In recent days, we took the advice of some affiliate experts, and spent some time getting up to speed on affiliate marketing as well as researching the major and niche players in the industry.

Excited, ContentRobot was ready to jump right in and sign up with several affiliate companies to see which ones can offer the best fit for our soon-to-be-launched affiliate blog.

However, we quickly found out that you can’t join any of them just because you want to – you first have to have a website (and offerings) that the affiliate companies find worthy. This meant: it’s time to build the blog.

We had to now determine some of our blog’s specifics:

  • What topics / products would we focus on? (It had to be something we were fairly interested in, not just something that is considered a “moneymaker.”)
  • What domain name will we use? (This could take a bit, as so many good names have already been snapped up long ago.)
  • Would we use a hosted blogging solution? (Because flexibility is of utmost importance to us, we’ll install and configure WordPress software and related plugins/widgets on our own server.)
  • What about design? (While there are free WordPress themes out there, we wanted to be able to customize the look of the theme as well as the affiliate ads.)
  • What advertising methods would we be using? (We expect to evaluate many affiliate options available to us, including banner advertising, text ads, ecommerce linking, Google AdSense, and even site sponsorship. We will plug and play with them all until we land on the right formula for us.)

Soon ContentRobot will reveal what we are selling and what domain name you’ll soon be able to find us at. (Note that we’ll be under construction until we have at the basic design completed and 10 completed posts. Once we have a functional blog, we’ll let you watch as we implement the various affiliate alternatives.)

While we are in build mode, we’ll keep the information and education coming. So look for reports on affiliate blog success stories, interesting finds, and more.