Affiliate Challenge – Subdomains And Opt-ins

GOOD NEWS: No sale, but my first opt-in for this challenge! This was a nice boost because it practically happened just a few hours after I created my landing pages for my products. So now I at least have one person going through my follow up email sequence.

I spent today building links to my articles in the hope that this would improve on their search engine positions, meaning more traffic and views, and hopefully opt-ins for me? I think I’m going to make Monday link building day;)

What I wanted to do today is cover where I stored my 2 new landing pages, and why I did it.

Subdomains Not Submarines

For some strange reason a while ago I bought a boat load of domain names with the intention of actually using them for something. That “something” never really materialized, and neither did content for those domains either. So they just sit there unused and under appreciated like my bank manager;)

Anyway it dawned on me that I could use the abandoned domains for a good cause, which would be my affiliate challenge landing page cause.

But I had 2 problems….

1. I didn’t want to use them all for this challenge, just in case I needed them for something else.
2. Their domain names were not exactly optimized for my products.

My solution…….

Submarines!!!!

Subdomains!!!!, sorry about that;)

What’s a subdomain? Well here is a regular domain…

www.yourmaindomain.com

And here is a subdomain….

www.SUBDOMAIN.yourmaindomain.com

Most of the time you see sites use a subdomain for their support or customer service side.

www.support.someBIGsite.com

I however use them for my landing pages on the same domain, which allowed me to add a targeted keyword into my domain name, even though the main domain name is not really related.

www.product1keyword.mydomain.com

www.product2keyword.mydomian.com

I thought that this would be a little more SEO friendly than a completely unrelated domain name to pass visitors too.

What this method allows me to do is create as many landing pages as I want on one domain, which saves me buying even more domain names. And it also allows me to add related keywords into the domain name URL. So if this method takes off I can apply it many times over to more products without it costing me anything.

Using my hosts HostGator I can use unlimited subdomains, but you should check your own host to see if you can also set up a submarine;)

How To Set Up A Subdomain

Log into your websites CPANEL -> www.yoursite.com/cpanel <- Notice you only need main domain name for this.

Once inside your cpanel(control panel) what you want to look for is this…

Yours may look a little different, but just keep an eye out for SubDomains then click on it.

All that’s left to do is enter your products related keyword where it says “enter subdomain” above. Now this will be blank on your screen, I just added the text above to show you where it all goes.

Once you are done hit CREATE.

You should then be able to enter your new subdmain URL into the browser bar…

www.newsubdomain.maindomain.com

This should now bring up your new subdomain page waiting for you to add files and content to it just like you would a regular domain. But that’s for another post soon;)

Give it a try! If you get stuck, let me know below.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 4:48 pm and is filed under $200 Per Week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.