Gadooney.com

One thing I forget to address when recommending WordPress as a content management system for creating and managing your affiliate sites was the idea that it’s solely a blogging tool, and that anything created with WordPress is therefore a blog, and not a proper website.

At the heart of this, I think, is the fact that most WordPress themes, out of the box, are set up for use as a blog, with comments enabled, with an “About” section for info on the author/blogger. They look like a blog when you turn them on. Which makes much sense, as that’s what WordPress was originally designed for.

It’s also a bit confusing as many affiliate sites are, in fact, blogs, as affiliates have had a lot of success with that model, since users connect personally with blog authors and it’s generally easier to encourage them to click through links, especially if they’re directly related to the content and theme of the blog.

When I recommend using WordPress to manage your affiliate sites, I’m not encouraging you to use the blog format for all of your affiliate sites. That’s a format that has proven successful, and it’s a good place to start, but it’s very easy to use WordPress to create affiliate sites that aren’t blogs at all, too.

Confused yet? It’s actually really simple, if you look at some examples.

This site itself is a bit of a hybrid. I have comments turned on and I encourage interaction from users (both key elements in blogs), but most of the posts are instructional content. If I created a traditional site that didn’t use WordPress it would actually be structured exactly the same, as I’d have the same categories that  would contain links to the same existing articles I’m creating. I use WordPress because it makes my life much easier, as I don’t have to update a page of links, make sure all the changes happen throughout the site, etc.

If I wanted, though, I could easily turn off the comments and remove any hint of them, like I did at the Cisco certifications site I’m (still) working on. I plan on taking that a step further there and removing both the Calendar and Archives in the sidebar to the left and tweaking the theme so that it doesn’t publish the date of each post in the top right of each page. That is all very easy to do, as far as editing a few lines in the PHP code of the themes, and the end result is that many of the elements that make it seem like a blog (comments, dates on posts, and an archive or calendar that shows posts by month) are suddenly gone.

To an average surfer landing on that site, they would have no vlue that it had started its life as a “blog”, and it’d look like any other website. I’d still be able to use WordPress as a convenient, Web-based tool to publish and manage my website, without being forced into the box of all my sites being “blogs”.

You can also mix and match elements, such as a new site I’m working on, Patio to Pool. I’m keeping lots of the normal blog elements, but I turned off comments. The goal with that site is to build pages for all sorts of juicy patio and pool search terms that pay well in Adsense, but to keep the user interaction limited. I want them to be able to associate the site with a face and a voice (Pool and Patio Gal), but I don’t want to expend time answering comments, deleting comment spam, responding to emails, etc.  I’m trying to have my cake and eat it too, as far as presenting a friendly, casual format (a blog about patio and pool stuff) that people can connect to, but without the element that creates a ton of work for me, the comments.

Those are just a few examples of how you can modify the output of WordPress to work for you in different ways, depending on what form you want your affiliate site to take. The key message to take away is that WordPress is actually pretty flexible, so no, you’re not locked into creating a blog when you use it for affiliate purposes, as you can actually tweak and modify it in all sorts of ways to suit your purposes.