There are a few things you need to consider long before either creating your website or paying someone to do it for you. You need to have an Internet Marketing Plan for your site. Here is an overview of Affiliate X Files and what we do when deciding  to enter a market.

The first thing that was considered was the theme of the site and as we have said we were restricted by the domain name having the word affiliate in the url. So the first tip is to always have your prime keyword in the url of your site. I know this is not always possible but if you use your imagination we are sure that you will be able to find something suitable. Try though to stay away from domains that look like this; www.this-is-my-domain-com they are hard to remember and I have found a low success rate when using them.

Ok so now the theme of the site is affiliate and affiliate marketing so the next thing we had to decide was how are we going to be competitive in a marketplace that has 10,800,000 websites trying to get to number one in Google. The first thing we had to do was check what sites were ranking in the top positions for affiliate marketing and see what they were doing to get to the top and whether we thought we could beat  them or at least get into the top 10 on Google.

You might be asking why do we always only speak about Google well it is around 70% of all traffic online if you can crack it in Google usually you will get good rankings in the other search engines overtime but this doesn't seem to work in reverse.

The first thing we noticed was that the top site not taking into account WikiPedia.org was only a PR4 site and the next one was a PR3 so we are in with a chance of getting a deceit ranking. We also noticed one other thing and that is that this site has many links coming in from Blogger meaning from the same IP. Another small observation was what this site was using as anchor text Affiliate Programs and Affiliate Directory not Affiliate Marketing. Always Analyze Your Competitors Website

To analyze any websites we have software that does this for us in a fraction of the time it would take us to do it all manually. Here is the top ranked website.

Here is our site using the same software with the same settings except our keywords are Affiliate and Affiliate Marketing.

As you can see we get some very important information when it comes to research and what keywords are being used. Affiliate Directory is the main keyword for this site but it is top ranked in the search for Affiliate Marketing. So all we do now is focus all of our onpage and offpage tactics on the keyword "affiliate marketing" so that we can rank highly. The software we are using to find out all this information is Seo Elite created by Brad Callen.

If the sites would have been PR6 or more we would not have pursued this Niche "Affiliate Marketing" as it would take to long to show significant traffic. You need to take small steps to get established first.

We then decided to be more relevant on the topic of affiliate marketing and that we would create at least thirty static pages on the Affiliate X Files site all covering aspects of affiliate marketing and then use the blog to add updates keeping the site fresh with content and relevant tips that are useful to the user.

We dont have to worry about site structure as Semiologic Pro the wordpress template we are using takes care of all of that for us plus the many other plugins that assist with Seo of the site. If you dont want to use a template and wish to build the web site your self do a search on Silo Pages so you have a good understanding of how to structure your website pages.

The only other things we now need to take into account are creating a site map and the contact details, privacy and disclaimer statements and we are set to go. This details as well as quality content give your site credibility and a more professional look and feel making your customers trust you.