In December 2001 I answered an advertisement in the local newspaper for a job with AssociatePrograms.com.

I had never heard about affiliate programs before applying for this job and when the CEO, Allan Gardyne, said he preferred to market digital products I thought he was referring to electronics not ebooks!

Despite my complete ignorance, Allan hired me anyway.

Apart from day to day handling of email, Allan wanted me to do some affiliate marketing experiments. The first project he gave me was to build an affiliate site with Site Build It! Since I had built only one site before, I was a little concerned about my lack of knowledge of HTML and also concerned about Allan's lack of knowledge of my lack of knowledge of HTML.

I need not have worried. Building a site with Site Build It! does not require any knowledge of HTML. In fact I found building a site with Site Build It! was a very easy way to slowly get to grips with HTML coding. With Site Build It! you simply include as much or as little HTML as you want.

My main motivation for building this site was that Allan was paying me. However, I don't think my position was very different from all those affiliates out there who are on their own. I was working largely unsupervised and I had to come up with all the creative ideas on my own.

NEXT: Choosing the topic of your affiliate site