How to Promote Affiliate Programs – The Right Way

Are you wondering how to promote affiliate programs using better methods and you also might be thinking to buy a domain for every affiliate program you want to promote online so that you could write or create a blog around that domain but, let me tell you that you don’t need a domain only if…

1. You are not doing it for SEO purpose
2.  You are not going to make an authority blog/website
3. You are not going to take that domain for a long time
4. You are promoting short term affiliate programs
5. If you are planning to re-direct your offers

These are a few of the reasons you should not waste money on buying new domain names every time you plan to promote an affiliate program instead, creating a subdomain is a useful way to promote your affiliate programs. Most of the affiliate programs are short term or maybe time-bound but people do suggest to buy domain names related to the programs.

But I always suggest my readers to get one main domain for a long term and create a subdomain instead of buying new domain every time for your affiliate programs if you are not following any of the method mentioned above…

If you want to re-direct your affiliate link but don’t want to hide your affiliate links, creating a subdomain will help.

How To Create a Subdomain

Most of the affiliates never show their affiliate links to people and to hide the links they use cloaking option. Creating a subdomain name is free and very easy to setup. Here are the steps involved to set up a subdomain (Steps shown here are for those who are using cPanel hosting). but before, make sure you have a hosting with a company which provides unlimited subdomains option with their hosting.

The first thing you need to have is your main domain if you don’t already have one. You can use Cheap Domains to buy a main domain and make sure you have a cPanel hosting. Now login to your cPanel using the link http://www.yoursitename.com/cpanel (use the username/password supplied by your hosting provider). After login, you will see a control panel with all the options available and ready to use as in the image below…

then FIND the option in the left-hand side to find and then setup sub domain. Just type subdomain in the find field and you will see the script in the right-hand panel. Click on it and you will be then taken to the next page to create a subdomain..

Now simply enter the name of your sub domain and click on create button.

That is all you need to create a subdomain but it might take some time to setup subdomain depending upon the hosting you are using. You can also use re-direction option (using manage re-direction option) but only if you want your domain to be re-directed to your affiliate link.

Re-direction is good only if you don’t want to hide your affiliate link or else I would suggest you to use cloaking of your affiliate links. You can put all your affiliate program information on your subdomain by installing a blog on it. Subdomains can get ranking in search engines as well if built on some authority site. You may have noticed while searching on Google that sometimes, it shows subdomains in its search result. To show you, I just used “how to make money online” in Google and here are the domains on the first page of Google.

Did you notice the name of the first domain?

The 1st domain in the search result contains subdomains (economictimes.indiatimes.com) on the first page of Google for “how to make money online” search. So from here, you can very well understand that Google does give preference to subdomains but the only thing it needs is that the subdomain should be associated with some authority site like in the above example.

WordPress, Typepad, Blogspot or about.com all are having great weightage and value in the eye of Google but that doesn’t mean you can not get ranking with your subdomains. That is possible once you have a good authority (as required by Google) site running online.

Apart from these main authority sites, I have seen many other subdomains in the search results that belong to other internet marketers. Because I believe that if a page can get ranking, a subdomain can get ranking too. Keep watching and you will soon see some other subdomains in the search results which belongs to other Internet Marketers like you and me.