This post is going to tackle the act of planning out and launching a new affiliate website. Some affiliates dive in immediately without any thought towards site structure, link-building, or exit strategy. If you use the tips in this post when you launch your site you will make things much easier for yourself down the road.

Step #1 – Plan Your Site Structure

Although your site may evolve or veer from the original plan down the road, it’s a very good idea to map out a site structure when you start out. This will help you do a few things:

* Plan a well balanced, hierarchical site structure. If you dive in with no plan for hub pages or article organization you might end up with certain directories with only two pages while other directories have 100+ pages. Having a well balanced, hierarchical site structure will help you spread PR more effectively.
* Stimulate ideas for content. When you sit down for an hour or two and do nothing but think of topics for pages on your site, you will be able to get the creative juices flowing and build a massive list of pages.

By the way, when I say, “site structure,” I mean the organization of folders and pages that will go on your website. I usually use a pencil and paper for this, but if your site is going to be really big you may want to use a Word document. Here is a screenshot of how a site structure plan could look:

The site structure above is obviously very basic as it is only one folder deep and there are only 29 pages listed, but you can use the same format to organize 100 page, 200 page, or even 500 page websites. If you plan on doing more than 100 pages I recommend you use Word for your final product, because things will get too cramped on one piece of paper.

Step #2 – Plan Your Link Building

Once you have mapped out your basic site structure, your next step should be to make a list of potential link partners or one-way link sources. Nowadays I don’t bother writing these down because I know plenty of poker/casino people I can link with, but if you are operating in a new niche (not gambling) or are new to gambling you might want to take a look around to make sure you will be able to build links successfully.

I recommend looking through your competitors back links to see who’s linking to them. If there are lots of one-way links from off topic sites, you can assume those are purchased links that you can buy as well (if you so choose). Also, if you see a lot of reciprocal back links from top poker sites, that’s good news, as you can assume that you will be able to trade links with those sites as well.

By making a list of potential link sources you will be able to confirm that there is a link building opportunity in the market before you put all the effort into building your site.

Step #3 – Think of an Exit Strategy

This step isn’t as big of a deal as the first two steps because you can figure it out later if you need to, but you should always have an “exit strategy” in mind for your project. This doesn’t mean you should be planning to sell the site or anything like that, but you should have some idea of how you can take yourself out of the day-to-day operations. In the future you will want to launch new sites which will be much easier if you aren’t working four hours a day on the old sites.

I recommend finding someone to write daily or weekly news posts on the site with in content links leading to other sections of the site. This can be set up easily with Wordpress and an auto-linking plug-in, so your writer doesn’t even have to think about doing it. That will ensure you have a stream of fresh content without taking any time out of your day.

One of the things I struggle with as an affiliate is staying organized because I don’t just have a work computer in an office. I have a desktop computer, laptop and iphone that at times become my work computer depending on where I am. This means that I have website files spread across my computers and makes being organized almost impossible along with not having files when I need them constantly being an issue.

This is where Dropbox makes life easier, it is a “cloud” hosting service that allows you to store all of your files in a directory that all your computers have access too. Each computer will store a local copy of your  files and if you change or add a file on one of them each of the computers you have using the service will be automatically updated. So if I take my laptop on a trip and work on a website and end up changing some files as well as adding others when I get back my desktop will have all the changes automatically.

Dropbox also allows you to have access to your files when you aren’t on your computer with access on your iPhone. The App was released yesterday and is one of the better apps I have and is free! You can also access your files on a computer that doesn’t have dropbox installed by logging onto the website where your files will also be stored.

Dropbox is also great for backing up important files. I am always paranoid about a hard drive failing so I currently use raid (two hard drives linked that are exact copies of each other) along with an external hard drive that I back up to every now and then (not enough…usually every couple of month). I have been looking for a better solution that is off-site and something I don’t have to think about, with dropbox being automatic and off-site it solves the issues.

Dropbox works with box Mac’s and PC’s which is nice since I use both. So do you need more convincing? Well, dropbox is free for your first 2gb’s. After that they have really reasonable pricing starting at $6.99 for 20gb, $9.99 for 50gb and $19.99 for 100gb.

Dropbox also has other features including being able to share files but I haven’t used it yet but the option is there and no doubt will end up being useful.

I wish this was my product because I can see myself not being able to function properly without it and I have told a couple other people about the service and it basically sells itself once people realize what it does.

Oh also if that’s not enough, they have a viral referral program that allows people to give out their referral link: Dropbox Sign-up and every person you refer gets an extra 250mb of storage along with the person that sent them.