1. Where and what to start with.
2. Content vs Product Data.
3. Building a new site.
4. Getting Traffic.
5. Bias and Competitive Info.
6. Driving the click through.
7. Selecting Landing Pages.
8. Keeping things Fresh.
9. Using the DriveWerks Tools.
• Search Box
• Show Case System
• Parts Data Feed
• Accessories Datafeed
• Best Sellers Data feeds
• Fast Launch Template

Where and what to start with.

Before getting started let me state one thing, affiliate marketing is not about banner farms, no one producing banner farms is making any serious money. Affiliate marketing is about creating pages that add value to the purchase cycle, for example; by assisting the buyer in their purchase choice, educating them in the products on offer or giving them information on the options available. So before starting to promote DriveWerks, think about what products will fit in best on your site and how you can add value to the purchase cycle.

It might be that right now you don't have a site that has anything to do with cars, you might not even want to develop a site that is about cars, so take a look at the products we have that do fit into your site. DriveWerks offers a wide range of areas for you to work in, not just in car parts, but also in books, video, posters, gadgets, tools, garage products and more. Even if your site is a about "Gifts for People who don't drive!", you'll be able to find targeted DriveWerks products to promote on your site.

If you are planning to build a new site, then first of all have a look at what DriveWerks offers and then search Google and MSN to see how many other sites are doing the same thing, try and find a niche where there is a demand but also less people promoting in that niche. For example, you could focus on Car Parts where you are competing with millions of sites for the same audience, or you could focus on tire care / protection where there a way less, or even a more focused niche such as tire totes where there are comparatively few.

Once you have chosen what you want to promote, then start building the site with an eye on content first. Don't build the site directly with your affiliate links in place, there are many locations on the Internet that you will want to promote your site that will penalize you for having affiliate links on your site. Build It, Promote It then add your affiliate links. An excellent guide on all the steps and things to keep in mind is James Martell's - Affiliate Marketers Handbook

Content vs Product Data

There is a pretty much an none stop discussion over what is best to promote, Content or Product Data. Both have their advantages. Product Data is easy to use, you're using data that comes direct from the merchant with descriptions pictures and so on, good for preselling if presented in the right way. The problem here is that everyone else is going to be using the exact same data, meaning your site is not unique and unless you have a loyal user base already in place you will have nothing for attracting users to see your data and you'll be skipped over by search engines, as they presently put priority on what is unique.

Content on the other hand can add a lot of uniqueness to a site and make it an interesting place for Internet users to visit, but content isn't easy to write about something you might no little about, if you don't keep adding to your site it can fail to attract users to keep visiting it. Running a content site is hard work, but the value of unique content is very high.

Taking things to the next logical step, a mix of the two would seem to be the best solution, content pages that link to product data pages, meaning you have the product information on site to present to the site visitors and you have the unique content to attract them in the first place.

Building a new site.

As mentioned in the first section, building a new site isn't simply a matter of throwing pages together, it needs planning and a defined goal. You need to know what you want to end up with to ensure you get it done right. Firstly don't use any of those Emall solutions, the ones that thousands of people use, that are all the same and never get any sales. Learn HTML, it's not that hard and books are cheap, with some basic HTML under your belt and a HTML design software such as HomeSite, HotDog Professional or CoffeeCup HTML Editor. Learning HTML frees you up from using pre sold templates that are sold over and over and allows you to control exactly what your site presents the content.

Next decide what you want to promote, don't get carried away, the more you promote on the site the less focus it will have the worse it will do in search engines, keeping a tight focus on a particular niche or product set means that your visitors will also be tightly focused and more likely to click through and ultimately convert. As you grow the site later on then certainly it pays to add more sections, but each section should have a core focus, I'd aim for 10 to 12 pages and 6-10 products per section. That can break down into

   » The Section Home Page
   » 2 to 4 Pages of relevant content
   » 2 to 4 Pages of relevant reviews
   » 2 to 4 Pages of product info.

Make sure your page titles, headers, navigation for each section are focused on what it is you are promoting. If you aim to keep a tight focus on the site then you should aim to grow the content by 2 to 3 pages per week, always keeping a focus on what you are promoting.

Don't over do your affiliate links, one banner per page and maybe 2-3 affiliate links, all your other links should aim to be internal links or links to other sites that you own and are topic relevant. There is little point adding a link to a Barbie site on a Site about Spark Plugs.

