded or highlighted in different colors.
- A definite call to action, which in this case is to get visitors to opt-in so you can capture their names
Setting Up The Opt-In Page:
You can create your “Affiliate Money Machine” site in one of two ways: From scratch or import an existing template you like into your WYSIWYG editor and edit from there.
In the following screenshot, you’ll see the template for my ‘ex site’ (now turned into a blog) www.EzineArticle.com loaded into an open source WYSIWYG editor called N-VU:
This shot shows how the opt-in box looks in the final mark up. Notice the dotted lines and slider controls around the table. These allow you to resize the box to your liking. The program handles the HTML in the background.
But how did the box get there?
Well this is the one case where you’ll need to wade through some simple code. Actually, some editors allow you to paste your HTML code directly into the WYSIWYG window, and the program will convert this to a visual element. However, you’re better off knowing how to look under the hood and do this the old fashioned way.
So, we’ll go back into our editor for a moment…
…and select the HTML Source tab. This will switch our workspace window over so that we can view the code and find a place to paste our opt-in box code.
Note: Here's a quick tip to save your sanity - You can place your opt-in box anywhere, however I recommend placing it either somewhere in the middle of the page or close to the end of the page and between pieces of text within a paragraph.
This will make life much easier for you because all you’ll have to do is select “Edit – Find and Replace” from the program menu and enter in the last phrase of the paragraph in the area where you want to place your opt-in box.
The text before the opt-in box on this example page is “quickly and easily…”. Notice how the program automatically jumped down to the proper location, and we’ve pasted the code just beneath that:
All opt-in boxes are created in HTML through what’s known as a “Form”. Your code will always begin with the <form> tag and end with the form> tag.
That’s it! Save your work and prepare to edit your page.
Setting Up Your ‘Thank You’ Page:
Your ‘Thank You’ page will be much easier to edit than your opt-in page – in fact you do not have to create it at all!
All You Have To Do Is Set Your ‘Thank You’ Page URL As Your Affiliate Link For The Affiliate Program You’re Promoting.
Remember to do this when you’re setting up your autoresponder and generating the form. There will be a column asking you for your thank you page location.
So in essence, once the prospect opt-in for more information from your main opt-in page, they’ll instantly be transferred to the affiliate program sales page with your unique referral id and at the same time you’ve captured their emails to build a list!
Uploading Your Page:
There are two methods you can use to upload your page:
A standard FTP program
In the Control Panel administration area of your host
A majority of Unix/Linux hosting plans implement the Control Panel interface. It’s a simple visual menu of administrative options relevant to your account.
In the screenshot below, I’ve highlighted the “File Manager” button which you would click on to begin the file upload process. This is as far as we’ll go with this method. The process varies from host to host, and I recommend using a standard FTP program instead because CPanel tends to run slowly.
The FTP Process:
Before you begin, you’ll need the following information handy:
-
The FTP address for your hosting account
-
Your Username and Password
-
Name of your home directory (usually “public_html” or “www”)
FTP programs vary in their interface design. Some programs will allow you to type your login information immediately into a navigation tab, while others may require you to pull up a “new server”, “new location” or “properties” box to fill in your information before connecting. In this example, I’ve pulled up a “Properties” box within FTP Commander:
The most common FTP port is port 21. Do not change this unless your hosting provider gives you a different port number. Additionally, your FTP address may vary depending on how your host has things set up. You may have a domain name address, as in the example above or a numeric IP address like ftp://66.129.154.87.
Once you’ve connected to the server, the program will refresh to show you a listing of your directory contents. In the next example, I’ve logged into Apple Computer’s FTP site.
Notice the split screen. The far left column is the navigation column which allows you to surf to selected directories and files on your local hard drive.
The middle column displays these files and allows you to highlight them for transfer. The last column displays the directory on your hosting account. Simply double-click on the folder you would like to store your files in, and the program will send a command to the server to move you to that directory.
In this program, you would transfer a file by first selecting it from the middle column list and then clicking on the blue arrow which points towards the right column. You should see the transfer in progress when you upload your files. The screen will auto-refresh and, if the transfer was successful, you’ll see your files listed in server/remote host column of your FTP program.