Affiliate Odyssey

Choosing The Domain Name 

Domain naming is the most hotly debated subject on the web with camps split between those who recommend short, memorable names and those who believe keyword-rich names are the way to go.

Eric recently posted 3 Steps To Keyword-Rich Domains which, when looking at an affiliate campaign, seems the right way to go.

My new gardening site is going to need as many factors in its favour as possible and regardless of the debate, I’d like to get maximum SEO benefits.

About a week ago, I had an idea that I might like to do a gardening blog so I did a similar exercise and came up with the domain cheapgarden.co.uk (the .com had already gone) but there was always the chance, using Eric’s method might turn up something better.

Following Eric’s advice, I tried the following set of keywords in the Google Keyword Selector Tool:

garden, gardening, gardens, how to garden, garden tips

Looking at the results, I had one eye on advertiser competition (as I’m going to be running a PPC campaign) and the other eye on possible domain names.

After entering the keyword combos into GoDaddy, nothing really stood out so cheapgarden.co.uk it is!

The beauty of this domain is that it is reasonably short, easy to remember and its keywords fit in front of lots of other keywords to produce long-tail terms e.g. cheap garden tools, cheap garden furniture, etc.

Choosing the Platform

This really is a no-brainer - it’s Wordpress all the way!

I’m not prepared to spend weeks developing a theme so I plan to scour the available, free themes all over the net and then modify one to suit my needs.

This exercise must take no more than one day so for the next 24 hours, I’ll be sorting this out.

Tomorrow, the process of creating some content for the site begins, ensuring that articles and posts contain plenty of opportunity to link out to products.

I’ll also be checking through Eric’s archives to see how best to maximise Adsense income too!