The concept is simple, promote products online and if someone buys that item after clicking your link you will earn a commission (between 4-10%).  There are two routes you can follow, either create a niche site around a particular product (more about this below) or you can create a large generic website.

Niche Affiliate Websites

One the best ways to start in Affiliate Marketing is by creating a niche website around a particular product, finding a niche can be quite hard however we’re going to give you an idea to get started. Think of some products that you’re interested in, it could be shoes, handbags, mobile phones etc and then see how many searches per month it gets in Google. You can find out the numbers by using this tool: Google Keyword Tool

Lets use the example of ‘fishing bivvy’. According to the Google Keyword Tool that term was searched for 22,200 times during March 2010. Therefore there are 22,200 people interested in buying fishing bivvy’s. So there we go, you have found your first niche! Making money out of this particular product would require you get to the number 1 position in google for the term ‘fishing bivvy’ – usually quite easy but does take 1-6 months to achieve.

The next step is to find out if you can buy a domain with that term in it – for example: www.fishingbivvy.co.uk – upon looking you will find that someone has already registered that domain. Don’t worry however because the .org.uk domain will rank just as well in Google and they are often not registered.

This same method applies for any niche you can think of, the rule of thumb however is that you should only bother with niche websites if the term gets more than 20,000 searches per month.

Once you have your chosen your niche, you need to register the domain. Registering a domain is easy and will cost you under £10 for 2 years , we recommend that you use either 123-reg or Vidahost. The next thing that is required is web hosting, we always use Vidahost as they are UK based and that helps with the ranking of your website.

Once you have your idea, domain and web hosting you will need to build a website. If you don’t have any experience in building websites don’t worry! Thanks to the wonderful WordPress platform you can set up a site in minutes and start creating a great looking website. WordPress is a blogging platform that works very well when used as an Affiliate website.

Next, you will need products to promote on your new website. You will need to register on an Affiliate Network so that you can create links to the products and therefore earn commission. The most popular Affiliate Network/Program in the UK is Amazon, we recommend you sign up for their Affiliate Program. Another popular network to register with is Affiliate Window, they have merchants such as Toys r us, Screwfix, B&Q etc.

And there you have it – a basic guide to getting started with a niche! Remember it can take up to a few weeks for your new website to appear in Google and then a further few months before you start ranking for your main search term. Adding unique content on a regular basis will really help with your rankings, aim to write 150-200 words per page. Don’t forget to try and acquire links to your new website, Google loves links and it will help boost your search ranking.