Affiliate Marketing on a Dime
I’ve often said affiliate marketing is a great field because the costs involved are so low. I think you would be hard pressed to find any other full-time business that can run on a hundred dollar a year expense budget. In this post I’ll look at the best in low cost hosting and domain registrars that you can use to setup your affiliate sites.
Most affiliates have dozens of web sites, which makes hosting them with DreamHost a must. Their “level 1 plan” includes 1 free domain registration, unlimited domain hosting, 20GB of disk space, 1TB bandwidth a month, 3000 email boxes, 75 shell/ftp accounts, unlimited MySQL databases and more. They really do offer an incredible list of features. But the best part is the price. If you use the coupon code FRIENDS you can get $50 off all regular rates. That makes the overall cost for hosting just $5.78 a month (i.e. 9.95*12 - 50 = $69.40 a year) when you sign up for a year. And remember that includes a free domain registration, a ten dollar value. And to top it off you get a 97 day money back guarantee.
Assuming you can host an unlimited number of domains, it would be a good idea to find a spot where you can register them as cheap as possible. Yahoo Small Business is currently offering a deal where you can register a domain for just $2.99 annually. That’s 1/3 of the rate that most other registrars offer them at. As well they also offer the option of registering the domain for more than one year at that rate. That would probably be a good idea seeing as there have been many rumours that registration prices are due to go up (and that Google favours domains that expire far in the future). Unfortunately you can only register one domain at their discounted rate. So unless you want to open up a dozen of Yahoo accounts (which I heard works) I’d recommend using 1and1 to register domains. Their rate is $5.99, which is much less than the leading registrar GoDaddy charges. Plus 1and1 allows you to have a private domain registration which means that your contact information isn’t seen in the WHOIS registry.
Using the options just mentioned you can host a web site for just pennies a month ($0.79 assuming you have 20 web sites, $0.61 for 50, etc.). At such low costs all you need is one or two AdSense clicks per month before a site is generating a profit!
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