I know I talk a lot about Wordpress on here… but I really can’t highlight enough just how great I really think it is for affiliates on a budget (or just plain stingy Scottish affiliates like me!).
I wrote my other guide -Wordpress 101 - All You Need For An Affiliate Site a while back, and a lot of people found it quite useful.
But what happens when you want a little more complex solution for a broader more in-depth site? It’s off to the web developers, right? Stop right there oh hasty affiliate!!! Wordpress is not simply a solution that will create a site based on a chronological “list” of data. You really can do an awful lot with it.
With that in mind, I am going to show you guys a site I have been developing since the start of November. With this site I think I’ve really shown what a cracking job you can do using Wordpress, a bit of work, and a little basic HTML / CSS knowledge. Obviously what I am talking about here is not suitable for total beginners, but I genuinely feel that most people can achieve results like this after a relatively small learning curve.
(click image to open site in new window)
So as you all know, I do a lot in lingerie… this is my new SEO friendly lingerie site! It’s absolutely jam packed with unique content which funnels visitors through to a feed based section where all the products I hope to sell are at. As you’ll see, it already has a PR2 and it is already getting around 100uv’s per day despite being brand new.
Gosh Darn Kirsty, that’s awful good. However did you manage that?
Gee thanks guys, I’m happy with it too. Here’s a list of the things we used to make this.
1 ) A Premium Magazine Style Wordpress Theme
We bought Brian Gardner’s Revolution Magazine Theme. As you’ll see from my site, the theme is insanely customisable using and comes in 2 or 3 column homepage designs. It costs just $79.99 for a single use. I bought a multiple use package for $249.. and Brian has since kindly reduced the price by $50 just to piss me off! However, for designing such a great theme, he may consider himself forgiven (for now). Cost £125
2. A Bit Of CSS Stylesheet Knowhow
We altered this theme a fair bit, but all we really had to know was some basic to medium stylesheet type stuff and we were able to sit down and completely alter all the colour schemes. If you want to see what some others have done with this same theme, check out Brian’s showcase section here… it really is amazing all the different ways you can customise a well thought out theme. Cost £0.00
3. A Teeny Tiny Bit Of Photoshopping
Duncan created the logos for me in Photoshop. He’s only got basic knowledge in Photoshop, but the site logo only took him ten minutes to actually create, with slightly longer to make some of the buttons. We got the fonts from one of them free font type sites and popped them into our Fonts folder in the C drive so Photoshop could then reference it. Cost £0.00
4. Some Really Cool Wordpress Plugins
I pretty much used all the same Wordpress plugins I referred to in the Wordpress 101 post. I also bought a plugin to manage a newsletter subscription database. This cost me all of $15. I’m not going to link to it as the chap who was selling it didn’t respond to my communications when I could not get it to work. It’s only now working because the tech support guy at Clook was extremely, extremely helpful and told me what the issue was and how to fix it.
I also used a wordpress related posts plugin to help me add additional content to each of the pages I’ve created for the various Lingerie Brands I have featured so far. The one I found works the best for me was Similar Posts, by Rob Marsh. It was certainly the easiest to install and works out related posts based on their entire contents rather than just tags and titles. The idea with this is to constantly be adding fresh content to my various pages, thus keeping Google interested in paying me a wee visit.
I’m having a couple of issues with how this plugin looks on the news articles themselves. I’d really like there to be some kind of command that excludes related posts from being displayed in some categories. But hey… that’s a pretty minor grouse and one I might work out how to get over.
Finally, I found a totally awesome link exchange plugin by Eric Medlin which creates a link submission form for your Wordpress blog and which also monitors whether or not people are continuing to reciprocate links and also records the page rank of the page on which your link is being displayed.
