How?

[catherineW]

Hi, I'm just starting out. Finding lots of bumps in the road and trying to solve them one by one. My first hiccup.... I am trying to build a website but cannot add products until I join an affiliate program and find products that is be interested in promoting (I'm thinking Amazon to begin with). But I cannot join Amazon's affiliate program until I have a website. It seems a catch 22 at the moment. I'm also struggling to put a website together and choose what I think it's the easiest platform to do it (Wix) but I will solve that hiccup when I've answered this one!

Any help welcomed. Thanks in advance.

 

[Graybeard]

WELCOME ABOARD ...

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I think a website, in itself, is the sound of one hand clapping ...
Are you intending to build a website around a topic or an advertising billboard for CPA offers?

The chicken v. the egg: Traffic, Page Views and Engagement. You need someone to sell to (or convert, or monetize) to support the website efforts and expense.

How are you going to promote the `website`?

You can buy traffic, you can try organic social media posting, you can play the SEO game --and hurry up and wait ....

 

[T J Tutor]

Budget
You need to establish a budget and the only way to do that is to build a plan around where you will begin in the business. So you will need to write down the costs you will have for the first few months, or longer. You will need to know your daily budget, weekly budget, and your monthly budget.

Get a VPS
With your VPS, you can host multiple domains, an absolute must in this business. You can also host multiple (usually unlimited) email addresses.

Build Sites
You are going to have more than one site, if not immediately, within the first month or two. At any given time I am running several content sites and usually between 15 and 25 landing pages. You will likely start with landers. Content sites generally require a bit more experience than you now have, but you will later (down the road a bit), be developing some content sites. They're a different animal.

Traffic
You are going to select a couple, maybe a few, traffic sources to begin with. They generally require a deposit, and a renewable funding source like a PayPal account, a credit card, and some accept virtual cards.

Intelligence
I highly recommend an intelligence platform subscription. Maybe not so much for doing Amazon stuff as much as for anything that you use a landing page for. I use several including Social AdScout, Adplexity, and a few others. An intelligence platform will save you hours a day in research time.

There is more, but this is much of what you need to make your initial steps into this business.

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Before you go crazy building your first marketing sites, start by building a site about yourself. Something light and easy that simply points out minimum details about your life and your profession. Under the profession part state your last successful employment and then state your new venture into online marketing and that you are being coached by a large organized group of marketers you've made friends with.

You are doing this to satisfy the needs of companies like Amazon, as well as any networks you apply to. Today, the companies we do business with ask for a website as a way to confirm you are the person you claim to be. These companies implemented this measure many years ago as part of their verification practices to help weed out scammers as well as to weed out those not really committed to doing the work.

 

[sinov]

Wow. That's cool to know