As I mentioned above one of the best resources on building affiliate based sites is James Martell's - Affiliate Marketers Handbook, it's a solid investment in a book written by a guy who does this for a living and isn't pretending to be a "know it all Guru", James' will tell you himself, things are always changing and he's always learning and trying new things.

Getting Traffic.

Getting enough traffic to your site to start making sales is one of the toughest parts of affiliate marketing. There are numerous gimmick systems for driving traffic too, the aim though is to get "Targeted Traffic", traffic that cares about what is on your site and is interested to click through to learn more and hopefully buy things. The cheapest easiest way to get targeted traffic is through effective Search Engine Marketing, and rather than repeat what is said in many different locations I recommend this link as a brief intro with 10 tips on SEO.

Bias and Competitive Info.

When developing your site you obviously want to drive traffic to the site that has the best conversion and best payout, these two might not be the same site. So you need to review where you want your site to go and then work towards giving that site a competitive bias. And by this I mean highlighting reasons why your targeted site is the best, looking at value added items, such as free shipping, return days, insurance, product range and so forth, at the same time don't make your second and third choice sites sound like disaster areas, why would you offer links to a site that is flawed. Your secondary links need to offer bias, just not as competitive as the site you want to drive people to.

Driving the click through.

Provide too much info and consumers will have no reason to click through, provide too little and they will have no interest to click through. This is especially true for content pages. You need to lead the visitor to want to learn more, give them a taste, but not too much, the aim of your site is to drive business to your merchant partners, and unless you have a form of community on your site or a way to make them loyal to your site, then you want them clicking out to your targetted merchants, not hanging around reading all your content. When it comes to product information, gettig click through can be as easy as offering "click here for more details", on content sites aim for phrases that tempt the visitors to learn more, get better educated and the like.

Selecting Landing Pages.

When you're building your content and links, one very important factor that you must never over look, is where do your visitors end up when they click through. If after reading through a great article you have written on paint and body care your visitor then clicks through to the home page of the DriveWerks site, well they are going to experience a feeling of dissapointment. What happened to learning more, where is the continuity... you will have destroyed the hard work you did with the article by failing to provide a targeted landing page. Make sure all your links go to merchant landing pages that are in context with your pre click page.

Keeping things Fresh.

One thing James Martell has been talking about a lot this year is a concept of "continual pour". By this he means constantly adding content to your site. Don't add 100 pages all in one go, but add them add a gradual and consistant speed to allow your site to grow at a slow but steady pace. This can be as much as one page per day, or one per week. The aim though is to keep the content fresh, training visitors and search engine spiders alike to know that content is coming up on a consistant basis. If you throw up everything in one go... well no one will ever come back because your content never changes.

Using the DriveWerks Tools.

Search Box : The DriveWerks search box allows you to place a search box on your site that will search the DriveWerks site and display results that link into the site via pre-coded LinkShare links. You can edit the basic script to change the design and the searchable areas in the drop down. You could for example put 6 or 7 search boxes on your site , each one focused on searching a different section of DriveWerks. Please click here to learn more.

Show Case System : This is the fast way to create a page full of focused products without having to do any coding, searching of the site or encoding of affiliate links. The DriveWerks show case system allows you to create as many pages as you like, precoded and focused on the product area you select. The code created can be edited for style if you like. Please click here to learn more.

Parts Data Feed : Our part datafeed has over 350,000 items in it and is ideal for using in the creation of a data driven parts site. However it's a lot of data and we recommend that if you are new to datafeeds that you use some of our other tools first. Please click here to learn more.

Accessories Datafeed : This feed covers all the accessories and items not included in our parts feed, it is much smaller, at around 6000 items. Again if you're not used to working with datafeeds then you'll find that the best seller feeds (with free scripts) and the search box above can accomplish a lot without the need to use a datafeed. Please click here to learn more.

Best Sellers Data feeds : We provide 4 feed with free scripts that can allow you to promote our best sellers on your site with no fuss at all. Each feed presents data going back over a different length of time, meaning you could use all four feeds without too much duplucation. We have free sctipts in PHP and ASP, which can be set up in minutes and require no programming knowledge. Please click here to learn more.

Fast Launch Template : We offer a 10 page fast launch site to all our new partnes, with that in mind, don't just load it up and leave it as it is, it'll be the same as 1000 other people who didn't make changes. Once you have it live and you see how it looks, then spend time to change the content, change the products and add more pages, make it unique. Mail us for a Copy.