Last week I announced a competition to win a travel website. The site in question will be built over this series of tutorials using the Affilistore tool for building data driven websites, starting right here.

They say failing to plan is planning to fail, so this is a quick intro to the steps we’ll be taking to build the site. It needs to be up and running by the time we give the site away on December 1st. There’s nothing like hearing the presses rolling to remove writer’s block!

Our objective is to build a website promoting a single merchant - Shoestring Travel - using data provided via the TradeTracker network. The site will be promoted mainly through ethical SEO techniques, but we’ll throw in a little PPC to show Affilistore’s tools in that area.

To be in with a chance of winning the site at the end of the tutorials, just sign up to the Shoestring programme on Tradetracker.co.uk and send an email to shoestring@shine-marketing.co.uk letting us know the name of your account.

We’ll be going through the following steps. Some more experienced affiliates who have built one or more sites in the past can probably skip a few steps. I’ll link this list to the tutorials as I write each one, so if you want to bookmark this page it could be useful in the future.

1. Choosing a domain name
2. Choosing hosting for the site
3. Get the Shoestring Travel data from the network
4. Install Affilistore
5. Creating Unique Content
   
6. Tweaking the Affilistore templates for travel
7. Using Afillistore settings for best effect.
8. Pimp your site - Design
9. Pimp your site - SEO Coding
10. Promoting your site

Some of these are quite big topics (you could fill a small bookstore on the basis of the last one!) so we’ll break some of them down and update this list as we go along. To make sure you don’t miss any, you can subscribe to receive each new article by RSS or email using the orange box on the right of this blog.

And don’t forget to enter the competition!