Tutorial 1 – preparing the Affilistore domain
So you are ready for Affiliate marketing now.
By now, you should have acquired your chosen domain and decided what products you wish to promote. You will also have decided and arranged your hosting whether shared, semi-dedicated or dedicated hosting per earlier entries here.
As you might know, I favour Affilistore as a means of promoting vendors product catalogues as it provides extreme flexibility to add products.
A few example sites that I market using Affilistore are:
Affilistore is by no means the only way to market vendor products. I also promote an excellent white label cheap mobile phone deals site where it is unlikely that any better mobile phone deal will be found anywhere in the UK.
However, the first tutorial on this blog will teach you how to install and develop an Affilistore site due to its quick set up.
There is some preparation necessary to ensure that your site is on the net and your database is at the ready. Follow this tutorial to complete final readiness before I teach you how to upload, install and customise your Affilistore site.
The tutorial to set up your basic site is absolutely full of images showing how I configured using my favoured 123-Reg for domain registration and Red Fox Hosting for domain hosting. The number of images make it really easy for you to follow, but making it difficult to attach to the blog. I have therefore hosted it separately to make it easy for all of us.
1. Enter your registration company control panel and select the domain that you wish to point to a new host
2. In the next screen, select the change nameserver option (NOT DNS). In the next screen you will invite your registration company to propagate your new nameserver name throughout the internet. The nameserver will tell requestors of your site where it will be found.
3. Enter the server details that have been provided by your host in the following screen
4. You will need to add the domain to your hosting package – look out for the add domain option
5. For your Affilistore site to run, you will need a database to manage your product feeds and pages – look for your database manager options.
6. Look for the option that allows you to create a new database
7. Affilistore requires a MySQL database to run, so make sure that you don’t get mixed up with the SQL Server option – MySQL 5 is the predominant option now, although 4.3 + are acceptable versions
8. Make note of the external address of the database (blanked here for security reasons) – there are some useful database tools (e.g. MySQL GUI tools) that allow you to connect and manipulate or backup your database. This address will be required if you wish to use those tools. You now need to create a user for the database – this user will be attached to your Affilistore instance as part of the installation routine. Affilistore will then store it ready for your and your visitors connections to the database.
9. Now add the database user – remember to make your password secure as you can….. and remember both username and password for your Affilistore install.
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10. Well here you are, you have now bought your new domain, set up your site on the worldwide web and prepared a database for use with your Affilistore site. One last piece of admin is now required – an email address to process any admin messages or to receive email from your potential visitors. Once again step back through your control panel until you see the opportunity to set up a mailbox. Although forwarding to an existing email address will also work, it will be more professional to also be able to respond with an email address appropriate to your site. There will typically be an obvious icon.
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11. Whilst this lesson is focussed on getting a domain ready for opening up your first Affilistore Affiliate based storefront, the preparations would be exactly the same were you to be installing many other tools. For example, Joomla CMS would require exactly the same steps.
Congratulations …. you have now prepared your site ready for whatever you choose to put on your site. Hopefully you will follow the tutorial to add an Affilistore site to your site.
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