Quick & Easy Affiliate Sites Using Wordpress

If you are new to the Affiliate marketing business, you will probably be overwhelmed with the sheer volume of information that is available.  Affiliate marketing can be a daunting business, on the one hand you have to grasp the setting up wesbites/landing pages and on the other you have to deal with all the traffic generation strategies and selecting the right offers.

Thankfully you don’t need to panic.  Here is where Wordpress can help get you up and running in no time at all and at least remove some of the headaches related with setting up Affiliate sites

There are a few of things that you will need to get your affiliate sites up and running, they are as follows:

• Web Hosting account – This will need to meet the following technical requirements – PHP and MySQL (Database) – I personally recommend either Justhost or Bluehost for wordpress hosting.  They are cheap, but do provide a good level of service and support
• Domain name for your site. Domain Sale! $7.49* .com at GoDaddy.com
• Account with an Affiliate Network or a merchant that provides an affiliate scheme

Once you have got all the above sorted out, you will need to install Wordpress on your web hosting account.  You can either do this manually or some hosts provide a simple 1-Click install system that does all the hard work for you.  Once you have installed Wordpress you then need to find a suitable theme for your site.  A theme is basically a “skin” for your website. Themes come in both free and paid for versions the choice is really down to you on whether you want to pay for a theme or stick with a free theme.  In the early days its probably best to stick with a free theme to keep the costs down.  Most of the reputable theme designers provide a demo site so you can actually see the theme in action.  Along with a theme you will need to install some plugins to help with managing your site and helping you get indexed with the search engines.  I wrote a post recently on 5 must have plugins for Wordpress so take a read of that and make a note of them.  Ok, moving on…

So, you now have Wordpress running and it looks just how you want it.

The next stage is to load up the relevant content onto your site.  Because Wordpress has an inbuilt CMS (Content Management System) it is really easy to add text, images and video to your site.  Wordpress offers you the choice to add content to “Posts” which is a blog format or to “pages” which is very much like a normal website.  Its really down to you as to which format you use.  Finally you can add any particular Affiliate offers to the post or pages by pasting in the relevant code provided by your Affiliate network.

If you plan to build a list (and if you are not you really should be!) from your affiliate site and you use Aweber for email list management and marketing, then you will be able to easily add the email signup form either by using the Aweber plugin or by pasting in the code provided by Aweber.  NB – If you are using a different email list system then please refer to them for instructions on integrating with Wordpress, or drop me a line and I will help you out.

So there we are, that is a very brief overview of using Wordpress to setup quick and easy affiliate sites.  You will find that after you have done a couple, you will be able to set sites up in no time at all.

Hopefully you will start to make money with you affiliate sites and at that point you may want to  invest in some of the Wordpress Themes that are designed specifically for Affiliate Marketing,  I would personally recommend Affiliate Theme by Unique Blog Designs Its a very flexible and customisable theme and I really rate it for affiliate wordpress based sites.  Check out my review of affiliate theme.