Make cash from a website by becoming an Affiliate

Website Building Advice

Building a website isn't as complicated as you may think. The hardest part is thinking of your subject matter. This can be made easier by taking some time to think what you would like to write about and what you can offer the reader. Once you've done this your website can be put together.

Do take time to plan your website. Think about the layout, colours, navigation, how to make it easier for the reader to find information and move around your site. The most important piece of advice I can give you is to stay user focused. Listen to your website visitors and get as much feedback as possible. This will help you develop and build the site.

You will need an html editor and an understanding of html coding. Html means hyper text mark up language and is the computer code that the internet is built upon. Though you can buy packages such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage the search engines will find your website much easier and result in more visitors. Get a basic understanding of html coding and this will help you develop to graphic packages as you develop your website.

A useful resource is www.htmldog.com which will guide you through building web pages and web code step by step from basics up to advanced. Htmldog also has cascading style sheets (CSS) information. These are useful to help you change the look, colours and navigation index of a website quickly and easily without having to change each page. This is so time saving, especially when you may one day have hundred's of web pages. The CSS can also be used to change the adverts you display.

In order to get your website live you will need an ftp programme. This means file transfer protocol. Do an internet search and you should find free trials of ftp programmes which you can use until you find one you like. Some have built in html editors.

Now you need to find a host company. There are literally thousands of such companies but look for those offering secure servers. Some let you pay monthly, others yearly. Some also give you access to templates that you can use to easily build your website. These include free images to make your site look attractive.

Do ensure you read your site statistics which your host company will give you access too. This will help you analyse where your visitors come from, keywords they use to search for your website and how you can develop the site - always remembering to stay user focused.

UK Affiliate Sites

The following UK affiliate schemes host many shops and sites with the advantage of having an easy to manage control centre whilst paying you altogether. It is worth joining each one because they run various links, banner advertisments and different payments:

Affiliate Future
Paid On Results

How To Get Traffic And Hits To Your Website

The key to getting increasing numbers of people, unique visitors and increased page impressions to your website is to offer original interesting and well written content. People will then want to visit your website, tell others about it and link to your website.

Other steps you can take to launch your website are to add your url to search engines such as Google, Wanadoo, Ask, Aol, MSN and Yahoo. You need only add your homepage url because these search engines use spiders to crawl your website and will find all your pages if you have implemented a successful navigation map.

Do submit your website pages to directories such as Dmoz (Open Directory Project), Yahoo or Splut. These sites have editors who will look at your website and if they think it offers content to the internet will add your urls to the directory. Do a bit of research and make sure you are listing your url into the correct section. Dmoz and Yahoo usually have 2 or 3 editors who will review your website and all need to agree to recommend your site is listed. This can take time and can often take several months. It is worth doing because search engines crawl through these directories to find new websites. So for example by successfully getting listed at Dmoz you should get crawled by the Altavista, Lycos, A9, MSN, AOL, Teoma, Clusty, Wisenut, Gigablast, Yahoo and Google bots.

Lastly do use Google sitemaps to help the Google robots find, crawl and index your website. You can find more information at www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps

Best of luck and do let me know, using the contact me link on the left, if this page hasn't answered your question. I'll happily help you out and update the page. Once your website is built you need to swap links with other websites to help you get a Google page rank and get visitors. There's information about this at the borntoloaf link swapping page.

Once you've done all this you can start earning by going to the top of this page and signing up to the recommended affiliate schemes.

Lottery Affiliate Programme

There is a lottery affiliate programme where you can earn £3.50 for each new online player who plays a charity lottery. For more information visit our Charity Lottery page.

Read the borntoloaf guide to drop shipping.