Setting Up An Art Affiliate Site - Part 2

Setting Up An Art Affiliate Site -
Part 2

This sounds like an easy step, but you may soon find it can
be surprisingly difficult. As mentioned before the majority
of your traffic will hopefully come from search engines. To
rank well in search engines one of the key factors is to
obtain a domain name that includes one or more of your
keywords. This can be a real problem because
YourKeywords.com is most likely already registered. You
can start by going to a domain registrar such as Go Daddy
and enter the domain you want on the homepage. If it's
not registered already you can register it. If someone else
has already registered it you will receive a list of
suggestions of available domain names or and go back and
try another domain. Depending on the term you chose
you may or may not find a domain you want by doing this.

The second method I'd recommend is a domain name
suggestion tool such as Name Boy. This tool will let you
enter your keywords and come up with a large number of
suggestions for domains based on those keywords. It will
also show you which of those domains are still available. I
used this tool to register the sample site TropicalArt.org. I
normally do not register .org sites, and if this was a site I
was seriously looking putting the effort into making
profitable instead of a simple example I would make every
effort to obtain tropicalart.com. For this example it will do
though.

Finally if you just can't find an acceptable domain using
the first two methods you can buy one that is already
registered from someone else. This can be much more
expensive than the first two options but in some cases it
makes sense to do. The two main sites for doing this are
Sedo and Afternic. These sites work as a trusted third
party to coordinate the sale and transaction between the
buyer and seller, and collect a percentage of the sale from
the seller for performing this service (much like EBay). I
used these services to obtain this domain name,
ArtAffiliate.com.

This is a very important step and unfortunately one I can't
explain in enough detail in this section. For those of you
who are already experienced web developers, you have
most likely already decided how you are going to develop
your site and can move on to the next section. The rest of
this section is for those who do not have any experience in
this area. You're going to need to make a choice at this
point to do it yourself or hire someone else.

If you choose to do it yourself and have no previous web
development experience then you're best bet will be to
develop a static site. This means you will manually be
creating pages for each product you wish to sell and listing
them on your site. It will also require maintenance to
make sure you keep the prices up to date and add and
remove products as needed. There are several tools
available for doing this and you can just search Google to
find them, but most likely you already have one on your
computer, Microsoft FrontPage. It is included with
Microsoft Office and is a great tool for beginners.

This may sound like it would be way to expensive for some
people, but you'll if you are reasonable about the
requirements it's really not that bad and will definitely
save you a lot of time of having to manually add products.
The biggest benefit is instead of manually creating a page
for each product, all the products can be loaded into a
database and the pages generated dynamically.
Periodically a new datafeed can be downloaded from the
affiliate program website and you'll instantly have the
updated prices and current list of products.

So how do you find someone? You may already know
someone who does web development, that will be willing
to create a site for you for free or cheap. If so great! But
developing the average art affiliate website will take
about 15-20 hours worth of work and you may not be so
lucky to find a volunteer. On top of that software
development is typically a fairly high paying job so hiring
someone locally to do it can cost a pretty penny. The
method I would suggest is going to a third party website
that pairs developers with clients such as
RentACoder.com.

RentACoder and sites like it allow clients to list the
requirements for their project and developers to bid on
the project. You will be able to get your project done for a
much better rate here because it's typically individuals
doing the work instead of companies and there is
competition from overseas developers keeping the prices
down. It's very important that you be thorough on what
exactly your requirements are. You also need to keep the
requirements reasonable in order to keep the price down.
Everything you ask for will add hours and cost to the
project so if you don't really need it, don't ask for it. To
give you a rule of thumb on what you should expect to
pay, a no frills site such as the example Tropical Art should
cost you somewhere around $300.

You are going to need a place to host your website. Your
ISP may provide some web hosting space but typically this
is a very small amount, so you're most likely going to need
to find a web host.

The first factor to consider when finding a web host is if
they support the technology your website uses. For
example if your site was created using FrontPage, ASP or
ASP.NET you will need a windows host. For static html,
php or Java you can go with a Windows or Unix host. If
you site requires a database such as MS SQL or MySql
you'll need to make sure the host supports that as well.

There are several other factors such as price, bandwidth,
reliability, etc that you'll need to consider as well. You can
simply search Google for "web hosts" and compare the
results to get an idea of what's available. I'd personally
recommend StartLogic or PowWeb.

Step 7 - Optimize for Search Engines

It's important that search engines know what your site is
about. You want to emphasis the keywords you selected
earlier to make sure they know that is the primary subject
of your site. To do this you need to make sure those
keywords are included as part of the title on every page.
Every page should have a different title though. Notice
how on Tropical Art the title on each page is different but
includes "tropical art" as part of the title. You should do
something similar.

You also should provide alternate text for all of your
images. This not only helps search engines know what the
site is about but also helps people with software to assist
with vision disabilities to navigate your site. You're
keywords should also be contained within parts of the
body text on your site, at least on the home page and
preferably on sub pages. Just be careful not to overdue it,
your page is made for human readers and should be
designed as such. Search engines will detect over stuffing
of keywords and rank your site lower as a result. It is also
very helpful to have static urls such as /1234/subject.htm
instead of urls with query string parameters such as
/subject.php?subjectId=1234 . You can use url-rewriting to
accomplish this with a dynamic site. It's also beneficial to
place keywords in the url.

There are many other on-site optimizations you can
perform. I recommend visiting High Rankings for more
advice. Also keep in mind that your primary phrase isn't
the only term you should target. If you have a subpage
about a more specific topic, optimize that page for that
topic not your main one. For example the page about the
artist Carl Aagaard is optimized for his name instead of the
more generic term "Tropical Art".

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Setting Up An Art Affiliate Site - Part 2

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