The deal is that you don’t have to pay someone a small fortune to get a site up and running. We are dealing with affiliate mini-sites here, not drop-ship ecommerce.
In brief: The overall idea is that you research out a hot keyword term and something you are interested enough in to post regular content about. You build a mini-site using your own paid or free web-hosting, and then upload your mini-site there. Next after that is to build out a free blog on blogspot or wordpress.com which links to your mini-site (Wordpress.com doesn’t like affiliate links, but doesn’t care if you post links to your own authority site which does – Blogger doesn’t care.) The blog sends traffic to your mini-site, and you also build links to that mini-site through your comment posting, article marketing, etc. – but these are additional subjects. See my write-ups at An Online Sunshine Plan – OSP blog here – email course here.)
Getting a website up and running
The deal is to KISS (keep it simply simple.)
1. Get a freeCSS or GPL template and download it . (And you can also scrape a site with something like HTTrack, but watch for copyright violations. You only need the first page, so set the depth to 1) Note: WP sites are GPL by definition, but the graphics can still be copyrighted…
Make sure you have it in a folder/directory of it’s own.
2. Now you have a template you like. Edit it in something like Kompozer and put a nice front page in there, with all the side-bar widgets and code you want. Get it looking exactly like you want, and what you want the majority of your site to look like (yes, you’ll be able to edit it later.)
3. Make sure you fill in all the SEO meta tags (check the source code) and also add in your Google Analytics javascript and Webmaster Tools meta while you are at it. Very important to do this now, before you do anything else.
4. Download Zimplit and copy this over to your website folder at its base.
5. Now FTP the whole thing up to your site and access Zimplit per the instructions (usually something like http://yoursite.com/zimplit.php). I like running a local version with something like Xampp so I can see what it’s going to do up there.
6. Zimplit will allow you to use your main page as a template for later pages. Really quite simple. And the site runs quite fast, as the code is very direct with no compiling necessary.
- - - -
And that’s all you need to do.
You don’t have to spend $6324.25 for somebody else’s aging website builder – and then pay $39.95 per month after that for their lousy hosting. (Lousy as in no real service for outages.) You can get a low-cost ($4.95 per month) service and build your own for the same amount of training you would need to know in order to put theirs up.
And on top of this, you’ll own the domain name and can move it anytime you want. Additionally, you won’t have some hosting company selling your name over and over to other telemarketers (or their subsidiaries).
You can see an example of this over at http://onlinemillionaireplan.com (yes, I know it needs updating… but you can see how simple it is to push a single product through a mini site.)
Good Hunting!
