Last weekend I launched Carbon Fiber Gear, my first site in experimenting with affiliate marketing. For more of a background on the site, check out the post I made earlier this week. I wanted to talk about what processes I went through to get the site launched so quickly.

What First? Domain Name

When I thought of the idea to do a blog about carbon fiber, I started off looking for a domain on GoDaddy (Use coupon code OYH3 for $6.95 domain). I searched for a variety of things like carbonfibeproducts.com, carbonfiberstuff.com, etc. Using thesaurus.com I found the word gear, and gave that a shot…luckily it was available, so I picked it up right away.

I later found out that carbonfibergear.com had previously been registered, but expired back in October. It looks like it was just a placeholder, lucky me

Setup Hosting

The next step was to setup the host in order to get this new .com up and running. We have a dedicated server through my IT company, Tri Megatech, so this made it easy enough for me. I set everything up on the back end, and uploaded a clean install of Wordpress to run the site.

Setup The Site

Here’s where a majority of the time was spent to get the site going. Once I had a clean install of Wordpress on the server, I went out to find a clean looking, well coded theme to work off of. This is just a side project, I didn’t want to spend much money or put too much time into it until I know it will be worth it. I’ve always been a big fan of Chris Pearson’s work. For those of you that don’t know who he is, he did the design for Copyblogger, a popular blog on copywriting. Chris converted Copyblogger’s old design into a theme, which I picked up and slightly modified to look the way I needed.

I popped up Photoshop, and I already had an idea of how the logo should look. A few minutes later and with the help of a couple suggestions from Crystal, I had a nice logo design.

Another important aspect was setting the site up for SEO so that it could get picked up by Google as quickly as possible. There are a few standard things I do when setting a Wordpress site up:

1. Setup a Google Analytics account and implement it on the site in order to track stats
2. Install the all in one SEO pack plugin
3. Install the Google XML sitemaps plugin to automatically build a sitemaps file
4. Install the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin in order to have my feed tracked through Feedburner
5. Install the subscribe to comments plugin so that anybody that leaves a comment can choose to get an e-mail when there are any updates
6. Install the related posts plugin to easily promote content within the site
7. Setup the site through Google Webmaster Tools

Content and Making Money

Luckily I already had some basic accounts setup to monetize the site like I had in mind. I wanted to start off with Amazon, eBay, and AdSense. I found some carbon fiber products that I wanted to write about online, and wrote a few posts so the site wouldn’t be completely blank for new visitors. I also setup a few post ideas for future posts I wanted to make in order to get things rolling.

Once that was done, the site was ready to launch!

Little Bit Of Promotion

Unique carbon fiber parts are very “diggable”, so I’m hoping that works out for me over time. I’d like to use Digg, but I also want to wait a little bit until I have more content on the site so that I can hopefully have a higher retention rate. I figure in about 1-2 weeks I can start trying to utilize Digg (unless the readers Digg themselves :)). I’ve noticed a good amount of traffic already come from StumbleUpon, but this isn’t very valuable traffic…lots of people just going in and out. I think the best traffic will be organic (aka search engines), but it will take some time before I see a buildup of that. I’m also doing some conservative advertising using AdWords to target traffic directly to posts that I can monetize on. We’ll see how that works out over time…I have noticed really high CTR percentages on the ads I do have (8%!).

Conclusion

Setting up a new site is pretty easy, especially once you’ve done it a lot of times!? If there is anything you think I’m missing, please let me know. Are your new site processes pretty similar?? If anybody needs any help or has any questions, I’d be happy to do what I can, just ask.