How To Build an Affiliate T-Shirt Site #2
Tags: 
Posted by Carl Thomas / Affiliate Preacher on October 22nd, 2008This is the second part of my tutorial on how to build a T-Shirt Christian Affiliate site. You can find the first part of the Christian Affiliate tutorial here.
The goal of this tutorial is to show how to build an affiliate site that sells Christian t-shirts that you never have to stock or ship. We are going to do affiliate marketing - that is selling someone else’s stuff for a cut of the profit. The first affiliate site I ever made was hand coded and I had to build links for each and every product I wanted to display with a link to the merchants product page for each and every product. It really was not fun at all.
Fast forward to now, and you can purchase some pretty sophisticated affiliate scripts to integrate affiliate products into your website. Some cost money, others are free. Many are put out by affiliate companies. Here is one simple way to do it.
For this tutorial, we are going to assume you have a webhost (I recommend dreamhost). You also will need a MySQL database installed. There are lots of merchants to use but for this purpose we will use C28 who are known as one of the premier Christian retailers.
The video shows in detail how to do this but here are the quick and dirty steps:
- Grab the free affiliate script from Affilistore http://www.affilistore.com/
- Go to Avantlink’s affiliate page and get the Raw Datafeed file for C28
- Choose the product categories you want to put in your site
- Configure the Affilistore script by changing the necessary file permissions, entering the config information
- Customize your site.
I just put mine up, and you can keep checking it out to see how I customize it. Christian T-Shirt Store
Is that all clear? Let me know if this works for you.
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 9:12 am
Great tutorial Carl! We enjoyed watching the work you’re doing with the raw feeds. As far as the dynamic solution resulting in ugly sites, just wanted to mention that we have advanced layouts for both the list and grid options…and that would allow Affiliate to customize the HTML for their feed subscription template files. In fact, the initial output of the feed client is ugly on purpose, to keep Affiliates from using it without adding their own content includes, etc. Here are a couple of Affiliate sites that present nice looking dynamic feed subscriptions (note I have permission to use these sites!)
http://www.gravitydex.com/stores.php
http://gear.alpinezone.com/
Also, we’ve slated a major upgrade for the dynamic web service feed, and that should happen Q1 or Q2 2009. Thanks again. Great stuff!!
[Reply]
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 11:35 am
Thanks for the input Gary. I am sure that the dynamic tool could be used for a better looking site. My goal was to make a half decent site in less than 10 minutes.
We will be looking out for that next release.
[Reply]