Cost £7.50
5. A Little Bit Of Dreamweaver To Make The Brand Profile Page Structure
We created a really basic table in Dreamweaver to format all the images within the lingerie brand profiles without the rich text editor stuffing them up. Again, only ten minutes work and something someone with a basic knowledge of Dreamweaver or simple HTML coding could do very quickly. Cost £0.00
6. Medium Range HTML, Dreamweaver & SQL Skills To Create The Feed Section
We re-created the blog template in static html and created a database driven affiliate feed site with Duncan’s SQL skills. He’s only a basic level competence in this, but he’s managed to put together a nice looking shopping area mirroring the blog design. I don’t think this is entirely necessary. You could also use a free service such as Affilistore if you wanted a feed site, and link to it from your blog navigation. Alternatively, don’t bother with the feed site… I felt it was a good fit for this subject area so have included it. However, linking direct to merchants would be just as effective in many cases.
7. A LOT Of Time Devoted To Content Writing - I’ve written 150 unique articles for this site so far, totalling somewhere in the region of 10,000 - 12,000 words. NB, if anyone even considers copying any of this content… do beware my notorious Scottish temper. I do check regularly and I am evil personified when you get on my bad side. 
Despite the domain and site only being weeks old I am seeing good search engine rankings already, which really does show the value of good content. The “Content is King” adage is well worn for a reason. And as John Lamerton has been saying on his blog, Affiliates need to realise good unique content is the way forward. This is something I wholeheartedly agree with. Cost £0.00
Total Cost Of My Nice New Affiliate Site: £132.50, Plus One Hell Of A Lot Of My Time!
There’s still lots for me to do on this site, the brand possibilities are endless. I also want to add images to each of the post excerpts on the home page. Brian Gardiner has a fix for this, but for the life of me I can’t work out how to do it!
January 30th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
sweet advice
January 30th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
For the image issue, what about adding **img src=”domain.com/images/.jpg** and creating an image for each post number. For example, if post number 17 was about bras, and you have a picture of a bra, you’d rename it 17.jpg and it would automagically appear next to the excerpt!
That’s what I’ve got set up on some of my sites, if I’ve understood you correctly (but I don’t have the Revo theme).
January 30th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Whoops that didn’t work. I meant
**img src=”domain.com/images/ **?php the_ID(); ?**.jpg”**
Where ** is a .
January 30th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
D’ya mean where ** is a > ?
Oh how confusing! Sounds like quite a good idea. The Revolution theme has some kind of fiddle you do with custom tags. Can’t get my head around it. I’ve tried asking on the support forums, but everyone on there seems to have watched some video tutorial and no bugger felt like sharing (so I got frustrated and put the task to one side!)
January 30th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
I missed your 101 post so was glad you did the follow-up. I’m a big fan of Brian’s themes and know he’s working on updates to his other themes at the moment following on from his RT 2.0 release last week.
I think WP is an excellent tool but as you quite rightly point out, to stay ahead of the pack it needs customising and to stay at the top of the SERPS, it needs unique content+. Your Lingerie site is a great example of what can be achieved if you put your mind to it.
Have you considered the wp-table & rss footer plugins?
January 30th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Hey gadget…. I hadn’t heard of those plugins. I will check them out though. Always looking for new plugins to play around with!!
January 30th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Yeah, sorry, this form kept ripping out every character I threw at it and so I gave up in the end!
An example from my code site on this page http://www.thediscountblog.co.uk/category/a/a1-gifts there is this image http://www.thediscountblog.co.uk/graphics/shops/A1 Gifts.gif, called by
img src= http://www.thediscountblog.co.uk/graphics/shops/*******.gif.
Instead of the stars, I put the WP PHP code for “single_cat_title” so it dynamically pulls in the logo depending on what the category is called, in this case, A1 Gifts.gif.
Hope that explains a bit more, but I think I’m confusing myself
January 30th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Hey Kirsty,
You said you spent a lot of time writing content. Why didn’t you outsource this instead?
Keep on the good work!
Stephane
January 30th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
I have the same question as TheWebHostingHero!! As you’re having more and more campaigns, isn’t it a huge chore when you have to write hundreds of articles? If you outsource, you can concentrate on doing other stuff, such as market research, keyword research, etc…..
Also, do you manually update your sites one by one, by hand? Wow I’m impressed at your ambition and hard work!!!! This is certainly something to emulate…..
