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With the right site building strategies, niche affiliate websites can offer some of the most reliable income for internet marketers. However, many of the commonly used methods to create these sites can require a lot of technical knowledge and be incredibly time consuming, even before the first word is written. WordPress Saves The Day With a bit of patience and reading, anyone who can write can email can learn to build affiliate sites with WordPress, which is an open-source content management system. Open source means that it is free to use and modify. The basic principle behind a content management system is to allow someone without a lot of technical or programming knowledge to run or even completely build a website. WordPress was actually designed and is still known as a content management system and website creation tool for bloggers, but many creative internet marketers actually use it to build sites that look nothing like a blog. Many bloggers run a site through WordPress itself, but the best way to use WordPress is as a self-hosted installation to take advantage of everything that WordPress has to offer. How to Use Self-Hosted WordPress Installing self-hosted WordPress is actually simple, but it requires having all the necessary components to make it all work. First, a domain name or possibly even a sub-domain is needed. Then, a website hosting account is connected with the domain. With most web hosts, there will be a "Quick Install" link within the administration area of the hosting account that is otherwise known as the Cpanel. By following the provided instructions, WordPress is automatically installed and ready to run on the domain name. Wordpress Themes The first thing to do on a new WordPress site is to install a theme by searching available themes in the WordPress directory. A theme controls the visual look, style, and layout of the entire website. Many different themes are available to fit a wide variety of types of websites and can be used "as is", but there are also other themes that allow for easy design customization for marketers who want their site to have a unique look. Wordpress Plugins To add extra capabilities to WordPress, simply install plugins by searching for features that are desired. There are tens of thousands of plugins available that can do almost anything needed on most WordPress sites. The extra features that plugins can add can really vary quite a bit. Some of them change the way the default WordPress programming works to use this system for different purposes. Other plugins allow for easy creation of advertising or even content. There are also plugins to help optimize pages on a WordPress site to improve search engine rankings. The cost, if any, for these themes and plugins varies. Generally, they are free or very reasonably priced, although some of them can be expensive. However, it is possible to make a professional site with lots of good plugins and a nice theme for free. Building a WordPress Site Once this point is reached, the site is ready to be built. There are two main ways to add content to a WordPress site, by creating a "post" or a "page". A Wordpress "post" is typically used by bloggers to categorize content and also to have it indexed in a time-based archive. While this is a convenient system to use, most internet marketers do not like the way Wordpress displays content created as posts. A Wordpress "page" is typically one of the main, permanent pages on a WordPress blog. They do not show their creation date by default, and they can also not be grouped in categories. Internet marketers often find that blatantly old content can keep some visitors away from the site. Using WordPress Pages Effectively The most confusing thing to beginning WordPress users about creating a site that consists of nothing but Wordpress "pages" is how to actually show those pages on the site. By default, many WordPress themes may not actually show the created pages in a menu, or all of them may be crammed in a single menu that doesn't look right. By using the WordPress menu system, two different menus can be created for the site. The first menu is for the top of the site, which should link to the primary pages of the site. The second menu gets inserted as a custom menu widget, which goes in the sidebar of the site and generally links to secondary pages on the site. A wealth of information on affiliate marketing and affiliate website building as well as information on book affiliate programs.
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