Free WordPress Themes vs Premium Themes

The beauty of WordPress is that it’s free and that there’s no shortage of great looking freebie WP themes to choose from. Thousands in fact. Often far too many and this can make the choice of which theme to use more difficult than you want it to be.

From an affiliate marketing perspective, many people put site look and design as a lower priority aspect of their strategy. But now, more than ever, the way your site looks should be a top priority.

Many many affiliate marketing, Adsense and other “make money online” courses and guides tell you that design doesn’t matter. They suggest using very basic themes or layouts and advise that an ‘ugly’ website will do just as well as a beautiful one. But is it true anymore?
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WP installed via Fantastico is Blocking Your Site from Search Engines

Update: this is no longer happening, and most hosts have replaced Fantastico with Softaculous.

This is a quick warning to double check your Privacy settings in WordPress.

It seems that WordPress 2.8 (and now the latest 2.9.2) versions are defaulting the privacy setting to “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” when installed via Fantastico in cPanel.

This means that your robots.txt file is set to block search engine spiders from crawling your site. This is obviously not ideal and it baffles me why WP have chosen to now make this the default setting! Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress Plugins for Affiliate Marketing

These are all free plugins (besides one that I recently added to the list) that I use on my WordPress sites, including this one. Thought I would share with you as I often get asked which plugins I recommend. Read the rest of this entry »

Removing the WordPress Date on Affiliate Blogs

Update: Child themes should be used to undertake any updates to theme files. I will have a new post on this soon!

Not all affiliate blogs are updated regularly like a “blog” should be.

So leaving dates on your posts can lead your visitors to (rightly) believe that your blog is old and outdated.

If your last post was written 10 months ago, people are likely to leave the site rather than stick around and read what they believe is up to date content. Read the rest of this entry »