Getting Started in Affiliate Marketing Using WordPress – 2nd Edition Part 2
Beginners Affiliate Marketing Add commentsG’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 Both of those posts are fairly out of date, but most of the points about finding suitable themes and customising them to your needs still hold true.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 This is the bit that’s probably out of date in my WordPress posts, so here goes!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. 
July 6th, 2010 at 8:18 am
Great post. Do you have an example of how a good AM site, build with wordpress should look like?
July 6th, 2010 at 10:08 am
I’d also add this firewall to essential plug-ins http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-firewall/
Keeps the hackers out of your blog and emails you whenever anyone’s messing with your files. Just make sure you select to show 404 error in the settings and not redirect to homepage. I also password protect (through cpanel) the wp-admin directory. It’s no fun being hacked!
July 6th, 2010 at 10:33 am
Luc – sure thing. http://www.blokesundies.co.uk
Chris – many thanks, my knowledge of security related plugins is rubbish I’ll also add it to my sites!
July 8th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
Great post Kirsty! I only have a couple of aff. sites using wordpress but I’ve worked with many more wordpress sites over the years that were not aff sites and even I hadn’t tried some of these plugins.
The paginator plugin is a great addition to my usual repertoir. I’m getting that on my aff sites right away!
July 16th, 2010 at 4:00 pm
Hi Kirsty,
I see you build specific articles to highlight keyword terms, such as “Impetus Dry Active Mini Brief”, and in the shop you show a page by category of all products, such as “Swimwear”.
Have you experimented with having an article per product instead of one “overview” and thereby a dedicated product page (with its own URL)?
I can see some pros and cons of both approaches but was wondering why you opted for this?
Regards,
WP
July 17th, 2010 at 12:04 am
Brilliant post Kirsty! I’ve already added a related posts plugin to my site as recommended, and I’m now looking into adding the paginator plugin as well.
July 17th, 2010 at 2:08 am
Glad to see another couple of people are finding the paginator plugin useful. It can have quite an effect on the number of indexed pages on larger sites.
Winalot – I find that the product or collection articles don’t generate as many sales as my pages dedicated to covering large collections. My real strategy is to have pages for each large product section i.e. long leg boxers and one page per brand i.e calvin klein underwear. The vast majority of sales will come from the brand related pages for obvious reasons.
I use the product related blogs to create content around my brands so additional articles of relevance will be pulled onto the page.
July 19th, 2010 at 5:34 pm
Nice post Kirsty. You mention that you use Thumbnail for Excerpts to put pages on your category pages.
Does this mean you have indexed your categories in WP? I thought this was a bit of a no no and most seo plugins use “no index” for WP categories to avoid dup content. Is that not the case?
July 22nd, 2010 at 5:07 am
sorry, first paragraph should have ended “images on your category pages” not “pages on your category pages”
July 22nd, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Great post, thanks for sharing. I’m interested in the paginator plugin, it looks like something I shouldn’t miss. And it’s a good solution to adapt to Google’s indexing strategies. I’ve never thought orphan pages could get a different relevance.
Lloyd Burrell
Publisher
Office Desk Reviews
July 26th, 2010 at 9:31 am
Hey jack – I have indexed my categories but I’ve also put unique content into them and ensured only an excerpt from the posts is shown. Works fine for me!
July 30th, 2010 at 3:49 pm
Hi Kirsty, Thanks for your reply and interesting approach on the large collection pages; I don’t see many affiliates doing it that way.
If you’re using a very large datafeed for a specific brand or category do you still show all products on the page, paginate or prune them to the most popular?
Thanks
July 30th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
One more question
On your datafed sites, how often do you update the product feed? I see some dead images, links, etc. on your sites and it’s obviously a tricky thing to keep on top of.
Do you also prune out products that underperform, move performing products to top, etc.? On your pages I cannot see any discernible sorting (not price, name, etc.) so wonder if you sort manually, another way?
Thanks for all your time.
July 31st, 2010 at 12:47 am
re: large datafeeds – yes we do tend to use all products. Most of our sales aren’t generated via the feed section – I have very targeted landing pages elsewhere on the site. Most people looking at how I do things see the feed section and think that’s all there is to it, lol.
Re: Feed Updates – well, as you’ll have noticed we’re currently hideously out of date due to firefighting on other issues that were left dangling when we renovated our house earlier this year. *sigh* we’ll get there. We usually update monthly, and sort by preferred merchant. We usually know which ones give best EPCs and sort accordingly!
August 11th, 2010 at 12:30 pm
Thanks for your reply.
Yes, I’ve seen your landing pages and once again they’re not like the norm. I see you show a few of the top products and then a big button to see more which redirects to the merchant.
When I think about it your overall approach makes sense as it gets the user to the merchant as quick as possible. Why would you want to keep them on your site? Content is good for search engines but the user wants to buy.
Thanks for your transparancy and advice which I’m hoping to apply to my sites.
August 12th, 2010 at 9:05 am
It’s my absolute pleasure Winalot – and the very best of luck in your endeavours!