Becoming an Affiliate

If you own a website then you can earn cash by becoming an affiliate (also called partner or affiliate marketer by some affiliate companies). This means you place affiliate advertising to websites of your choosing on your affiliate website and when someone clicks on the text links or banners, you will either receive a cash payment or a percentage of any money they spend on the site. Below the building a website information I have listed the best free affiliate programmes to help you on your journey of becoming an affiliate or affiliate marketer. It is worth joining all of the affiliate companies because they all have different companies and shops and pay different rates of commission. Below these are website building advice and hints and tips to get traffic to your affiliate company:

How To Become an Affiliate

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 then you can start the process of how to become an affiliate.

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 rather than worry about how to become an affiliate. Listen to your website visitors and get as much feedback as possible. This will help you develop and build the site.

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Affiliate Marketer

You will need an html editor and an understanding of html coding when you become an affiliate marketer. 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 affiliate website and become a successful affiliate marketer.

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 the form of affiliate marketer includes.

In order to get your website live an affiliate marketer 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.

The next stage in becoming an affiliate is 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 during your affiliate marketer career to stay user focused.

Affiliate Companies

The following UK affiliate companies 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 affiliate company because they run various links, banner advertisements 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 affiliate 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 undertake upon becoming an affiliate 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 affiliate 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.

Those who become an affiliate should 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 about becoming an affiliate 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 middle of this page about becoming an affiliate and signing up to the recommended affiliate schemes.

Lottery Affiliate Programme

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

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