Wordpress Affiliate Style: Part 2
In part one of this series I shared some basic configuration settings that all affiliates need to consider when starting a new Wordpress site. Today I want to focus your attention to some of the plug-ins you need as an affiliate.
All in One SEO Pack
The days of thin sites built around affiliate offers are over. Successful affiliates know that SEO sites are what the search engines want and reward them with lower click costs. The All in One SEO Pack is a lightweight plugin that ensures that all vital SEO meta-data is included in your sites pages. There are many plugins that effectively handle this, but I have found this plugin to be the fastest and easiest to configure.
Redirection
As you know, affiliates only make money by sending qualified traffic to a merchant’s landing pages. Yet there are times where you want to disguise the links on your site to these merchant’s offers. It will look more professional if the link appears to be on your own domain. For example, www.merchantsite.com/landing.php?affId=1&prod=2 is not quite as attractive as www.mysite.com/go/product. The Redirection plugin let’s affiliates very easily create professional looking links to merchant offers.
Dagon Design Form Mailer
One important part of creating an affiliate site is adding a contact page. Search engines want legitimate advertisers and businesses, not scammy looking affiliate sites. Adding a contact page to your site gives the appearance of a real business and the Dagon Design Form Mailer plugin makes it a snap. I like this plugin because it’s extremely flexible and very easy to use. Creating a contact page is done by simply creating a new Wordpress page and adding the contact form tag: <!-- ddfm1 -->. That’s it!
WP Greet Box
I really love this plugin! It’s been very useful in my affiliate marketing efforts especially for list building. WP Greet Box will display a customized message to your site’s visitors based on where they come from. So, when Google sends traffic to your site, a Google specific message is shown. The same is for Yahoo!, MSN, Delicious, and any other site you want to configure a message for. The message can be anything but is commonly used to ask readers to subscribe to your site’s feed. However, I have also used custom greetings to anounce discounts and coupons to my site’s visitors. Think about it for one second. When you recognize a visitor from another site and reward them with something, a conversion is much more likely to happen. Here’s a an example of the default message a visitor sees after installing the plugin.
Xavin’s Review Ratings
Many affiliates have had success with review style sites that compare all the features and benefits of related products and services. Often times products and services are given a star rating based on various criteria. Xavin’s Review Ratings plugin makes adding dynamic ratings to your site’s review pages very easy. I have used this plugin many times and highly recommend it.
Google XML Sitemaps
Getting your site indexed with search engines is an important aspect of SEO and part of doing that is building a sitemap. The Sitemaps plugin will automatically create a XML sitemap that is recognized by Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com. The plugin will also update the sitemap with every change you make to your Wordpress site and help get your site indexed faster. This is one of those plugins that is an absolute must for every site you build.
WP Super Cache
This last plugin is very important and for two good reasons. First, if your site takes a while to load you could lose visitors and ultimately money if you are buying traffic. Secondly, if you are buying traffic from Google, part of your site’s quality score is determined by your landing page’s load time. I’ll try not to be too technical, but Wordpress stores all of your site’s content in a database, but serving content out of a database is slower than serving files out of a directory. The WP Super Cache plugin speeds up your site’s load times by caching the content on the web server’s file system. I highly recommend this plugin to anyone running a large Wordpress site.
That’s all for now, but stay tuned for the next post in this series.
Related posts:
Great stuff. After installing the Redirection plugin, there was a link to his other plugins on the config page. I just replaced All in 1 SEO with Headspace. You might wanna check it out.
I’m glad you found it useful. I’ve used the Headspace plugin before and it’s very powerful. However, I’ve had some trouble with it on very large sites. One in particular had over 2,000 posts and while the Headspace plugin was enabled the site was very slow. I replaced it with All in One SEO and the site responded very nicely. I guess it just depends on how large your site gets
Hey! byTagg is a very good affiliate program too! bytagg is another RSS Reader, but it comes with your RSS and Twitter account configured at install (it detects from what site it comes)
And the Blog owner own 50% of all banner page-view! veeery nice!
Im making money! $.$
Check out:
http://www.devilsworkshop.org/bytagg-a-new-medium-to-earn-extra-money-from-your-blog/
and
http://bytagg.com/en/affiliates
Cya! Nice blog!
Bye
Hi Jason
I am interested in the Review Rating site plugin in setting up a WP site.What other plugins do you use and the type of Theme you use to set up review sites? Pus any other help you can offer would be great?
Best Regards Cal
Cal, Thanks for your comments. I currently use Xavin’s Review Ratings with my review sites just to simply add rating stars to my reviews. It’s a nice plugin because there’s all sorts of looks and you can add star ratings to anything just by inserting a shortcode tag [xrr rating=4/5] to display a rating. I have used a plugin called My Review that formats all your review posts in a specific way. This plugin is what you would use if you were doing a detailed review. It’s not for those review style pages where you see a grid of 3 or 4 products compared side by side to each other. My Review uses short tags as well but it formats the review so there is a summary at the top, a grid with the good and the bad, a detailed review, and then a break down of categories with scores for each, and them a final rating. The bad thing about this plugin is that it’s not supported anymore and there’s no documentation. I’ve tested it with Wordpress 2.7 and it still works even though it’s only tested up to 2.5.1. If you use it, you might spend some time trying to get it to work and digging through the code to figure out how it works. Here’s an example of what My Review looks like in action. Another and more powerful review plugin is WP Review Site. It is documented and has many more features including affiliate link tracking and building those fancy comparison grids for you. It goes for $97 and may be worth it if you don’t have time to mess around with My Review. Honestly though, if you know a little HTML you can do everything yourself. It’s really about formatting your content for easy review and you don’t need a plugin for that. Plugins do save you time though. If I get some free time I’ll write a quick post about My Review and give some simple instructions for those of you who are interested.
As far as themes go, I personally use WooThemes a lot. They have a lot of professional looking themes that are great for building out content rich sites. Each theme is loaded with many options and very configurable. I have also used some free themes before. I have found often times a free theme requires some work to customize it before you start using it while professional themes are almost always ready to go. So it depends on what type of skills you have and how much free time you have as well. If you know HTML and PHP like me then free themes are great if you have time to tweak and modify theme. Otherwise a professional set of themes might be what you need.
I hope all this helps.
Hi Jason
Thanks for your reply and your time to answer.Yes I was hoping that you had a answer to setting up a Review style similar to WP Review site which cost $97 with the plugins etc that said…
You said”If I get some free time I’ll write a quick post about My Review and give some simple instructions for those of you who are interested”—–that would be great to pick you brains for that knowledge and I am sure other vistors to your site would find this of interest..Regards Cal