Wordpress is an excellent site building tool and once it is setup properly, you can concentrate on adding great content to your site.  Wordpress will then take care of the rest, including all of the linking, creating pages, sitemap etc.  If you need more convincing, read my article on “Advantages of Using Wordpress for Affiliate Sites”.

The big question here is how do you set up the site?

The way I like to build a website is to have a homepage and some main pages.  The main pages cover the various sections of the niche.  I’ll then add content to the site, with each article fitting nicely into one of the sub-niches covered by a main page.  Here is a diagram I created a few years ago to explain how I structure a website:

You can see from the diagram that the homepage links to the main pages, and a sitemap.  You will of course want to add some of the following: privacy, disclaimer, terms & contact us pages, and these will also be linked to from the homepage.  The articles on the site then link to the related main pages, so that the content on your site is linked together by topic.  Wordpress makes this type of site very easy.

The homepage is obviously taken care of, though you do have a choice – do you use a static homepage, or the recent posts as a homepage?  Everyone has their own idea of what they want their homepage to look like.  I personally prefer a static homepage, or at least a homepage that I can control, so that I can make sure it acts as an “information centre” guiding visitors to the content they are searching for.  However, what about main pages?  How do you handle the main pages in Wordpress?

Many people teach that you use “pages” in Wordpress to hold your main page content, however, I use posts.  if you are confused, read this article on the difference between posts and pages.  In fact it would be more accurate to say I use the category pages as my main pages.  The category pages in Wordpress usually show all of the posts in the category, but I modify them slightly.  For my category pages I’ll:

1. Create a “sticky post” for each category, so that the same post is always shown at the top of the category page.
2. List the other pages in the category as plain text links to the “post” page created by Wordpress.
3. Remove the potential duplicate post page (the one that Wordpress created for my sticky post) using a redirect.

You can see this in action on the website I have been building for my Wordpress for Affiliate Sites members.  Here is the site.

Across the top of the site you can see links to the “home” and “glossary” pages.  These are pages (not posts) in Wordpress.  Underneath this, you can see three menus:  Conditions & Disease, Diabetes Treatment and Diabetic Pets.  Each of these categories represent main pages, but they are also “super categories”.  If you put your mouse over the top of these, a sub-menu opens showing a number of other categories.  Every category on this site is a “main” page on the site.

To illustrate the point, click on any of the categories. 

The page you get to is a category page in the eyes of Wordpress, but a “main” page in my site model. 

You can see the “sticky post” at the top of the category page, and this post will never change unless I change it.  In a traditional Wordpress setup, this post would be replaced when I next published an article to this category.  However, on this site, any new posts to this category will just be added as a link at the end of the page.

When you do things this way, posts are pigeon-holed into one category or another, so that these category pages (my main pages) become themed to a high degree.  The pages they link to are all in the same category, and of course, all of those pages link back to the main page.  

If you would like to learn how to create sites like this, my Wordpress for Affiliate Sites course teaches everything.  During the course I have videoed the entire process, from start to finish, so anyone can follow along. 

There is a lot of planning and decision-making involved in starting an affiliate site. It is tempting to take short-cuts because everyone wants to see quick results. However, I cannot emphasize enough the need to take your time.

Follow each stage carefully, and don’t move on to the next until you are 100% happy with the previous step.

Let’s look at an overview of the complete process from start to finish, a kind of summary for the whole of this course.

2.1. Process of building a “FAT” Affiliate site

1. Identify a profitable niche (which includes checking for products that you can promote).
2. Carry out keyword research to find out what people are actually searching for at the search engines.
3. Analyze your keyword research and split your keywords into groups, according to their future use on your site.
4. Sign up with a web host, so that you can get your site on the web. This particular stage is very important since not all web hosts are equal and it is a pain to change over to a new host when you find your current one is not living up to your expectations. To confuse matters further, price is not a good indicator of quality.
5. Buy a domain name, and set up your host ready to upload your pages.
6. Create pages “pre-selling” the products you are promoting. It is important to create quality content that helps your visitors with their buying decisions, as this not only makes your site valuable, it also helps prevent being labelled as a thin affiliate.
7. Add tracking code to your pages, so that you can analyze where your visitors come from, how many, and how they found your pages in the first place.
8. Join affiliate programs that provide products related to your chosen niche. It is often better to have the basic site up an running before trying to sign up for affiliate programs, since many merchants will want to see the site you are going to promote them on.
9. Add affiliate links, and/or Adsense to your pages.
10. If you are selling your own product, create a sales page for the product, sign up with Paypal or another payment processor, and add a Buy button or link to your sales page. Also you need to create an eBook “cover image” for your product, and add this image to the pages of your site so that anyone visiting a page, can see your eBook and click through to the eBook sales page if they are interested in more information.
11. Link your pages together into a site, so that it helps your visitor, the search engines, and your rankings.
12. Upload what you have done so far so that it can be found and indexed by the search engines. Get a link to your site from another site that is already in Google so that the search engines can find your site.
13. Add quality content in the form of articles that are 100% relevant to your niche. These again should be quality articles, which are informative, and provide a genuine “value” to your site. Add these slowly over time, so that your site appears to grow in size naturally.
14. Get links to your site. This can be done in several ways, and not all of them are painful!

Repeat steps 13 and 14.

That’s it. You may not be following every step (depending on whether you are going to offer your own products), but that list of points are the ones you will follow on the road to a fat affiliate site.

A word of warning, and I cannot stress this enough - You can spend weeks or months going through all these steps and create a large site that is well designed, but unless your content (the stuff you write on the pages) is quality, valuable and genuinely informative, your site will not do well. The most important part of any site is the content, so don’t skip on quality. Make sure that you would be proud to show your content to a Google engineer. If you can’t honestly say you would be happy to do this, don’t publish it on your site. You will be killing any potential your site had to do well.