My latest Affiliate development project using a wordpress shop
Following the success of my site XmasGifts.co.za in December I was inspired to achieve the same sorts of results every month with affilaite earnings and went in search of a wordpress theme that operated as a shop and allowed for affiliate links. I have a nice portfolio of domains that shopping related and decided to start off with MensGifts.co.za and then progress through to womensgifts.co.za, kidsgifts.co.za, crockery.co.za and a few others.
The reason I chose MensGifts.co.za to start with, was that the earning potential from the available affiliate programs are great and in particular with Mantality offering up to a 15% referral rate. This combined with the offerings from Kalahari and Pro soccer offers me a nice range of products in many price ranges to satisfy almost any men’s gift seeker.
After a long and exhaustive search for a WordPress shop theme, I settled on this shop theme. The beauty of the theme is that it allows you to build a complete shop selling your own products, a combination of your own products and affiliate products, or to be in affiliate mode only. What also attracted me to the theme was the ability to have a shop feel with a blog built into the theme. The blog operates from one of the categories which I have called “gift ideas”. My reason for this selection was that I analyzed the keywords that brought me the most traffic to XmasGifts.co.za and by far the highest number of searches included the word “idea” or “ideas”.
What did this tell me? That people were looking for ideas of what to give their family/friends and that they needed guidance. If I could give them the ideas and direct them to a shop where I could earn, then I would be onto a good thing.
Now that I had selected the correct domain for the project, identified the affiliate programs I am going to use and selected the theme that gives me the functionality I need, I need to add both products and content.
I have developed many mini sites over the past 3 years and can say through trial and error that trying to beat the system with duplicate content simply does not work and in fact has resulted in a few of my domains being sandboxed by Google. This is a tragic mistake that so many domainers make which effectively reduces your potential revenue stream to parking.
Each product is entered by hand and a portion of the content is written by hand. This is a tedious process but from past experience I know that the long term success of the site depends on me offering unique content. The reason being that they will keep on giving, month after month.
The site is constantly having new products entered and I hope to have it sufficiently populated to take advantage of Valentines day coming up.
Let me know what you think and feel free to offer any criticism.