Moving Old Sites Over to Wordpress
I didn’t much like Wordpress when I first started out in this game of affiliate marketing. I thought it was too restrictive on what you could post, the themes weren’t that great and it seemed like a bit of an overkill for a small niche landing page. As my dreams of being a web design were never realised building affiliate marketing sites using HTML and CSS gave me an opportunity to indulge my creative tendencies. Due to all this I decided Wordpress wasn’t for me and I would build my own sites.
But as time went on I kept reading about how Google loved blogs and Wordpress blogs in-particular and how well they ranked and were easy to update and customise. After a while I decided to try Wordpress on a few sites. Besides, my web hosts, Hostgator, gave me access to cPanel and Fantastico which made installing Wordpress a breeze. I installed Wordpress, picked a free theme that looked nice and started building my site. It took me a while to work out the best way to setup the site including how to use the tags and categories in the best way, how to organise the posts and pages and which plug-ins to use. But once my sites had been up and running for a while I noticed they started to rank quite well. Once I had seen this for myself I started putting more effort into understanding Wordpress and soon after I started work on my own theme. I found a blank theme that I could modify and shortly after I had my first Wordpress theme which I would use for my keyword domain niche sites. I also created a version that is suited to atomic or micro niche sites.
This has all worked out rather well for me and I can now have a site up and running in less than a day with a few posts of content and all the relevant admin pages (contact, privacy, discliamer, etc). I am now in the process of migrating my existing older sites into Wordpress sites. So far this has gone well as previously where I had 10 or so product reviews on an HTML page I have now put each product review into a separate Wordpress post. As Google sees each of these post as a seperate page my sites have all grown a lot bigger in page count even though the same content is being used.
The move has been positive for each site I have moved over so far and they have either held their top position in Google or moved up in the SERPS.
From now on I am a Wordpress only affiliate marketer. Although I’ve yet to look at Drupal or Joomla. Am I missing out on anything?
you cant beat wordpress for seo. I love it!
I was EXACTLY the same….I thought of it as limiting you etc..but once you give it the time, and understand it etc…you can do almost anything!
I just launched my new site http://www.tvoffers.org.uk using word press.
Wordpress is very good and does well for thousands of affiliates, however it is not a true CMS. It’s a blog platform (the best I might add) that people are trying to use as a CMS.
When I started AM last year I had a go at both Wordpress and Joomla before I got going and found once you get over the rather steep initial learning curve Joomla was the best platform for making proper content managed websites, and with a little HTML & CSS know how like I know you have you can make some really professional looking sites.
However if you’re getting along with wordpress ok then I don’t think changing over will benefit you much, and with the way you do AM I don’t think you’ll ever be limited by wordpress.
Hi Dan,
I like joomla too, but with the amount of help/info and plugins available I opted for Wordpress.
Have u got any examples of sites you have done using Joomla?
@David
Hi David,
You can click on my name and it should take you to one of my sites. Please don’t judge it from an affiliate marketing point of view as I’m very new to the game and I’m just trying things out at the moment.
I agree the user base is larger with WP and therefore help is more abundant, but IMO Joomla is next in line and also has a huge user base. I’ve had many issues when putting together sites but I’ve found an answer for every one of my questions, and a plugin/extension for every feature I wanted.
Hi Dan.
Nice website, yeah I agree that Joomla has lots to offer and is technically a ‘real’ cms system than a blog platform..suppose its just down to preference.
Best of luck with your site..looking good.