Although some affiliate marketing programs provide their affiliates with websites, you should have your own in which to promote your merchant's products or services. Having your own website is more advantageous than being provided with one. It prevents you from being locked in to the merchant provided website and allows you to create and maintain your own mailing list. Building a personal mailing list is one of the main advantages of owning website.

The very first step in getting a website is to register a domain name. A guiding rule in registering your domain name is to make sure that it should at least contain the main keywords of your website's subject matter or area of focus. This way, whatever business you are in is reflected in your domain name, the user will type our domain name to get to your web address.

You will also require website hosting services. One of the cheap and readily available resources of domain name registration and website hosting is Yahoo! Small Business solutions; they have several basic and advanced packages tailored to meet most requirements of newbie e-commerce entrepreneurs and your wallet.

A word of advice, stay away from free web hosting and domain name registration companies. The reason? Since you are going into business, it is unprofessional if your website is hosted free of charge, besides, free web hosting services require their name to be included in the domain name.

Once you have registered a domain and signed up with a web hosting service, you are ALMOST ready to launch your website on the Internet. You can use either the web hosting service starter and advance templates, which you can easily modify online to design your website. Keep the design of your webpage as simple as possible. You do not have to finish the design in one sitting; in fact, you can immediately use a standard template and launch your website. You can do the modifications later on and then publish the revised design later.

If you have absolutely no knowledge about website building, you can familiarize yourself with point and click website builder tools that use templates and allow you to incorporate your own images and logo. Although you can pay someone to do it for you, it pays off to know how to add your own content and affiliate product html codes because it can be very expensive if you have to pay a designer every time to do it for you.

Important factors you have to integrate in the design of your website is the integration of client payment options, credit card, direct deposit, Paypal and other alternate methods, client support such as e-mail, chat and preferably a toll free number and autoresponders. Although these enhancements can be normally provided by the web hosting provider, it pays to ensure that they are working and functional the moment you publish your webpage on the Internet.