What To Do When You Don’t (Yet) Have a Domain
Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 2:59 pm by Ryan Hall, AC Forum Moderator
“I’ve been feeling a bit disturbed over the fact that some affiliate programs are asking you to have a web URL or domain name to sign up with them. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but this seems a bit backwards? I want to be sure I can get into the program before I spend any money!”
Think of it from the Merchants point of view.
For one thing, requiring a domain name for affiliates to sign up weeds out the people who just go around signing up for every program out there, and not working on any. (I was guilty of this when I started). If a person has gone to the trouble of purchasing a domain name, then it is more likely that they go to the trouble to promote the program.
For another, it gives them a way to view their affiliates’ work. If you had a super-affiliate who was making more total sales than YOU were, wouldn’t you want to have an easy way to look at their site and see how they’ve done it?
If you are on a small budge, go to GoDaddy.com. You can purchase a domain name specifically for that affiliate program for a little under $9.00 per year. So it is not a large investment.
If you still cannot afford it, here are some ideas:
1. Go to blogger.com and get a free blog. Make a post like “This blog will be used for letting people know about X product/niche”. Use the blog URL as your domain. They should accept it.
2. If you have a generic main domain, set up a page on it that says “A site to promote X product coming soon”, and submit that. I’ve had sites accepted like that or worse.
3. You can leave the URL form blank and tell them that, you do not have a website as of yet, but will build one if their program seems worthy.
The first idea is really your best bet. Many, many affiliates promote programs with nothing more than a blog and blogger.com is very well known.
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