Beginner Technical Setup for Affiliate Marketing (16)
Beginner Technical Setup for Affiliate Marketing in 2019
Hi All,
Here is the step by step article newbie friendly guide I wrote, outlining how to do a technical setup in order to get started with Affiliate Marketing in 2019.
Initially this started with me trying to help a friend get a grip on things, but now turned into a hobby project.
Original article can be found here: https://www.affiliatecase.com/techni...ate-marketing/
There is a lot of outdated and confusing information out there. If you follow the guide as written you can be ready to make some internet moneyz in less than an hour! 
Please let me know if you see any errors or if something is unclear and I will correct.
(To mods: links for cloud hosting and tracer are affiliate links, since they were copied straight from the site, feel free to remove them.)
Here we go. 
The technical side to getting started as a beginner with Affiliate Marketing normally involves setting up the following:
- Tracker Server Setup
- Landing Page Server Setup
- Domain Names and DNS Configuration
- Tracker Installation and Configuration
- Landing Page Server Configuration
In this article, I will do my best to describe exactly what you need to do to get yourself set up. It will be in a simple, concise step-by-step manner, giving you only enough information to accomplish the task without overwhelming you further. I’ve even included screenshots to make life a whole lot easier. Thankfully in this day and age, many of the technical aspects of a server setup are automated and user friendly!
Let’s go through each point one by one.
TRACKER SERVER SETUP
Aside from going down the dedicated hosting route, the easiest and most effective setup is by using one of the cloud-based on-demand platforms.
The key players in the industry are Vultr or Digital Ocean, and the setup is pretty much identical on both of these. You can choose whichever one you want and use it for both your tracker and landing page hosting.
Below I’ll list out the steps on how to get set up. We’ll use Digital Ocean for this purpose, but as mentioned both setups are basically the same.
1. Sign up for an account on DigitalOcean.
2. Create a project. You can name it anything. We will use “Tracker Project” as an example. For purpose, select “Web Aplication”. Click on “Create Project”.
3. Once inside your newly created project, select “New Droplet” button.
4. Choose a $40 per month plan. Select Ubuntu 16.04.4 x 64 as the Operating System.
5. For location, I recommend droplets located in Asia or Europe, since as a beginner, they are the places you’ll most likely do the majority of business.
6. Don’t hit any boxes additional boxes, you can leave everything as is. Press ‘Create’ to deploy your droplet.
7. It’ll take less than a minute to create it. Once finished you will see something like this:
For this guide I’ve created a new droplet to show everything in detail.
8. When the creation is complete, check the email you receive from DigitalOcean with information about how to access the server. It should look like this:
9. Copy and save the IP Address, Username and Password in a safe place. You will need to have access to this information further in this tutorial.
If you have completed all these steps, then you will now have a baremetal server installed with nothing but an Operating System.
You will still need to buy a domain name and setup your tracker, but first you are going to deploy another server, this time for landing pages.
LANDING PAGE SERVER SETUP
Now you need to create another server, but this time to host your landing page.
Yes, technically, you can host your landing pages on your Tracker server, but I don’t recommend this at all. You could go for a lot more expensive, dedicated server option, but you’ll find a problem with doing this because, as a beginner, when you haven’t yet made any profit, you don’t want to spend money on buying and setting up an expensive server.
It takes a long time to learn how to set up and configure servers, which in my opinion is a waste of time since it is not vital for those who work in affiliate marketing.
Instead, we are going to take an easier route, and since you already have an account on DigitalOcean, all you need to do is create another droplet. The steps are identical to creating your tracker droplet.
1. Create another project, naming it “Landing Page Project”.
2. Deploy another droplet.
3. Choose a $20 a month plan to begin with for your landing pages. You can easily resize the droplet if your campaigns start blowing up with money down the road.
4. The rest of the settings, including the server location should be the same as in the previous setup.
By now you should have two servers (droplets) with nothing but an Operating System installed, accessible by nothing but their IP addresses.
This is a good start, but there is a little more work to do before you are done!
DOMAIN NAMES AND DNS CONFIGURATION
The next part of the process is purchasing a couple of domain names and attaching them to your tracker and landing page server accordingly. But don’t worry, domain names are extremely cheap, and you can pick one up for about $5-10 per year.
Namecheap.com is one of the most popular and reliable domain name registrars out there, so you can do a search for suitable domain names on their site.