January 30th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Well, there are two reasons I do most of my own copy…
1. I am too much of a control freak
2. I am a stingy Scot!
Seriously, I do actually have one chap helping me with this already, he doesn’t have a lot of time right now to do work for me, but I do want to ensure the quality is right with the copy (and he’s pretty good at writing in my preferred style). I feel it makes all the difference, although I’ll definately have to outsource at some stage!
When will I outsource? When I find someone competent, trustworthy, and at the right price.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
Kirsty, you inspired me to go on a plugin hunt and I’ve found a plugin genius. At first glance the following page looks very geeky but I “promise” you that if you spend just 2 mins reading through the list you’ll find some awesome plugins. By awesome I mean ‘very’ useful ones.
The guy’s called Lester Chan and he’s my new best friend!
http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php
January 30th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
I am so impressed with your site - and all that hard work getting the articles done. Way to go! It’s great to see examples like this - real life projects, and realizing that YES, IT DOES TAKE A LOT OF WORK. LOL. Thanks so much!
January 31st, 2008 at 12:15 am
“and he’s pretty good at writing in my preferred style”
Do you mean with a nice feminine touch? haha
January 31st, 2008 at 1:02 am
I had a bit of space on my celeb PR5 site so I’ve linked to yours. Some celebrities out there don’t wear enough lingerie on a night out lol.
January 31st, 2008 at 9:27 am
That’s a great affiliate site. If that isn’t affiliate added value, I don’t know what is.
If you don’t mind me asking, will you be promoting this purely with SEO, or with PPC also?
Keep up the good work with the blog.
January 31st, 2008 at 10:31 am
Very nice site, well done. What’s the feed based shop section made from?
January 31st, 2008 at 10:36 am
Geoff - Yes, its your nice female touch!
Ray - Ohh, thanks. I will find somewhere suitable to reciprocate. lets hope old Britney starts wearing knickers soon.
Joe - There is some PPC being delivered also, but the main aim is to have a good site with really strong organic traffic. I want to reduce my reliance on SEO.
Ben - The feed based shop section was created by hand by my other half. He re-created the blog template and used merchant feeds to create a shopping section.
January 31st, 2008 at 10:58 am
Nice Site Kirsty! Some nice plugin resources there too! Unique added value content is key! If you took away all the affiliate deals you would still have a very useful site so gooel will love it!
That is what you call a PHAT affiliate site!
Good Job!
February 5th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Hi Kirsty, First of all thanks for letting us all know how you do all this fantastic stuff.
I actually started my own lingerie blog for valentines day recently, http://www.mysexyvalentine.co.uk, what do you think? I’m just using a template from 1 and 1 at the mo, but with all your hints and tips next year I should have an awesome site like yours…
with unique content written by me, of course. x
February 6th, 2008 at 12:12 am
Great looking site Kirsty.
Any other stingy Scots might like to know there are a few other ‘magazine’ themes out there that are being given away free. Not quite up the Revolution standard, but might be enough to learn the tricks they use to make something just as nice.
http://www.stephenpratley.com/wordpress-magazine-themes-hot-for-2008/
March 5th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Hi Kirsty,
A friend recently sent me to your blog and I read your post here and found it quite inspirational.
I’ve never used a feed so when you say, “The feed based shop section was created by hand by my other half. He re-created the blog template and used merchant feeds to create a shopping section.”
Can you iterate on that? I assume from your post your “other half” created a static html page right? I can follow that part but, as I’m new to feeds, is that shop section actually utilising a feed or did he use the feed to create the images/prices/description by hand?
I hope that makes sense
Cheers
March 11th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
[...] wrote a short tutorial on how to build an affiliate site from scratch with Wordpress, Kirsty from AffiliateStuff.co.uk introduced a really nice feed driven lingerie site using the revolution theme and Monty from [...]
May 10th, 2008 at 1:52 am
Kristy, I have looked at many different themse for wordpress. We ultimately chose the Business Pro theme from Brian Gardner. His templates are awesome. We will be using it as a real estate site. I have very little CSS experience but I learn quick. Hopefully I can make something out of it. Your site is awesome BTW!
May 30th, 2008 at 10:56 am
BOOKMARKED!
This is seriously great! Thanks for this post!