Wordpress Theme Issues

I think if you find a theme, paid or free, that'll work with no modification as an affiliate site, you'll be lucky. Probably, the best thing to do is find one that is the nearest, then have it customized by a programmer on Guru, Rent a Coder, Elance etc.

What kind of theme are you looking for? CMS, magazine, traditional blog. Have you looked through the list of WP 2.5 approved themes? - http://codex.wordpress.org/Themes/Theme_Compatibility/2.5

Here's some magazine themes - http://wpmagthemes.com/

Derrick: Thanks for the link. I was interested in seeing what could be done with drikatruu. The association site lookds good!

chopper

OK, so I think I'm beginning to sort this whole thing out, you know, the long term sticky website vs affiliate site vs landing page vs minisite vs cms vs static page scenario.

I think it's much more difficult to mess with the css and php in a wordpress theme to craft a landing page that is tuned to your target market, keywords, product etc.

It's much easier I think to use dreamweaver/fireworks or some similar tool to get the landing page layout EXACTLY as you want barring images you can't afford and extra time you can't spend.

That being said, the affiliate site on which your landing pages will reside can be simple 15-25 article website on a wordpress platform such as this theme (no affiliate link) by Chris Pearson--- http://diythemes.com/ . Granted it's not free like Drikatruu but it has an active forum of users with Chris on board in the forum as well as putting out regular updates to the theme for all who have purchased.

So this affiliate site with your 25 original, unique, helpful articles is to help your landing pages get decent quality score through the minimal links they'll have to the rest of the site and maybe some relevant content below the fold.

Your landing pages will be crafted with precision on some wisysig editor and added to your site as Custom Wordpress Page Templates which will reside within your blog as separate static pages. Watch this video and see if it makes sense to do a landing page this way as part of a wordpress site http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAi3ZM1h4SY .

So back to the affiliate site. Now where does a blog fit into all this ?
I mean Jeremy gave a great example of a niche done right with the thinkpad example
http://www.thinkpadtoday.com/ . The idea is great, but the site needs much more original content, comparisons etc because its compete.com traffic seems to have fallen off to 500 or so a month although conversions might be good. The magazine style theme is great for tech stuff but perhaps not so great for an affiliate site on scrap-booking.

So this site doesn't look like a blog but that is exactly what it would be if the author updated it regularly with more in depth articles. The fact that's its laid out in a magazine format is immaterial. It's just a more attractive layout for a subject like laptops and probably helps conversions because of the in your face visuals and coupons etc. So again where does a blog fit in to affiliate marketing?

I think this link right here provides the best clarification I've ever read- http://www.chrisg.com/where-blogs-fit-into-your-online-marketing-strateg...

I think it will be interesting to see what kind of layout Jeremy comes up with for the ultraportable site and how it compares to the Lenovo site.

OK I better stop now.

I build all my sites with wordpress acting as a cms, at first I setup my landing pages through the page template tutorial on wordpress.com which creates a page template etc and liked it but what I ended up doing is creating a php landing page in dreamweaver and uploading the php file to the domain's main folder on ftp. The reason I ended up doing this is I create a landing page for each adgroup I create, then I name the landing page after the keyword I use so then my display url is the same as the destination url and has the keyword in it without a long url

I.E.
www.mydomain.com/keyword.php

instead of
http://mydomain.com/public_html/wp-content/themes/mytheme/landing_page.p...

I guess its all personal preference and both ways will work, I also create a page that points to the blog posts and make posts a couple times a week. I think wordpress is awesome for blogs and websites.

-skeever

Twitter Me This....
www.twitter.com/skeever

"Skeever, good way of prettying up your url and having your keyword in it too. Are you using .htaccess to redirect big-ugly-url to skinny-minny-one? I have done one url where I redirected to a page outside the blog like you did. But if you have too many e.g. each model has a landing page, would you have X number of redirects as well? Would that be a flag for G?"

Hey Lydia, basically its not a redirect at that point, I don't believe. I create a landing page as .php file and save it as keyword.php. Then I upload it to ftp under the folder for "www.mydomain.com" so then the url for the landing page that the searcher lands on is www.mydomain.com/keyword.php so when they click on that link it goes to my landing page.

Once on the landing page, the link to the offer is a php redirect which I have been saving as go.php or apply.php etc etc. This is what I've been testing lately, I'm not sure if G would flag that or not, as far as I can see its only one redirect. As I use that same re direct link, go.php or apply.php on all the landing pages since they all go to the same offer. I hope that helps. If this is in fact something that will flag the big G, please let a brotha know. Thanks, hope that helps

cheers

-skeever

Twitter Me This....
www.twitter.com/skeever

I only have 1 link to 1 offer in my go.php file, the only thing i have in the go.php file looks like this

<?php header( 'Location: http://affiliateoffer.com' ) ;?>

and that is the only line in the .php file and it points to the one offer my site is promoting. Ill have to check out webmastertools and see what I get. Most of my traffic comes from ysm.

Thanks for the info! :)

cheers

-skeever

Twitter Me This....
www.twitter.com/skeever