For your tracker domain, I recommend using a .com extension which may be slightly more expensive than other extensions depending on the name that you choose. It essentially does not matter what domain name you buy though, but it should be something that is easy to remember. It should also be more or less professional as it might be visible to your visitors when they click through your funnel.
For your landing page domain, feel free to use the cheapest extension domain, such as “.site”. This will change multiple times throughout your affiliate marketing journey for a variety of reasons.
Now that you have purchased your domains, you can view them on your dashboard.
How to attach your domains to your droplets
The next step will be that you need to attach them to your previously created droplets on DigitalOcean.
To do that, one needs to update the domain’s DNS first.
1. Log into your NameCheap account
2. Go to the Domain List
3. Click “Manage” next to your domain -> “Nameserver” section.
4. Ensure that “Namecheap PremiumDNS” or "Namecheap BasicDNS" option selected in the drop-down list;
5. Next go to “Advanced DNS” tab -> “Host records” section -> Add New Record. You will have to add two records with the following settings (CNAME and A Record)
1. CNAME Record | Host: www | Target: (TRACKER-SERVER-DOMAIN-NAME) | TTL: Automatic
2. A Record | Host: @ | Ip Address: (TRACKER-SERVER-IP-ADDRESS) | TTL: Automatic
6. After you add two new records, remove the two Namecheap default records, CNAME (Linking to parkingpage.namecheap.com) and URL Redirect Method.
That’s it! Normally the domain name propagation should not take more than 30 minutes to an hour but in extreme cases it might take up to 24 hours.
To check if it’s all gone ok, visit https://www.whatsmydns.net/ and enter your name to see if it has been propagated to the correct IP address. If it does, all servers will show up as green.
Now you should follow the exact same steps to attach your landing page domain to your landing page server. Obviously, you will need to use your landing page server IP address when setting up the A-Record instead of the tracker server IP.
TRACKER INSTALLATION ON YOUR TRACKER SERVER
First and foremost, you need to sign up for the actual tracker.
We recommend Binom Tracker, because it is absolutely FREE for the first 31 days and you do not even need to enter your payment details.
Once you sign up, find the Binom support page here, and ask for help with the tracker installation. You will need to provide your DigitalOcean droplet IP address and password (it should have been emailed to you), and your newly purchased tracker domain name.
There area number of different solutions for your tracking. For years we have advocated the cloud based
Once the support team has completed their setup, you will receive your fresh installation credentials. All you need to do is go to your tracker domain name and enter these details. Your username will normally be “root” and whatever password the Binom support sends you. Make sure to copy it and store it in a safe place.
LANDING PAGE SERVER CONFIGURATION
Now that you have a tracker setup on your tracker server, you still have to configure the environment to serve landing pages on your landing page server. Fear not.Nowadays, it has become extremely easy to automatically deploy a highly configured instance of various required software for that role. We are going to use ServerPilot for this task.
What is a ServerPilot anyway?
For launching any script on a server, one needs a set of server software called LAMP stack. This includes the web server Apache, PHP5 and MYSQL, but unless you have training as server administrator, it is rather difficult to do from scratch. ServerPilot is a special service for cloud servers, and it can create its own LAMP stack on a server in under 5 minutes, so you don’t need any knowledge or experience to do that. The price is quite reasonable and it only costs $5 to connect a server and 0.50 per each domain that you set up on it. (ServerPilot calls them “apps”)
1. Go to ServerPilot and sign up for an account.
2. Once there click connect to a server and enter your landing page server IP address and password. Leave plan as “Economy”.
3. Click on “Connect to Serverpilot”.
The installation will take some time, once completed you will see:
That’s all you need to do, the server is now ready.
Next,it’s time to add an app. An app is the equivalent of a website on your landing page server. If you decide that you want to use more domains for hosting landing pages you can easily do so, by just attaching that domain to your server in NameCheap and adding an app in ServerPilot.
1. Enter your landing page domain credentials, choose a strong password. This information is what you will use to access it via FTP client and upload landing pages.
2. Once your App is created, navigate to SSL on the left hand side, and click “Enable SSL”. It might take 5-20 minutes for that button to show up. So, if it is not there right away, do not worry, just come back later.
3. Once SSL is enabled you can upload your landing pages to the server. We suggest you use one of the most popular FTP clients out there, FileZilla. Download it on the developer’s site and install.Once installed, launch FileZilla and select New Site on top toolbar.
4. Now input your app credentials. Remember the password and name you set for your domain when creating the app? Pay attention to the protocol, make sure to change it to SFTP, and not a default FTP.
