When it comes to setting up an affiliate marketing website, you have a few options. You can choose to create a static website using HTML. This requires you to know the specific programming language.
You will also need to have an HTML editor handy to create your pages. An alternative to this is setting up a blog using WordPress, which is a free platform that many people are using to build their affiliate sites these days.
Why WordPress?
There are many benefits to using WordPress for your affiliate marketing efforts. For one, it can be easily installed from your web host’s cPanel. You can use Fantastico to install WordPress in less than one minute. Once it’s up and running, your site is live with a fully functional blog for you to use to promote your affiliate products.
Another reason many affiliate marketers prefer WordPress is because of the easy to use admin panel. When you log into your WordPress installation, you will have access to the different sections of the administrative dashboard.
From here, you can change the blog’s theme, create pages or posts, install WordPress plugins, track your site’s stats, and more. Being able to do things with a push of a button makes WordPress so likeable by affiliate marketers.
Search Engine Optimization
WordPress can also assist with the search engine optimization of your website. There are many themes and plugins out there that have built in options to help you rank your site higher in the search results.
Take your meta information, for example. This is a title, description, and set of tags that the search engines can read to help determine what keywords your site is targeting. If you use HTML, you would have to type these into your pages manually. With WordPress, however, you can input the information into text fields and it will be added as soon as you publish the post.
Schedule Your Posts
Because the search engines love fresh content, WordPress makes is ridiculously easy to update your site on a regular basis. You can even schedule blog posts to publish in the future. If you sit down and write 52 blog posts (or have them outsourced), you could set them up to publish once a week. This would basically put your blogging efforts on autopilot for a full year!
As you can see, there are a number of reasons to consider using WordPress for your affiliate blogs. Some people may feel that the platform is difficult to use, but it sure beats having learn the entire language of HTML in order to set up a website.