There’s a lot of things one can learn about Affiliate Marketing. One of these is using Wordpress to power your Affiliate or Niche Site. This is just a simple guide in setting up my own niche sites. It’s one of the methods I use in my ongoing quest to learn affiliate marketing. I see it as a guide I can follow every single time I start building a new site. I’ve been documenting what has worked for me in the past and what hasn’t. A good handful of the themes, scripts or plugins I use for my sites have some custom code that I’ve modified to my liking.

I start out by organizing all of the tools I need for the job. I like to have all my ducks in a row before I start working. It’s borderline obsessive compulsive.

Off-Line Structure - I keep my sites in folders labeled with the name. There, I keep everything related to the site: affiliate links used, graphics, list of plugins and scripts used, template changes that’s site specific, and miscellaneous notes.

Niche Content - All niche articles go in a folder. The folder and sub-folder structure is the same as it is presented on the site. It helps me visualize the site, in terms of topics and/or categories.

Once you have the organization part down, you can start developing your own Niche Site guide. It’s obvious to start with Wordpress, but a lot of testing is done at this stage. Don’t neglect this part. A niche site is no good if it’s got lots of glitches and errors. Test, test and test all your plugins. Whenever a new version of Wordpress is released, you test again. In order to test properly, I suggest you have a demo or development site. You can also use XAMPP to test locally. In the end, all this testing is worth it. You don’t want to take down your own site (or worse… sites) do you? When you’re ready to implement the changes on your live niche site, make sure you backup everything. By everything, I mean anything you need to restore your niche site, in the event of a failure.

Now that you’ve tested everything, make a general checklist. It’s probably easy for some of you to just memorize this, but I’ve found that a checklist also helps me focus on the task at hand.

As you build more and more sites, streamline your process by taking notes of what works and what doesn’t. Everyone who’s been into niche site building will tell you that the key to all this is generating traffic to your site. By developing a system you can easily follow, you’ll zip through all the grunt work. This allows you to focus more on generating traffic for your niche site.

I know that there are tools available that allows you to manage multiple wordpress sites easily, but that simply shortens the process. It’s just another tool. You still need to be organized and you still need a guide to help you manage all your Wordpress Niche Sites.

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