Step 3: Setup your infrastructure

You’ll need the following to get started:

1. Approved merchant offer from sharasale.com (or another network with datafeeds).   Some of the merchants are instant approval; others never approve applications, and the rest take days or even weeks to approve applications.  Diversify and apply to many merchants who have products related to your niche until you have at least 3 merchants you can get datafeeds from.  (Hint: Make sure you have a shell site built AND registered with ShareaSale BEFORE you apply for a program.  Populate it with generic data, including articles and any content that would show a merchant affiliate manager that you are a serious web site.  Just get something in there so the affiliate manager for the merchant can visualize the type of site their products will appear on.
2. Datafeed for your merchant/offer.  Some merchants do not offer datafeeds, be sure to apply to merchants that DO in fact offer datafeeds.  You can search only those with datafeeds to make it easier to identify datafeed merchants.
3. Domain name.  Now here is something you CAN use GoDaddy or Namecheap.com for.  Any domain will do, but consider that targeted keywords in the URL make a big difference when you’re trying to rank your site.  Namecheap is who I recommend.  Get WHOIS protection AND an SSL certificate with your domain purchase for about $9 when you buy with a coupon, so find this month’s coupon!  SSL and Whois protection is important for a few reasons, so get them both with the coupon.
4. Hosting.  This can be a cheapo account, but I highly recommend not using Godaddy, Hostgator, or other high-volume-per-server shared servers.  WFReview has a hosting service that utilizes a WFReview/Wordpress optimized server farm and it’s a LOT faster/scalable and inexpensive than using one of those other services.  If you’re going to import more than 10,000 products, probably better to use a VPS or dedicated server.  Our hosting packages at WFReview can handle much more data than a shared account on GoDaddy or others, it’s a good idea to use us for at least your first site so you have no issues with traffic or latency on the server.
5. WFReview 3.0 or later
6. A copy of Wordpress 2.8.6 or newer (Wordpress MU works as well, and if you’re experienced with WPMU, WFReview works flawlessly with it, consider using it to scale out in the future.)
7. Any SEO plugins you wish to use. (XML-Sitemaps is essential, the others you can choose on your own!)  Also check out the Related Posts plugin, it absolutely makes a HUGE difference in conversions.
8. Setup a Google Webmaster Tools account.  This allows you to submit sitemaps and view rank data for your pages/keywords.  It’s free and it gets results.  You can submit up to 50K pages in a single Sitemap, and here you can specify multiple sitemaps.  Sitemaps are XML files that tell Google where to look on your site for content. It’s not a guarantee that you’re page/URL will get ranked in Google’s search results, but it does help!
9. Setup a single trial account at www.sheerseo.com .  You will use this to monitor rankings for your top keywords.  The trial account is SUPER limited, but it gets you in the mindset of thinking rank.
10. Get a free account at clicktale.com.  This will allow you to see where visitors are clicking/engaging on your site. This is important early on to gauge where people are first trying to look, allowing you to modify your theme/layout to get a lower bounce rate.

You’ll want to complete the steps above in order, though if you already have datafeeds and hosting, it’s not imperative.  I recommend following the order above.

Before you proceed to Step 4, you want to get all the hosting setup, Wordpress installed, and WFReview installed.  Make sure the site comes up when you go to it in a web browser.  Also make sure you have a local copy of the Shareasale merchant datafeed on your computer.

NEXT: Using WFReview To Make Money With Your First Website PART 4

Popularity: 18% [?]