When is a website ready to start affiliating?

[NewMom0208]

My website is up, but there is alot I have to do and on each step I have to learn how.
My question is how ready does your site has to be before you start affiliating to products and services?

Which of the following are "must haves" before you start promoting
(I am using wordpress straight blogging for now)

- Set an opt-in newsletter
- Activate rss feeds
- enable comments on each article
- Enable pictures (I am having issues uploading images on wordpress)
- Add video, podcasting
- Create free ebooks to offer for free
- Submit to engines - is this necesary?

I don' want to scare affiliates nor consumers away of the page is not half decent.

How did you decided to stop fine tuning your site and jump into affiliating?

[Rosalind Gardner]

Hi NewMom0208,

It's good to have most those items in place, more from the standpoint of making sure your visitors come back to visit again - especially when you offer RSS feeds and a newsletter.

Too, you want your site to look as complete as possible before you start applying to join affiliate programs.

Basically, however, the most important ingredient to have solidly in place is your content.

I usually recommend that you have at least 10 posts / articles on your site, plus your Disclaimer, disclosure, About and Contact pages before you apply to join a program.

That said, you could put Google Adsense on your site right from the outset to capture a tiny bit of revenue.

Hope that helps!

Cheers,
Ros