5. Click Connect.
6. Once connected you will see a lot of folders. Navigate to app – public. You will see index.php file. This is the default file that ServerPilot has created. Feel free to delete it as you won’t need it. Now you simply need to create folders for your landing pages and upload them there.
I hope that you’ve been able to follow this all clearly and you’re able to get everything set up without any problems. All the best, and do let me know in the comments below if you experience any issues – I’ll be happy to help!
Thanks for the guide! Very useful stuff, especially the hosting setup with all the screens!
Had to remove the affiliate links though, it's a forum rule that we simply have to enforce to keep people away from trying to spam the forums.
Hey,
Super nice tutorial.
Could you do step 2 for FTP? And how to rip/clean/upload landers?
+1 this part.
Originally Posted by augustkas
Originally Posted by augustkas
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ing-up-landers
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Ripped-Landers
hello @affiliatecase . Thank you for the instructional breakdown ! very helpful! i have a question though for the landing page domains. Would you recommend putting the landing page domains through cloudflare as well ? I just started running sweeps if that makes any difference.
Also is it possible to make more than one of the domains SSL Secure? or is it automatic.
Lastly, Would you say its best to force HTTP-> HTTPS
VERY nice tutorial!
Tech is my weakest part - I'll be referring members to your tutorial.
Amy
Thank You so much! I have been learning more on the cost side and repeatedly gone around $100~ range for servers..
One thing, how do you run blackhat offers like using logos and all on these servers..I tried and it was flagged at vultr like immediately.
Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums
Originally Posted by beirutbaba
Originally Posted by sean3
This happens with VPS as well, but it is hell of a lot harder to switch to a different provider, since majority charge monthly and take a while to setup. The switch can be done in literally minutes with the services I suggested. Nja.la (Owned by PornHub folks I believe) now has a VPS service, where I am almost certain they ignore DMCA take down notices. Might be worth checking them out if you are having issues.
On a side note, if you are running shady stuff, then I would most definitely try and remain somewhat anonymous, which, with a little bit of work, can also be done with the structure I described in this guide. I say "somewhat", because I am sure if somebody really wants to find out who you are, they will, no matter how hard you try to hide.
Hey @affiliatecase!
Such a helpful thread for newbie affiliates. We will use it for sharing to some interested clients.
Best wishes,
@affiliatecase for number 4. you wrote "Select Ubuntu 16.04.4 x 64 as the Operating System" but digital Ocean offers these https://prntscr.com/o0ppuy which one were you refering to? in the screen shots you provided it shows 18.04.2 x64
Go with the 64 bit version.
You can also safely go with 18.04 x64 which is the current LTS (Long Term Support) version of Ubuntu with support until April 2028
thank you erik! also can anyone comment on how to use Cloudflare for CDN with Serverpilot? I Connected my Digital Ocean droplet to my domain on namecheap and then i decided i want to use Cloudflare as well. So when i added my domain onto my Cloudflare account all the sameDNS records were already filled in from the namecheap Advanced DNS host records My "A" & "CNAME" records both. So im guessing the only thing to do now is change my nameservers to cloudflares and change the setting to "Cache Everything" so the CDN loads my pages faster if im not wrong as well as keep the orange cloud ON and thats it? Should anything else be changed like turning SSL from flexible to off so that i can use serverpilots SSL? Also to add* this is only for the landing page server* i use
For using Cloudflare you have to point your domains nameservers to Cloudflare.
Login to Cloudflare and "add a new site", then on one of the steps they will show you which nameservers you should set.
You will then go back to NameCheap and set custom nameservers there.
That change might take a while (from minutes to hours), after you will be able to completely manage domain from Cloudflare and use their features.
"Orange cloud" will enable the CDN feature, the caching is on by default.
are there any specific changes in cloudflare to make it run optimally with serverpilot? Such as SSL (Flexible,Full, Strict,Off) while using Serverpilots Auto SSL, Autominify, Caching level Opportunistic Encryption , Onion Routing ,Custom Purge everything setting, Browser cache Expiration, IPv6 Compatibillity ,Pseudo IPV4 .. etc.etc.
Saw a post from caurmen a while back that said make Custom Cache level: Purge everything so it made me think if i would need anything else on my settings to make it run optimally.
I use a US server so the CDN will be important for my lander speeds
P.s. Thank you for answering erik youve been very helpful! Also i really enjoyed your interview with ZorbasMedia back in November!
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