Getting Started in Affiliate Marketing Using WordPress – 2nd Edition Part 2
Beginners Affiliate Marketing 16 Comments »
G’day folks and welcome back to my mammoth getting started post! You can catch up on part 1 here.
Building Your WordPress Affiliate Site
Now that you’ve identified your host, bought a domain, found a niche with good merchants, and worked out your content it’s time to build that site. Well. Where do I begin. An absolute age ago I wrote my WordPress 101 post, and its follow up – WordPress 102. I think WordPress is the absolute dogs danglies where affiliates are concerned. Both of those posts are fairly out of date, but most of the points about finding suitable themes and customising them to your needs still hold true.
I’ve noticed a lot of affiliates are using magazine style themes these days. These are great for creating static looking websites. What I tend to do is create a category structure that looks a lot like the menu structure of a standard retail site. I have found this works well in combination with adding a couple of hundred words of unique content to my category descriptions. Do watch out for the themes that will use category descriptions as link titles though, not good!
Once my sites have a few posts up and running I then feature some of the posts from my key categories on the theme home page and voila! My site has a relevant and regularly updated home page with little to no input.
If you want to create nice looking landing pages check out this post to get all my trade secrets on laying out a landing page. It’s really not as hard as you’d think to create and customise your own affiliate landing pages. You just need to be handy with pen and paper plus a pinch of imagination and basic HTML. It’s very worthwhile and increases your click through rates to merchant. Your visitors like to see an attractive landing page when they arrive. It’s worth spending some time messing around with these even if you don’t implement them immediately.
Now Install Some Essential Plugins
Great plugins that are a must install for an affiliate site? This is the bit that’s probably out of date in my WordPress posts, so here goes!
- Sitemap Generator Plugin – not the XML kind, one that’s actually part of your site. Helps search engines find your content and index it. Kinda pivotal.
- XML Sitemap – creates a lovely Google compliant XML sitemap of your site. (I’m not entirely convinced this helps you any, but it sure doesn’t hurt!).
- Robots Meta – Absolutely essential. Helps you stop Google indexing uneccessary content and also eliminates some of the problems WordPress can throw up re: duplicate content.
- RSS Footer – Ha ha!! Those naughty RSS content robbers will shoot themselves in the foot with this one (geddit?). If someone publishes your content from your sites RSS feed on their site, this neato little plugin will add a link back to your site making sure you get credit and they don’t – denied!
- Search Meter – Find out what your blog visitors were a cravin’ when they came to visit your site. Handy dandy little tool that will give you additional information on how your visitors are thinking and searching. Great to use to create extra content and can reveal some search term gems that Google won’t.
- Contact Form – When you set up your Contact Us page, you’ll need one of these. It’s handy to make sure people can contact you via your site… you never know what you’ll miss out on if you don’t!
- Similar Posts Plugin – Great to help give your readers a view of some related products or information. I use this plugin because it’s very customisable. I’ve added a thumbnail to all related posts on my sites which really creates an attractive looking page. I think it also gives my visitors a sense of “choice”. As soon as they arrive on one of my pages they immediately see lots of products and navigation options, giving them confidence this is going to be a good site to have a nice look round.
- Thumbnail For Excerpts – I use this to create nice looking images on my category pages. Because I started noticing visitors often landed on category pages as my sites got stronger in the SERPS I figured I might as well give them some nice images to look at as soon as they arrived rather than a boring page of text that might result in them clicking away.
- Link Exchange Plugin – If you want to set up a link exchange page on your site, this handy dandy little plugin will help you manage the process and keep an eye on your link partners to make sure they’ve not pulled the old trick of removing your link back a few weeks after exchanging. Sneaky eh?!
- Pagination Plugin – Do not build a blog based site without one of these. These will help keep your posts in the index by creating a good cross linkage structure in your site. Google doesn’t like orphan pages and as time passes old blog posts look an awful lot like that. This plugin convinces Google that your older content is still very much loved and part of the family!
And Your Shiny New Site is Complete!
All you need to do now is get some inbound links (OK, I know… not so easy but we’ll save that for another post I think!) and follow your ongoing content strategy to keep adding new and relevant pages for Google and other search engines to chew on.
At this stage, your journey to a profitable affiliate site is really just beginning. From now on you’ll have to master the finer and more subtle points of SEO, learn to identify new ways to monetise your traffic, and find new and exciting merchants and products to promote to keep your affiliate business rolling. So not much then
Finally…
Good luck with your new site. Affiliate marketing is hard, hard work. There are no easy wins, but when you do get there it is incredibly satisfying.



