Advice needed before I begin

You can build pretty much anything on WordPress these days. You can also head over to ThemeForest and you'll see numerous themes that you can get hold of to apply to pretty much any business.


Depends on the themes / plugins you're buying. They can also customized i.e. by designing your own pages via CSS and HTML but coding knowledge is essential, unless you outsource it.

You could consider getting your hands on something like OptimizePress which is going to cover the majority of all your needs, or invest yearly / monthly with Lead-Pages. If you look on their blog they also give you numerous templates to download, but again... you'll be required to have coding knowledge in order to get those working.


It is ridiculous but you can still make it work if that was your goal. The market places are going to depend on your niche, but if you are UK based, then JVZoo ill most likely be ideal as they payout directly to your PayPal account and depending on the product owner, you can even get instant commissions, which is helpful if you're looking to put that money straight back into advertising etc.


SEO is a long term approach. At the early stages you want to ideally work on getting paid traffic to get quicker results. It's going to you to do a lot of testing, tweaking and adapting, which are all crucial points at this stage. I've done SEO in the past, I've even been hired by 2 companies to do SEO but it's a major headache to keep up to date with everything.

So my suggestion is to wait until you're profitable then outsource it.


You wouldn't build a website around 1 product. A product needs to be a solution and therefore your content needs to be based on your subscribers or your audience needs. Sometimes it's just pure value, but then it follows up with value and then the solution.

I think you're over-thinking things and that's stopping you to make any progress. Don't hold back, keep moving forward as you learn but learning is one thing, and taking action is another.

I started out with affiliate marketing 5 years ago exactly like you are doing it. I built a Wordpress site around a niche and got some organic traffic and actually made some sales. It was addicting.

I spent years trying to scale this up by building new sites and promoting more products without much success. I would make some sales but just enough to keep me chasing the dream not any life changing income.

This is where I messed up..
I never spent the time to build a list. I started to a couple of times but it was harder than it seemed. Since I was jumping from one niche to another I just couldn't build a relationship with my subscribers thus I wasn't getting any sales from the small list that I would attempt to build so I would quit and go out and promote another Clickbank product that might earn me $20 a month.

I put the "cart before the horse". I should have focused on listbuiding from the beginning. If you build a list around quality products that addresses the solution to the problem that caused them to join your list in the first place, you then can look for more quality products that you can promote to them as an affiliate.

Hope this helps.

I'll answer what I can, and let the others chime in on the rest.

Yes, absolutely. It does pose some challenges, however. The opt-in form won't be able to go to the right of the page. Well, for me, anyway. I suspect the theme has a lot to do with it. Putting one on the home page, above the content, is just as feasible, and effective. It depends on your theme, so if you do encounter this issue, there's a solution.

For me, WordPress is more than ideal. Very little "skills" required.

Whoever told you that is a fool. Clickbank is well-established, and as many Warriors know, can be very lucrative if played right. It's all about the trust of your subscribers. It's all about the sales-page of the product. Providing it's not leaky, or terribly written, making sales shouldn't be an issue.

Article Syndication (it seems as though you have the writing abilities for it). I'll let Alexa do what she does best, and respond in this regard. You may also hear from myob and JohnMcCabe (and several others -- all of whom you can completely trust).

Just a quick summary of article syndication:

Creating high-quality content (800-1200+ words), and getting it distributed to many publications with a little author bio at the end, with a link in clickable form. Publications include magazines, blogs, newsletters, ezines, emagazines, etc. There is a learning curve, and it's not an overnight thing, unfortunately. You need to build credibility, which can be done by getting published in niche-relevant publications.

Make sure the articles you write have a voice, and provoke, entertain, captivate, and leave your audience "wanting to read more" afterwards. You'll then appreciate the importance of a good bio at the end.

Trust me, I've made every single mistake possible, besides the ones which Alexa, and many others helped me with. Create a voice in your niche. Took me time to appreciate this. There's a difference between informational content which can be found everywhere, and content coming from you, the master of your niche which everyone wants to read more from.

Have backup products. Make sure that if you're promoting two products, there's a third "just in case". It'll be an inconvenience, but is absolutely necessary to ensure what you just said doesn't happen.

P.S. I would recommend you don't use SEO as a traffic-generation method. Affiliate marketing requires you to build trust with your audience, and your list. SEO traffic is far less important than getting your article published in publications.

For example:

Say you're in the fishing niche. You essentially start off as a "nobody". As you syndicate content to publications, such as the obvious, fishing publications, and then outdoor publications, and then cooking publications (who doesn't want to know how to cook a delicious tuna meal?), etc. you become reputable. You become the "go-to" person in the niche.

What sounds better, being in the eyes of a huge crowd who thrives on your content, or being Google-dependent, with traffic which won't appreciate your content and expertise as much as those you've syndicated to, who read the publications you publish to, because that's what they enjoy doing.

It should be obvious, I would think (don't worry - I didn't know article syndication was even a thing when I first started).

There is no perfect way to do Internet Marketing. The great majority of people who have attempted it, are attempting and will be all have 'one' thing in common.

They are all trying to get their ducks in line and perfect everything before they do anything.

Why is this?

It comes down to this...

