The Basics to a Successful Affiliate Marketing Web Site

A First Impression is Everything! 
One of the most important aspects of a successful web site, is the overall look and feel of the site. A web site should be aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate and be of value to your visitors. This means useful, current, neatly displayed information. A web site that is not too flashy and is limited on the number of banners. Black, Arial font on a white background is suggested for text.

Domain Registration
You'll probably also want to register your own domain name. Free hosting is not a professional hosting solution and many times free pages are cluttered with banner ads. This will very quickly make visitors want to hit the back button. You can register a domain name with Register.com or Register4less.com for only $14.95 and get your site hosted for as low as $6.95 per month with HostSaveFast and $5.00 per month with Your-Site.com. 

If you are new to building web sites and working with HTML, you probably want to use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) product like MSFrontpage. A great book for learning HTML is HTML for Dummies. This book comes with a CD-ROM with several examples of HTML code and is highly recommended. It's also a good idea to search online for HTML code snippets and examples or visit sites like DynamicDrive.com. However, make sure you don't go overboard and that your site remains simple and clean.

Content Keeps Visitors Content  
Once you have an affiliate program that has proven to be a success for your web site, you can continue receiving quality traffic by adding more and more relevant and useful information. By adding value (new and quality information) to your site, you will become trusted by the visitors to your site. This will surely increase repeat visitors...and traffic equals commissions!  As you add content to your site, you will also be increasing your sites visibility online by having more web pages available to the search engines. 

Educate Yourself 
Getting your site up and runnin is not the end, you must stay current. There are many helpful email newsletters that you can sign up for related to your sites content. If your sites content deals with finance for example, be sure and frequent sites such as CNNfn.com, Etrade.com and other highly visible financial resources.

Web Site Design and Promotion
Getting traffic to your site is always a challenge. Your web sites design is extremely important. The PROPER use of meta-tags is essential and can greatly improve your ranking in search engines. (For more information on using meta tags, read this article.)

It is important to submit your site(s) to the major search engines consistently on a monthly basis. SearchEngineBlaster is one of the world's leading online promotion services and will submit any URL(s) to more than 400,000 search engines and directories worldwide EVERY day. There are also many different types of software packages that you can purchase to submit your web site yourself.

Helpful Tools
Email
A great feature for any web site is an email list. Your site should provide visitors with a link for signing up on your email list. It can be as simple as, "email me at you@yoursite.com to be added to our email list."...or you can use services like Microsoft's bCentral.com which is a great email list managing tool that allows you to design custom email list sign up forms. As your email list grows, you can email members of updates, specials etc.

Bookmarks
Reminding visitors to Bookmark (add to favorites) your web site can be a very useful tool in getting visitors back to your site. DynamicDrive.com offers a simple "copy and past" script that will enable you to place links on your pages allowing a visitor to bookmark the page with a simple click. DynamicDrive.com also offers many other great tools, ideas and simple "copy and past" scripts and HTML code that can greatly enhance your site.

Targeted Email
Targeted email is a super tool for marketing products and services online. Targeted email marketing is emailing product/service information directly to people that have signed up (opt-in) to receive information on specific topics of interest. For example, I want to send an advertisement for women's shoes, so I purchase a list of email addresses targeting women...or women who shop online. SendMoreInfo.com is a great service for targeted email marketing and is surprisingly inexpensive in comparison to other targeted email services.