Why WordPress Is Great For Affiliate Sites
When it comes to affiliate marketing, building websites is a large part of the process for many. I know that I rely on websites as the backbone of all my affiliate activities.
In order to build many affiliate websites, or to save yourself time when managing sites, it helps to have a good platform that makes essential tasks easy.
That’s why I really like using WordPress for the affiliate sites that I build.
I don’t really rank my reasons in any particular order, but let me just run through why I think you should use WordPress if you aren’t sure what publishing platform to use.
Support
WordPress has a huge community of people that build themes and plugins. There’s tons of help out there if you need to find it. Forums, blogs and more. Lots of people use WordPress so it’s easy to find people that have similar issues if you are running into problems with anything.
Ease of Setup
It is super easy to install and setup a base WordPress install. Many web hosts even provide services to instantly install WordPress blogs to domains that you host with them. Setting it up yourself is also pretty quick.
Lots of Themes
Tons of people develop themes for WordPress, it’s easy to find a unique them that you can either buy or attain and then modify or use it as is.
Many themes are very flexible and allow you to customize them extensively without even mucking with the code.
Easy to Develop Around
If you want to do your own custom plugins and themes, it’s easy to get into. If you have PHP and HTML experience, you’ll be doing advanced things with WordPress in no time.
If you don’t know how to develop sites on your own, it’s also very easy to find developers that know WordPress.
Plugins
There are tons of plugins to help you do things that you need to do with any typical website. You can find plugins to do the following, for example:
- Automatically publish sitemaps
- Automatically backup your site
- Caching, to help speed up your site
- Advanced widgets
- Automatically post to Twitter and other social networks
And that’s just scratching the surface.
Publishing Content
Putting together a website with several product reviews and a blog, for example, is made easy through the basic features of WordPress. Articles can be published in a matter of minutes. You can schedule posts to go live at certain dates. Stuff like that.
Arranging your pages into menus is easy with the menu system that WordPress uses. Widgets can be used to automatically display new posts and content in the sidebars.
You don’t really need to work to hard at all to publish a new page to a site, and to get it to be displayed or linked to.
Search Engine Optimization
This is where I appreciate WordPress the most. I assembled a core of SEO-related plugins with some basic configuration setups that I use for every site I make, and by simply installing those plugins and configuring them correctly, I don’t have to really worry about manual on-site SEO for any of my sites.
I set things up so that meta tags can be managed on a per-page basis when editing pages. I also set up default meta-tag generation for pages that I don’t want to manually set meta tags.
WordPress also automatically creates descriptive page urls based on the page titles.
When publishing a page or post, WordPress automatically updates the site XML site map and pings the search engines. WordPress also automatically keeps the RSS feed updated.
Images can easily be properly optimized using the media manager and the insert options.
Stuff like that. There’s numerous other things I could list, but that’s for another post I think.
Conclusion
These are my main reasons why I think WordPress is great for affiliates. If you need to be able to set up sites quickly, back them up and manage them automatically, publish to them easily and optimize for the search engines easily, it’s hard to go wrong here.
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