Choosing a Content Management System
Find yourself spending more time perfecting you website than you do promoting it? For the affiliate marketer, this means lost revenue. Your site must be appealing, however, or your visitors will not stay. One solution to creating an attractive website with high quality content is to use a content management system. Three of the best are Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal.
Wordpress
Free blog services include Blogger, using Google, and Wordpress, using Wordpress.com. For those short on funds, free may be the way to go. However, if you host your own blogsite and use Wordpress, you will have a robust and versatile site that can serve as a blog, e-commerce, or content site. There are many free plug-ins for Wordpress that greatly expand its capabilities. Support is readily available so even a novice will be able to quickly get their blog up and operational. For me, Wordpress is the way to go for an affiliate marketing blogsite.
Joomla
Joomla offers more than the affiliate marketer is likely to need in a content management system. This is like having a safety net so you don’t need to worry about have to upgrade to or learn another system. There is a learning curve so don’t expect Joomla to be a plug-and-play system However, support is readily available, and you can have a site operational in short order and then add the finishing touches as you promote your affiliate products. Two versions of Joomla are available and either will work for the affiliate marketer.
You can design you own templates for Joomla but you need more time and training than most affiliate marketers have available. It is probably best to find a suitable ready made template, many are free, and modify it as you go. You will likely need to learn some html and how css works in order to made your site look and work the way you want. But there is still a great time savings over starting from scratch. With the popularity and wide use of Joomla, you will have no problem finding support and answer to most of any problems you may encounter. I highly recommend Joomla for content management.
Drupal–Another Useful Solution
Drupal seems to be used primarily for community websites designed so that the members can add their own content and perspectives. Drupal is, in my opinion easier to learn than Joomla, but not as easy as Wordpress. Drupal can easily be adapted to a blog or content site and also has many add-on modules available to expand its basic capabilities. Drupal comes with a selection of themes or you easily create your own. Most themes have a central content column and left and/or right sidebar columns. Drupal will remain free but you can expect to see more non-free additions in the future.
Choosing a Web Host
Choose a web host that supports MySQL and PHP. These are necessary for many content management system including those discussed in this article. Also be sure to find one that has cpanel with fantastico. You can painlessly install Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal with fantastico. Many web hosts will let you have many domains and sub-domains without any additional fees. Get one of those! You will probably need several sites to be a successful affiliate marketer. Versatile hosting and free content management software is, in my opinion, the way to go!
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