Now that you have your WordPress blog installed, you’ll want to change the theme to one that’s a bit less bland than the default Kubrick theme.
Kubrick is not that bad, but it screams out, “Golly, I just didn’t have time to do any work on my site”.
For affiliate sites, you really want a theme that doesn’t get in the way of what you’re selling. There are a couple of schools of thought on this; you’ll need to try a few of these ideas and see what works best for you.
Every premium theme site I’ve come across has an affiliate program, and they seem to have an unwritten law that they’ll exclusively use Paypal as their affiliate payment processor. That means that South Africans, who can’t receive payments through Paypal, can’t make money by recommending premium themes. Fortunately there is one exception – WooThemes have recently introduced their own Payoneer pre-paid Mastercard, as used by 2Checkout, ODesk, iStockPhoto, Plimus and many others.If you’re looking for high-quality WordPress themes to promote, and Paypal doesn’t work for you, WooThemes might be the answer. Thanks Adii!
Having said that, I mostly use free themes. Here are some of my favorites:
Flexibility 2
As the name indicates, the Flexibility theme is very, well, flexible. You can quickly and easily change many aspects of the theme’s ‘look and feel’ from the WordPress dashboard. Really useful for simple affiliate sites.
Corey Miller’s Internet Marketing With Blogs theme
These are two free themes which feature a clean layout and three additional sales page templates. They work pretty well out of the box, but are also easy to modify (if you’re not scared of a little CSS.)
Thematic
This is a theme framework, which gives you the “nuts and bolts” that go into a modern, search engine optimized theme, while being specifically designed to be adapted and expanded by the use of child themes. Very powerful, but the learning curve is a bit steep.
Having chosen a theme (and remembering that it’s dead easy to switch to a different theme if you want), you’ll need to decide how to use it. One of the most effective ways is by putting a big ad on your home page. This could be a simple text link, with some reasons to click on it. Or it could be a graphical button, or even a big banner ad.
The best idea is to test it, and see what works best.
A fresh WordPress installation has (naturally) the blog on the home page. However, you can easily tell WordPress to use any static page as the home page instead. To do this, go to the ‘Settings’ menu. Select ‘Reading’. The first option you’ll see is the ‘Front page displays’ section, where you can select an existing static page for the home page. You can also decide which page to use for the blog – I usually create a page called ‘Articles’ or ‘News’.
If you want your front page to look different from the rest of the pages, you can use a theme which includes different templates – for instance, the Internet Marketing With Blogs theme. Or learn how to create your own page templates – you can start here.
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Affiliate Marketing 7: WordPress Themes
Now that you have your WordPress blog installed, you’ll want to change the theme to one that’s a bit less bland than the default Kubrick theme.
Kubrick is not that bad, but it screams out, “Golly, I just didn’t have time to do any work on my site”.
For affiliate sites, you really want a theme that doesn’t get in the way of what you’re selling. There are a couple of schools of thought on this; you’ll need to try a few of these ideas and see what works best for you.
If you have the budget, you could go for a premium theme, like AffiliateTheme or one of the terrific themes from WooThemes, iThemes or StudioPress.
Having said that, I mostly use free themes. Here are some of my favorites:
Flexibility 2
As the name indicates, the Flexibility theme is very, well, flexible. You can quickly and easily change many aspects of the theme’s ‘look and feel’ from the WordPress dashboard. Really useful for simple affiliate sites.
Corey Miller’s Internet Marketing With Blogs theme
These are two free themes which feature a clean layout and three additional sales page templates. They work pretty well out of the box, but are also easy to modify (if you’re not scared of a little CSS.)
Thematic
This is a theme framework, which gives you the “nuts and bolts” that go into a modern, search engine optimized theme, while being specifically designed to be adapted and expanded by the use of child themes. Very powerful, but the learning curve is a bit steep.
Having chosen a theme (and remembering that it’s dead easy to switch to a different theme if you want), you’ll need to decide how to use it. One of the most effective ways is by putting a big ad on your home page. This could be a simple text link, with some reasons to click on it. Or it could be a graphical button, or even a big banner ad.
The best idea is to test it, and see what works best.
A fresh WordPress installation has (naturally) the blog on the home page. However, you can easily tell WordPress to use any static page as the home page instead. To do this, go to the ‘Settings’ menu. Select ‘Reading’. The first option you’ll see is the ‘Front page displays’ section, where you can select an existing static page for the home page. You can also decide which page to use for the blog – I usually create a page called ‘Articles’ or ‘News’.
If you want your front page to look different from the rest of the pages, you can use a theme which includes different templates – for instance, the Internet Marketing With Blogs theme. Or learn how to create your own page templates – you can start here.