Ah, the get rich quick scheme. In the days before the internet it was relatively easy to avoid anyone who was hawking such ideas, but sometimes it’s hard to move online for the volume of adverts claiming that you can start raking in cash. However, as you’ll no doubt be all too aware, there’s no such thing as a quick way to making money, and any grand plans of your own that you’ve had in your life will no doubt require some kind of big investment to kick start, reinforcing the old mantra of ‘you have to spend money to make money’. However, if you’ve got a roof over your head and an internet connection then you’ve almost certainly got enough disposable income to invest in the world of Affiliate Marketing, and at the beginning you won’t need any particular skills other than a fertile mind and a bit of time to devote to your new project.

First you’ll need to lay down about a fiver and buy yourself a decent domain name to set up your site. You can get free domains, but to the savvy web browser (and they’re not all drooling apes) it’ll look unprofessional if it’s obviously free, and it’s not like buying your own will cost much. Look for a combination of key words that is likely to attract the most number of searches a month, and one that will be relevant to the content that you intend to put on the site. It’s no good registering a domain like shirtsandtrousers.co.uk and then just filling it with any old content you like as it will be hard to get any returning traffic and few people will want to link to you. As well as buying a domain name you’ll need to put a bit of cash into web hosting, but I’m not talking about hundreds here, around £10 per month is about right. For that money you’ll want to get a decent amount of web space to play with, and if you’ve never had to design and upload a site before and wouldn’t know where to start, some hosting packages offer step by step programs to do all that for you. However, if you’ve got a bit of skill you might want to create the site yourself so that it doesn’t look like it’s been made from a template or exported from Microsoft Word.

Next you’ll need to sort out the actual site itself. At this point you may want to get involved in the world of Wordpress, an open source blogging program that can be used to increase the keyword rich content and links on your site and bring in the punters. Some people even use Wordpress to create their entire site, and because it’s open source it is completely free to use, and it’s simple enough to adapt to your own site’s style or branding. There are some minimum hosting requirements in order for Wordpress to work on your site, but it’s simple enough to find out if your hosting package is up to the task, and even to base your hosting selection on Wordpress requirements in the first place. Wordpress is of course backed by a massive community to help support you through the process and iron out any problems you encounter, but the truth is that it’s such a simple to use piece of kit that you’ll have your site up and running in no time, at no additional cost!

The next step is to get writing. Creating unique, original and above all interesting content for your site is the only guaranteed way to get people to come back and view your pages again. It’s important to consider key words to include in your on site content, and including a combination that is likely to get the most hits and increase your ranking. And of course there is a way of finding the perfect keywords that won’t cost you a penny: there are a few free keyword research tools out there, provided in unison with programs such as Google AdWords plus of course you can spend some time trawling all of the major search engines to find additional relevant keywords and phrases that you might want to include on your site to help promote it.

Finally you’ll want to get some inbound links from other sites, and this too can be done effectively and for free, providing you don’t mind sweating for it a little. The best rule is to only approach sites with relevant content but who won’t consider you as a threat to their traffic levels. Get communication going and indicate that you can reciprocate or exchange something for a link, whether it’s a link of your own – or, arguably, the most valuable currency in the world of the internet – unique content for your new link partner’s site.

Now if you do have deeper pockets, you can of course outsource any or all of the above activities. As you will have seen from other postings here at Lammo.net, outsourcing and automation are two of the keys to the success of any long term affiliate enterprise. But at least in the early days until you have a proven stable revenue stream, you can see that there is no requirement for any major initial outlay, just time and determination.

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