Affiliate marketing is a lucrative business. Many people are capable of raking in six figures or more by marketing other people’s products and earning a commission. As a CMS, WordPress is actually perfectly suited to affiliate marketing due to how easy it is to get a blog up and running, how easy it is to optimize a blog, and more. Not just that, but you can easily copy wordpress installations in order to get a new blog up and running in no time.

Initial Steps

In the case that you have already installed your affiliate blogs, you will need to start sending content to the blog. This can be in the form of both pages and posts. Personally, for a landing page, I recommend setting up a WordPress page as your landing page. This can be done in your reading options.

The reason that I reccomend this is simple. It means that you can customize the page at will, and seperate it from the remainder of the blog, making the site look for like a content site rather than a blog.

I also opt to use sidebars on my landing page, however, this is entirely up to you. Some people like the flexibilty of being able to add an opt in form to their landing page, or even affiliate images with links. The choice in this case is entirely yours.

Taking The Next Steps

As a preference, I like to drip feed content at a reasonably fast rate for the first week, then slow down after that time. This means that you can easily populate your blog with good high quality content that sells a click, then focus on developing more as a background task later on.

Remember to optimize your content for the search engines. The best way that I do this is using the Headspace SEO plugin for WordPress. This allows you to add custom meta data for each post or page, and helps you appear as being much more relevant in the search engines.

Going Pro

People like to steal affiliate links. This is a hard truth about affiliate marketing, and one that you need to be aware of from the moment that you start. This is a black hat tactic that others use, and it can have a very big impact on you.

As a safe fall, I use a plugin called “Pretty Link”, which allows me to cloak my affiliate links, and also monitor my click through rate for each link. This is a free plugin that is available from WordPress, and is a great safe fall in the case that someone does steal your content, as you can simply change out the link at any time.

Final Words

Although this is going to be slightly off track, I want to remind you about what your job is as an affiliate marketer. It is to find high quality products that match what it is that your market is searching for. It is not to sell garbage that may not be relevant, it is about honesty, integrity, and true care for your market. Without that, you are going to find it hard to get started.

On top of that, remember that setting up an affiliate blog is labor intensive. Make a copy wordpress installation so that you can deploy small affiliate sites fast. This will give you the edge when getting affiliate sites up and running.