subject: Using WordPress For Affiliate Marketing [print this page] There are almost as many ways to market as an affiliate as there are products to be marketed. One of the more popular methods is to use a WordPress blog, installed on a domain with a keyword rich name. The reason for the popularity of this is because the site is easy to manage using plug-ins that can help with everything from increasing traffic to building a list. There are many different ways to use a blog, as you'll see below.
WordPress, as mentioned above, has the ability to add functionality through plug-ins, which are small software programs that integrate directly into the blog. You can use these plug-ins to manage your blog's content, and in some cases even to find relevant content to post on your blog automatically. Since frequent, relevant posting is a good way to increase search engine rankings, this is a very useful function.
Other plug-ins can help to increase traffic by automatically submitting RSS feeds or other links to relevant aggregators, directories, and bookmarking sites. These links increase your blog's exposure, and increase your chances for search engine rankings as well.
Beyond this, there are also plug-ins that can be used to post advertisements, links and information to products from affiliate networks like Commission Junction, and even from individual programs like at Amazon and eBay. Additionally, there are some that will help with tracking visitors, split testing, and even creating a pop-in box to use for advertising or collecting visitor's email addresses.
To make the most of the software, affiliates will configure their sites in different ways depending on their own goals and preferences. For some, a static home page is configured for the blog, to be used as a review of an affiliate product or as a squeeze page to help build an email list.
Other affiliates prefer to create a variety of pages within the blog to review many different products, providing links to these reviews from every page of the blog. Others sprinkle in posts with reviews and recommendations to make them appear more like a natural part of the blog.
One thing that most affiliates do is to post multiple articles that are relevant to the topic being promoted or that are related to a specific affiliate product they are promoting. Using articles adds content to the site, which is something the search engines like to see.
Overall, it is easy to see why many affiliates who create sites on their own domains do so using WordPress. With the added functionality and simple manageability, it is almost difficult to see why anyone would use anything else.
