Currently the Internet is an excellent place for earning money. Moreover you can make money on almost everything, even if you don't have your own product in the Internet. For instance, you can use an affiliate shop for this purpose. Lets take into our consideration hosting business as one of the most old and powerful businesses in Internet. Thus, you will be able to sell any hosting provider product under your own brand or not hiding that you are affiliate - anyway receiving your interest. You don't need any special skill for creating an affiliate shop. I'll try to give everything you need for creating an affiliate shop in this tutorial. I'll describe how to create an affiliate shop using a template as an example. Our future affiliate shop is designed for selling templates as well.
Choosing template design
So let's begin with the site creation. Currently template-based creation of a web site design is the most money-saving and effective. You can purchase any web template on here which has strong reputation of a leader on web templates market. So let's pick one from Hosting related category. Let's select one in light tones with readable texts. While browsing website templates presented at TemplatedBusiness I liked #20391. Here it is:
After purchace you will find HTML-version and source PSD file of the main page, fonts which are used in the template and some screenshots in the archive. Now, it's time for template customization. In case of a low-budget project, you may take advantage of free web templates that will help you solve both problems: time and money. FreeTemplatesOnline.com offers quality free web page designs that can be easily customized and used as a basis for your website.
Template customization
Now, it's time for template customization. If you have no knowledge of HTML and don't want to spend time and efforts to learn it - you can easily contact templatetuning.com where you can order the template customization at an affordable price. And along with the rest of the way we will go full customization of your template.
For the full-fledged website we need only design of the home page, we will make other pages on its basis. To get started you need to install necessary fonts (usually they are placed in "sources/fonts" folder- in this tutorial you'll find more detailed description. After that open .psd file in Photoshop and make necessary customization. The template already has left part with categories (in the future we'll use it for template categories navigation, but I'll tell you about this a bit later). The same with "LATEST WORKS" at central part - we are going to make a show-window with templates with the help of generated JavaScript code. Remove "Search" form from header - we don't need it. And change copyright from the bottom.
Our next stop - logo and slogan. This template has already had logo. You can leave it, or you can purchase a unique one here, or download free logo here, or finally you can read tutorials and articles on creating logos in this section and create your own logo.
You should probably move your logo on the page depending on your comany's name length.
Next give names of pages to navigational buttons in the upper part which you will use on your website. Generally the templates offered by TemplatedBusiness are already optimized for fully functional websites, so you can leave buttons and sections of your website "as is" and just customize it by fill your own info. Let's look on what we have: home, company, hosting, services, contacts and I'm pretty sure that these sections are best to use, except 'Company'. Let's try and if you feel that some page are excess or you need one more you can always easily change it. What I have so far:
The rest operations will depend on hosting provider you choose. So let's do this before continue.
Choosing hosting provider
Now you need to register an affiliate account at any Hosting provider you choose. While concidering you have to pay attention on such factors as base
commission you get, there is lifetime
commissions or not, does hoster has realtime
statistics, how long cookie tracking is etc. And the main thing that drives me to the right desision is the reputation of a hoster provider in affiliate programs forums and communities.
I looked for affiliate program reviews and forums and I have chosed webhostingbuzz.com as it seems to has most attractive affiliate program among others. You can create your account on this page.
On this web site you'll find all the necessary tools for affiliates. There you will be able to generate the code for your affiliate shop, have a look at your financial statistics, update your affiliate information and do a lot of other things:
Next we will continue with:
Template customization
Now, when we know a hosting provider, we should customize our website to fit hosting plans of the hoster. Take a look at hosters hosting plans and services page and copy information and prices to your page.
For this just copy (CTRL+C) this data on original website:
and paste it(CTRL+V) to the new one:
Do the same with features:
but rename "What's included" before:
In most cases after correcting the design you don't need to slice PSD, save as separate images and code the page once more. This template has a complete HTML version, so all you need is to make some small changes in the specified parts and correct images (they are in images folder) using one of HTML editors. If you are not very good at HTML coding, then I recommend you to search the HTML & CSS Tutorials section at www.webdesign.org. I got this code. Again by using the TemplateTuning service you can describe necessary changes, and professional web designers and coders will help you to customize your web site.
Now invent some text to display on the main page. I don't recommend you copy/paste this text from hoster (and any page in the Web), because Search Engines comparing all pages they index, and your page will be putted in "Similar pages" section, that meand that your page will be invisible to anyone who search hosting. But you can rewrite it based on excisting one.
The main page is finished, though it is not functional yet. Save the results and have a look at what we've done:
Looks like a real professional hosting company, heh?
Affiliate codes integration
Now we need to go to the "Alternate Incoming Page Links" section in order to generate the links for adding them on your web site. In this section you should navigate to the "Automated Link Creation" section and create links for every hosting package or service you are going to promote on your website. Paste in a link to desired page and press "Create my link". You'll be able to find it in "My Alternate Incoming URL Links" table. Press the remove button; there you can remove links made by mistake.
Then you should add created links to appropriate "Order" buttons:
Now you should open each page in your HTML editor and make it's customization depending on its purpose. Use your experience in main page customization as example:
Home - completed already;
Hosting - detailed description of all the hosting plans and information about hosting, that you should take from your hosting company;
Services - detailed description of all the services;
Contacts- your contact information, e-mail, messenger, online chat. Best practice for this - contact form, but I'll teach you how to do it on some next tutorial. Sometimes hosting providers doing technical support for your clients.
Privacy policy - provide information about the use of personal information or take it from your hosting provider.
Domain name, hosting & promotion
Creation of the code is finished. Now register a domain name. You can find related materials in the appropriate section of Webdesign.org. After registering a domain name you can use hosting company you are affiliate of or find another of your choice. Upload the affiliate shop files to the server. You will learn everything about hosting here.
If you experience any troubles with registering a domain name or hosting you can always contact TemplateTuning.com professionals.
That's all - now it's time for making money. To get maximum profit from your web site I recommend you to search the appropriate WDL section - Web Promotion. There you'll find a lot of articles about web site promotion. Or you can order Website Promotion Services from Web Design Library to get professional promotional services from qualified specialists.
Good luck with your new hosting business!
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