Most people are Betas. Not Alphas. Alphas are leaders who possess traits like:

1- Not Afraid to Make Decisions: Betas are too afraid to make a decision and that is why you find most of them scouring the Internet trying to 'Perfect' everything. Look, most of the decisions we will make being an Alpha or Beta will be wrong one's but this is how human nature learns....

By trial and error.

We make mistakes, we know what doesn't work and this gives us the real Knowledge as to what will work.

2- Not Afraid to Fail: Alpha types are not scared to go 'all in' no matter what the outcome is. They are not afraid to post their names and pictures all over the Internet because they believe in themselves.

Betas hide behind fake names, no pictures and their computers because if they fail, no one in their 'inner circle' of family and friends will know that they failed.

Alphas are the type of breed that would rather 'die trying' instead of trying to perfect everything.

Alphas are Ignorance on Fire!!

Are Alphas and Leaders born?

Yes some people are born with these natural traits but history has proven time and time again that Alpha Leaders are 'Developed'.

Now go out and lead yourself.

To answer all your questions in a simplified way:

1. Yes, do wordpress. Keep it simple. Hostgator is a good place to start. Install a free theme or just use 2014. Plenty more simple blogging themes for free on wordpress.org. Pay someone (or a couple people) on Fiverr or odesk to install and step it up for you.

2. Get an autoresponder to capture emails and build a list. Mailchimp is free but doesn't like affiliate, IM, MLM, CPA stuff, so probably Aweber is best.

3. Start with high-gravity offers on clickbank. Do blogs and youtube videos reviewing the product/offer and include your affiliate link.

4. Get some related PLR, and give away stuff when visitors hit your video or blog, then redirect them to the clickbank offer. And followup with an email about the same offer.

This formula works. Yes, there's a lot to discover in terms of how appealing your website and videos look, but don't worry with that in the beginning. Just get the site/email optin/redirect/follow up/ all working first. Then you've got the steps down so you can duplicate over and over again for more offers. Plus, your speed and skill will improve with practice.

just remember if you build a site , do not be specific in the domain name.
example: if your site is about coffee. do not name it bunncoffeemachine.com (very specific)
name it coffeehub.com or something like that. this way if affliate products end, you just reoplace them and it does not affect your site.

Please excuse my mentioning that this is really out-of-date advice, for 2015, Jeff?

Warriors are leaving Hostgator (and other now EIG-owned hosts) in droves, because they've become so unreliable and their customer-service so unresponsive. Many people explain the position pretty clearly in these recent threads ...
http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post9797330
http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...or-family.html

And this will help anyone to choose an appropriate host, if they read it carefully enough ...
HostGator Alternatives, Part 1: Who is EIG? - The Digital FAQ

Please excuse my mentioning that, personally, I would urge anyone to start with low-gravity products, and make life easier for themselves rather than more difficult!

I made the mistake of starting off with high-gravity products, myself, wrongly imagining that they were either converting well or at least selling well, and would "therefore" be better/easier to promote as an affiliate.

Like so many others before, and since, it was when I realised how deeply mistaken that perception was, and why, that I started making some money!

These threads (which I know have also helped many others in similar positions) explain a little more ...
Gravity High or Lower - Which Sells Best & Why?
Clickbank gravity - is there a sweet-spot here?
Understanding Clickbank Gravity
Clickbank Gravity

Yes, it's true that there's comparatively little point in promoting from UK Amazon (other than as an "addition" to amazon.com, amazon.ca and the others). But Amazon affiliates who live in the UK (like me) are promoting from those other Amazon sites. The web is international. Your own location needn't be relevant at all to what/how you promote.

"Products" don't generally attract buyers, online. Marketers attract buyers.

I've been making most of my living from promoting ClickBank products for 6+ years and don't find any lack of buyers for them. What matters is to have the right marketing skills and knowledge to promote them successfully. I'd start here, if I were you: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post7110523

Absolutely right!

It wouldn't make a lot of sense to design and build your business so that it's dependent on the continued success and availability of one specific product, at all, would it? One of the great advantages of being an affiliate is that we have complete flexibility about which individual products we promote, and - unlike vendors - we can build a genuine, asset-based business without it being dependent on any specific product at all. It would be a "strange" approach to choose to give up that major advantage before we even start?

Make your sites/business about niches, not about specific products.

A realistic traffic-generation plan that doesn't depend on Google.

I always suggest to people that they shouldn't put time and effort into trying to attract SEO traffic, for two main reasons: first, it's very precarious and makes your business Google-dependent, and any business that's Google-dependent is no more than one algorithm-change away from a potential accident (or even a potential disaster), as so many Warriors have been finding out over the last year or two, some of them to their very great cost; secondly, for me, search engine traffic, in every single one of my niches, has been uniformly the worst-converting traffic out of everything I've ever tried - search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often and actually buy anything by far the least often. I admit I do get tons of search engine traffic to all my main sites (because high rankings for multiple keywords happen to be a minor side-benefit of the main targeted traffic-generation method I use) but I'd hate to have to make a living just from that traffic. If you have a good look round the forum, you'll also see plenty of other Warriors making exactly this point.

Good luck!


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Thanks guys I really appreciate the excellent advice from everyone in this thread. I'm very grateful that you've taken time out to do that. I now understand why this forum is so popular and it's due to the excellent posters and the help they give others especially newbies.