What will your site be about?

The internet can be broadly divided into three different types of sites. Those that sell things, those that provide information about things, and sites that show photographs and/or videos of naked people. There is a lot of competition in the area of the later, so we shall concentrate on the first two.

Sites that sell things

If you already have an offline business, or a business idea that involves the web, then you will already of course have some ideas about what you would like your website to be about. In order to make money out of affiliate marketing through this site you will need to start thinking about the affiliate programs available to you. Of course, there is always books, but as we have already discussed, the payout on Amazon.com is rather poor unless you are getting millions of hits on your site every week.

You should think about browsing the catalogue for affiliate programs that compliment your idea and with products that appeal to you (or perhaps products you already own and love!).

Hopefully this kind of thinking will help you crystalise your ideas and focus your mind on building that website that will not only be sucessful at selling your own product / products, but one that will provide you with a steady stream of extra income.

Sites that provide information

Starting from scratch like this affords us many luxuries when it comes to designing a website for affiliate marketing. However if you haven't got any ideas yet then try asking yourself 'What are my areas of interest or expertiese?'. Right, go and have a look in the catalogue for some complimentary products.

If nothing springs to mind don't panic, just go and have a browse through the cataloge of affiliate programs and try and find one, or a related group of products that interests or appeals to you. You should think about selling that product or group of products.

So you have an area of interest or expertiese and/or some products in mind? You can now create an information site based on this area. Don't worry if there are other websites out there doing the same thing, there is plenty of room for more on the internet. Even if there is one page which completely dominates the web on a particular topic and it comes in at number one in the search engines, there are still 9 other sites on the same page.

Its is true that you are more likley to get higher search engine rankings if there is less competition for a topic