First 2 sites for my Intern

Well, it has been about 3 weeks or so that I have been working with my intern, Seth Weber. We spent the first couple weeks going over some of the basics of affiliate marketing and last week we got started building some sites.

To start out we chose a niche I have worked in for years and have had some good success with on a number of other sites I have built in the past. I figured this would be a good way for Seth to get his feet wet in building a site, utilizing affiliate links, working with some basic HTML, cleaning up datafeeds, and other stuff that goes into building a decent affiliate site.

What we did was take a site I already had built, stripped it down, and use it as a template for these new sites.  They are a pretty standard datafeed type of site with around 1000 and 1700 pages of different products and based on my past experience they should get some OK traffic and make a few sales a week. If we can get these sites pulling in somehwere in the range of $300-500 a month I would be very pleased.

To build the datafeed portion of the site we used a server side script we developed a few years ago. I had used a couple different datafeed options in the past and was never pleased with them so we just built one ourselves. The problem I had with most of them was the pages would build on my computer and I would have to upload them which could take a long time for bigger sites. Invariably there would be something wrong with the template so I would have to rebuild the pages, upload them again, find more problems, upload again, etc. and that took way too long for my liking.  With our current system I can just make a change to the template, upload it, and rebuild the site on the server in a matter of seconds as opposed to 30 minutes to an hour.  Much more efficient.

Once Seth gets more comfortable working with these sites and the datafeeds it shouldn’t take much more than an hour or two to crank out a new site so we will keep building these over the summer along with some other sites and niches we have in mind.

The two sites we have built so far are Alabama Fan Gear and Georgia Fan Gear.  Eventually we hope to have sites for 100 or more colleges.  Even if they can each average $100 or so a month that will be some pretty good money. We are working with Football Fanatics as our merchant.  I have worked with them for many years now and they are a great affiliate program to work with. Check them out if you are looking for the best sports merchandise merchant out there.

Like I said earlier these sites aren’t necessarily finished product. There are a couple small things we need to change on them but for the most part they are ready to go.

So what do you think? See any glaring problems with these sites? Anything we can add? Any suggestions? Leave a comment and let Seth and I know.  Also if you want to link to the sites that would be fine also. 🙂