An Affiliate Website Anyone Can Build

I know a lot of my posts are rather technical, but this one is a bit different. I’m going to show you an affiliate website that anyone can build, and walk you through exactly how I did it.

First, you need a niche. I’ve covered this before, How to Choose an Affiliate Offer to Promote. For this site, it was all about a love (some may say obsession) I have with Christmas and the movie, A Christmas Story.

I met with A Christmas Story House at the recent ShareASale ThinkTank, which boosted this project to the top of my list. (Hear that, merchants? When you meet with affiliates face-to-face, you become a priority to them). What resulted from this meeting is Buy Leg Lamps.

Buy Leg Lamps

Here’s how the site was created, in about 20 hours

1. Buy the domain name. Don’t spend too long here. I like domains that start with “buy” and then add the product name.
2. Install WordPress, add theme. For this site, I went with eStore by Elegant Themes. For $39 you get access to all their themes. eStore looked like a shopping site, which is what I wanted to do.
3. Start adding products, manually. Yep… this merchant doesn’t have a datafeed, so I was manually adding products. As I looked over their products, I came up with my own categories on my whiteboard, then I started populating them. It took a while to figure out the image sizes that the theme wanted, but once I knew, I was able to go through the products pretty quick. I have 55 products on the site, from A Christmas Story House and Amazon.com
4. Add something more than just products. In this case, I added a YouTube video of the trailer from A Christmas Story

Now I’d be lying if I said I didn’t do any custom programming on the site. There are a few things I wanted to change.

As an affiliate, my goal is to get the cookie set. So, I changed the links to go to through the affiliate link, and not the shopping cart links. You’ll notice my links look like: /addtocart.php?nProductID=218. I wanted the user to think they were buying the product at this site! addtocart.php is simple:

<?php
	define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
	require_once('wp-config.php');

	$cQuery = "select * from wp_postmeta where meta_key='afflink' and post_id=" . (int)$_GET['nProductID'] . " limit 1";
	$oResult = mysql_query($cQuery);
	if ($rsData = mysql_fetch_array($oResult)) {
		if (preg_match("/^http\:\/\/(www\.)?redriderleglamps/", $rsData['meta_value'])) {
			// If it's a link for A Christmas Story shop, deeplink it
			header("Location:  http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?u=132296&b=251080&m=28973&afftrack=&urllink=" . urlencode(str_replace("http://", "", $rsData['meta_value'])));
		} // ends
		else {
			header("Location:  " . $rsData['meta_value']);
		} // ends else from
	} // ends
	else {
		header("Location:  http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=252579&U=132296&M=28973");
	} // ends else from
?>

I add a custom field to each post called afflink and that’s the affiliate link. Since most of my links where going to redriderleglamps.com, I put in some code to automatically deeplink it.

I also added Facebook’s commenting, so when a user comments on a product, the comment is shared on their Facebook page, and shown to their friends. If you’re using eStore, edit /wp-content/themes/eStore/includes/single-product.php and add

<div id="fb-root"></div><script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script><fb:comments href="http://www.yourwebsite.com<?= $_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL'] ?>" num_posts="6" width="615"></fb:comments>

Then, do a little SEO on the site:

• title tags
• meta descriptions
• robots.txt
• sitemap
• image sitemap

Finally, showoff your site to other Elegant Themes users in their customization showcase and then start getting your backlinks! (BTW, if you liked this post, I’d appreciate a backlink to my Leg Lamp site)

Tagged as: n00bs, wordpress