A lot of people struggle with starting a real affiliate marketing business online because they think that creating a website and marketing it involves tons of techical nowledge and know-how. Thankfully, that’s just not true.

These are 5 essential steps that I follow every time that I create another niche business:

1. Register a domain and get hosting

You have to find a solid hosting company, one that offers maximum uptime and provides the most value for your money. Also, I recommend a hosting company that has a cPanel and programs such as Fantastico. After that, be sure to study your market and think carefully about a domain name. This is something that might affect perception, sales coversions and much more. This step gets much simpler after you get hosting for the first time.

2. Get an autoresponder

This one is a very important part of marketing online. You have to have a good way to market your products to your costumers, and email marketing is the best way. With an autoresponder, you get a chance to do that many times over. Also, once you get an autoresponder, you can use it for all your sites and businesses.

3. Create content

Depending on what kind of a site you plan to have, you will have to create the content, whether it be in the form of product reviews or a simple blog. You can outsource this or write it yourself. Adding some affiliate marketing ebooks or PLR can booost your efforts significantly.

4. Create a website

This tends to be the most complicated step for most people, but it doesn’t have to be. By getting a hosting account that includes programs like Fantastico, you can install a Wordpress site with one click of a mouse. After that, all you need to do is choose a good theme template for it and you’re off. Managing and adding content to the site is easy, you just use to content that you had previously created.

5. Market your website

Decide on the most suitable affiliate marketing strategy for you and start doing a lot of it. You can do PPC, blogging, article marketing and social networking. The only important thing here is to choose the right strategy for you.

Creating a website doesn’t have to be hard and, although this is a rather simplified 5-step process, it can be done with ease and very little time. I hope you find this useful and assures you that you too can create websites and make money with them without much expense or hand-holding.