Five steps (or slightly more) to build and start making money from an Art affiliate website.

1.     Select an Art Affiliate Program.

Some of the current/active ones are: Art.com, Allposter.com, 123posters.com

Things to compare:

a.      Commission structure: Usually from 15% to 30%

b.      Cookie retention time: This is the

c.      Conversion rate

d.      Discounts and promotions

e.      Data feed

 

2.     Choose a Domain Name and Hosting Company

Domain name

a.      Domain suffix: There are many options - .net, .com, .biz, .info etc. The domain extension .com is the most common extension that most people prefer or type when they are searching for a website.

b.      You can check availability for your selection at internic - internic.net/whois.html

c.      Never use trademarked names: simple reason is to avoid future lawsuits.

d.      A quick survey from friends and family can provide you the feedback on whether the domain name is easy to remember, spell and type.

e.      Some common domain registering companies: yahoo, godaddy, networksolutions and register.com

f.       Don’t make the primary domain too long and avoid using hyphens in your domain.

Hosting Company

a.      Disk Space: When comparing web hosts disk space shouldn’t be a major deciding factor as most sites need less than 5MB of web space.

b.      Bandwidth: For starters 5 GB of bandwidth is enough. Ensure that the hosting company offers upgrades to existing accounts when your site grows.

c.      Technical Support and after sales service: Check if hosting company provides technical support function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

d.      E-mail: If you have your own site, you would probably want to have email addresses at your own domain, like info@mydomain.com, etc.

e.      Control panel/ Web based tools: This tool provided by majority of hosts allows you to manage different aspects of your web account yourself. It has various tools like add, delete, and manage your email addresses, and change passwords for your account.

 

3.     Build the Website

If you are technically savvy you may build the website on your own. You may hire an experienced web developer or hire a freelancer to build your website. This will provide you a quick to market website.

 

4.     Perform Search Engines Optimization (SEO)

a.     Build BackLinks

·         Submit your site to free and paid directories.

·         Register with major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.

b.     Generate free and paid Traffic

·         Buy Adword TextLinks to generate traffic.

·         Buy traffic from established companies.

·         MSN and Yahoo offer coupons using their targeted keyword services.

·         Buy banner Ads

c.      Refresh your content

·         This provides users the incentive to re-visit your website. Don’t get frustrated as it takes time for each search engine to index your pages. Typically it takes between 2-6 months for pages to be indexed.

 

5.     Regular Monitoring

Monitor your error and access logs via the control panel, usage reports and sales reports via the affiliate programs toolkit to ensure you are targeting the correct products to your visitors. Refresh and update your website to entice user re-visits.