Wordpress Affiliate Style: Part 1
Wordpress is probably the most widely used publishing platform on the web and powers everything from personal blogs to corporate websites. I have come to love Wordpress for two reasons: simplicity and flexibility. It’s because of these two reasons that I use the Wordpress platform in my affiliate business. I don’t have time to build every new site from scratch but I need a platform that is flexible enough to fit my business needs too. In this series I want to share with you how I use Wordpress as an affiliate and the best practices for setting up an affiliate ready Wordpress site.
I’m not going to talk about installing Wordpress because there are hundreds of resources out there that can help you with that. Many of the web hosts today even have 1-click installers that make setup even easier. What I want to talk about first is the Wordpress configuration.
Permalinks
As soon as I finish installing Wordpress I head straight to the settings panel to get some of the basics out of the way. Your permalinks structure is a critical step in setting up your Wordpress installation and affects how the search engines index your site. I always choose a custom structure and include both the post id and post name in the URL. Including the post id ensures that my URL is unique (very important) and the post name ensures that I have a descriptive URL that is search engine friendly. Many times I even include keywords in my post name so they show up in the URL as well.
Taxonomy
Next you need to understand a little about what Wordpress calls a post and a page. Technically they are both the same but functionally very different. Pages are typically very static and are not time sensitive like an about us or contact page. Even your home page can be considered static and it is in most cases for me. Posts are the real meat and potatoes of your site. Posts contain the content that brings people back wanting more. In an affiliate site these are all the articles I write related to the niche I’m in. Knowing how to use these two determines how setup your affiliate site.
Once I’m ready to start throwing content into the site I get the contact us, about, privacy, and disclosure pages out of the way. I then start working on landing pages. These too are considered Wordpress pages but I don’t necessarily want these showing up in my site menu. There are many reasons for this and I will discuss this further when I talk about landing pages. However, there is a great plug-in that makes it easy to exclude these from your site navigation called Exclude Pages. Just download this plug-in, upload it to your wp-content/plugins folder, and then activate it from plugins panel.
After you have got all the pages out of the way then you can start creating your niche specific content or posts. Whether you write yourself or outsource your writing, it’s important that your content is unique and easy to read. More importantly you want to make sure you categorize your content appropriately for both your readers and the search engines. You want people to be able to find your content as easily as possible so take a few minutes to a create content organization strategy.
I’ve rambled enough for today but in the next part of this series I will talk more about some necessary plugins you are going to need as an affiliate. Don’t worry, they are all free and work well. There’s a lot more to come in this series including theme customization, landing pages, monitization, and more. So stay tuned until next time.
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Thanks for the recommendation about Exclude Pages. I’ve always just hacked through some php array function that did it for me. This seems much easier.
Ken, no problem. I’m glad I could share something useful and I hope to share a lot more in this series.
Thanks Jason. I recently created a new wp blog and knew my permalinks need changing. Your custom structure worked great.
Michael, glad I could help and thank you for your comments.