About 2 weeks ago (early December, 2008) I was surfing around the net, and stopped at Sedo to check my parked domains.  My account was up to a whopping $12.XX after 15 months on 40 domains.  I thought to myself, this is ridiculous, I can do better than this by myself.  So it began.  Did I begin the right way.  No, I didn’t do much research I just jumped and started treading water.  So if you follow me along my affiliate learning path (it may be rather rocky) maybe together we can make a few extra bucks.  I am not trying to make millions, just make some extra cash to pay off the bills.  If we find a way to get rich, well, so be it!

Before I detail how the first 2 weeks went some background on myself.  I am a 31 year old Mechanical Design Engineer.  I don’t necessarily like my job, but it is a semi-reliable paycheck.  After all I have to feed my wife and 2 (soon to be 3) kids and dog.  I am pretty technical, I have done web design in the past, and have some limited skills in HTML, PHP, and image manipulation.  Over the last year I have been starting up my own company focused on LED lighting and technology.  Unfortunately the stock market crash put a huge delay on my startup.  Only thing missing right now is capital.

Back to the affiliate marketing.  The first thing I did was look for a script that would compile as many pages as possible in the least amount of time.  After a minimal amount of searching I purchased DomainZaar for $99. DomainZaar is capable of setting up multiple domain names with different keywords on one hosting platform.  This was a great feature for me, as I own a lot of domains and did not want to host them all individually.  I will expand on this product later.

Now I needed a place to host my sites.  My business site is hosted at StartLogic and they have treated me well for several years now.  They support PHP , MySQL, and CGI, everything I needed for my application.  They also have services included that will do automatic installation of WordPress Blog software (what you are reading right now), and OSCommerce, a very effective (and free) e-commerce solution, and more.  When I signed up there was a special running for unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited storage for $5.95 per month, they also threw in $50.00 worth of Adwords credits.  Seems like a good deal to me, and I tend to be a loyal repeat customer when treated right.

Next episode we will discuss setting up accounts with Google Adsense, ClickBank, and Commission Junction.  Plus forwarding of GoDaddy domains.