Any business or affiliate needs to ensure that their website is secure but it is especially important if they want to actually sell products or services. In that case, it’s not just that one needs to protect against hackers. One also needs to ensure that the sale transaction itself is protected, and that prospective customers know in advance that their information and credit card details are safe.

The critical technology in achieving this is something called “SSL”, which stands for Secure Sockets Layer. It’s a simple and easy to implement solution, and it does two things really well:

      – it stops anyone not involved in your sale transaction from accessing or intercepting any of the data that is being exchanged;

      – it tells your prospective customer that your website can be trusted.

These seem like elementary points but they’re critical for any affiliate or business that needs to successfully sell products or services online. To make a start with SSL there are a few other technical details that you should get to grips with. Over the next few blog posts we’ll cover the essential pieces of the puzzle.