Building Your Site

When building your site its advisable to research which website system best suits your objectives.

Are you creating an educational review site?  If so you will want something that is SEO optimized and simple to create new content and add pages.

Do you want to build a list?   If so you’ll need to have a lead capture system in place, with a squeeze page so you can collect your prospect’s names and email addresses.

Regardless of what type of affiliate model you choose, your affiliate site will need three things.  A domain name, hosting and a website platform.

(These are essentials that will be needed again and again.  Be sure to read this section carefully as this information won’t be repeated.)

Domain Name

When choosing a domain name for your site choose a domain name that is rich in keywords.  This is to help you rank in the search engines.

And so potential visitors will see your site as being targeted to what they are searching for. For example someone looking for information on FusionHQ may search for “FusionHQ review” or “FusionHQ information”.  In these cases buying www.FusionHQreview.com or www.FusionHQinformation.com is ideal.

Both these domain names help describe what your site is about and will closely match what your prospect is searching for.

It also increases the chances someone will visit your site if they do see it in Google.

Hosting

Once you have bought your domain name you will also need some hosting.

Generally for review sites almost any hosting will do. You are not expecting a flood of traffic to them, nor are you required to manage complicated server setups or scripts.

For cheap but effective hosting for this type of site visit www.dlwmmm.com/host or www.dlwmmm.com/cool.

Website Platform

Lastly you will need a website to base your review site. You don’t need anything fancy but you must ensure your site is SEO optimized.

Whichever system you choose make sure the coding for the pages is as simple and SEO friendly as possible. Ensure that the page “slugs” (the extension after the domain name to create the page URL) is “clean”.

For example… Some systems will create pages such as www.yourdomainname.com/page=?45 (where page=?45 is the slug).

This is not only ugly but SEO unfriendly. You need your site to be SEO friendly if your aim is free, targeted visitors.

Instead your pages should have URLs that look more like www.yourdomainname.com/productname (where “product name” is the slug).

From the very beginning its best to get your domain name and website structure set up correctly.

Both of these heavily influence your ability to rank well in the search engines.  And it can be difficult or impossible to change these later on.

For those who are comfortable installing scripts you may want to consider CMS Made Simple. If you are not, these are your options for a website platform...

(a) WordPress

Many people advocate using WordPress for this. Unless you know what you are doing we would avoid this platform...

This is because WordPress is a blogging platform, not a dedicated website content management system (CMS). WordPress’s script is excessively large.  It is very heavy on code and is overkill for a review site (as excessive code can be a memory hog on your server).

WordPress can be an excellent choice if you know what you are doing with it.  It is not SEO friendly—at least not “out the box”.

That said WordPress can be made SEO friendly if you install a few plugins, tweak the settings and configure it correctly.

WordPress is a focus for hackers.

Because of its open source platform it is easy to identify and is therefore constantly targeted by hackers looking to take control of a site. (Again this can be fixed if you know what to do.)

Leon used to have the attitude “no one would bother with my site as hardly anyone knows it’s there”.  Unfortunately he was wrong!

He had many sites taken down and then turned into “phishing” sites by hackers for their own criminal gains. (This is the kind of site that tricks people into giving personal details or credit card information through a mock-up of a legitimate site.)

WordPress is a popular choice but Leon does not recommend it unless you intend to create a blog or know how to use WordPress well.

In short while WordPress is a popular choice it is hard to get right.  However it is free. And there are lots of plugins and plenty of training available if you look.

(b) FusionHQ

Personally we like things to be as “set and forget” as possible. For this reason Leon now uses FusionHQ (yes he is biased) which comes with hosting built - killing two birds with one stone.  

FusionHQ is a purpose built internet marketing platform.

It enables you to easily build squeeze pages, build and manage a list, create autoresponder sequences as well as build SEO authority or review sites.

FusionHQ also has the advantage of having the ability to create an affiliate program for your own products should you also choose to expand as an information marketer.