Affiliate Project launches first site – powerplates.org.uk
After some hard work and steep learning curves we have got our first niche product site up and running. It’s live and we have started to run SEO on it to try and improve the search ratings. We decided to target the fitness and leisure industry. The reason being we are both keen on keeping fit so we have an interest in this area. Gary had been hearing about an up and coming fitness trend called vibration fitness and had specifically heard about Power Plate machines and their increasing popularity. So we set about looking for domain names and other websites already out there. We wanted to create a site that reviews brands and machines and various price ranges and that also explains what vibration fitness is, how it can benefit and give links to reputable stores to purchase from.
Hence www.PowerPlates.org.uk was born. Have a look and see what you think. We would welcome any feedback, positive or otherwise as we want to learn from what we have done well and also learn how we can improve.
Being our first site we faced a few challenges along the way. These included how best to design the site and write it. Also trying to not make it too complicated and also to get the content right. We have been thinking is the site right, should we continue but reading other affiliate blogs we have learned not to give up, to take these challenges head on and persevere as ultimately it’s best to keep going and get the site out there and improve it rather than waste the time and scrap the work done.
It has been great learning for us and ultimately this is why we are doing it. To learn a new skill and to make some revenue, especially in these hard times at the moment. We have thoroughly enjoyed the venture and are proud of it. Will it make any revenue? Well only time will tell but it hasn’t put us off and we already have our next two domain names.
New plugin we are using
We noticed that we were getting a lot of spam comments, hundreds a day which uses up time removing them and also bandwidth to our site. So we looked for a plugin to combat this. The simple way we thought was to add a question to the comments section so that spam robots cannot automatically post comments. We came up with the following plugion and so far this seems to be working well for us. If you are having trouble with spam robots hitting your comments, try this plugin.
Math Comment Spam Protection
Asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question. This is intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot.
Our Top Wordpress Plugins
We are utilising more Wordpress plugins as we get better at webdesign and want to add more functionality to our websites. We thought we’d write a review of the ones we’ve used so far.
Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. We have seen an influx of spam comments to our site and this plugin has helped get rid of them to the spam folder where we can review them to make sure they are spam.
All in One SEO Pack
This has been a great tool to help get this site to number 1 on google search. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very important for websites to improve the amount of hits they get.
Similar Posts
Displays a highly configurable list of related posts. Similarity can be based on any combination of word usage in the content, title, or tags. This is very useful to direct readers of your blog to other related content they may be interested in on your site. Requires the latest version of the Post-Plugin Library to be installed.
Social Bookmarks
Adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites. You can pick from a large number of social sites which makes this plugin great.
WordPress.com Stats
Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. This is useful for determining how much traffic you are getting and what they are doing once they get there.
Wordpress Popular Posts
Retrieves the most active entries of your blog and displays them on a list. As you can see we use this plugin on our sidebar. It means readers can immediately see which are the most popular articles on a site.
WP125
We use this in our sidebar as well to easily manage 125×125 ads within your WordPress Dashboard. It allows you to run ad campaigns for either a specific amount of time or indefinitely.
We are getting there
We are still busy with our first site. We had some design questions so it has taken a little longer than we initially expected but it is now progressing at a good rate and we hope to have something live very soon. It’s been hard. At times we have thought about whether the idea was viable but as we have read on other sites you have to persevere even when the going gets tough. We think this is because we are new to this. As we get more experience we will get better at this and sites will get easier. We have even sat down together and discussed ideas for after this next site so nothing has put us off for good so far.
How we have used Wordpress so far
We researched about how to create our blog and the best package to use. We came up with Wordpress. I had been following other people’s personal blogs which were written using Wordpress and I liked the feel of them. Looking into Wordpress further it seemed that its ease of use suited web design beginners like us to create a blog fairly easily using a good standard of tools.
So we then looked at using and installing Wordpress. The installation was straight forward with a good step by step guide on the Wordpress website which can be found here
Wordpress comes with a nice dashboard which really makes designing and managing the website straight forward.
We had a look at some themes and decided on the layout we wanted. We wanted a 3 column layout. We had a look at lots of themes that we could customize to suit our blog. We came across the Revolution website which has lots of great themes to use at a great price.
As well as the main blog theme two components of Wordpress have increased the speed at which were able to get our blog up and running and to have the look we wanted. Firstly plugins have been very useful to add functionality to our website with ease. They can be used to do almost anything you can imagine with Wordpress. Many people have designed and written plugins for Wordpress. Some plugins we have used are the Popular Posts plugin and the SEO plugin both of which aid the website development to do what we want it to easier and to make is better content wise. To have a look at some plugins available to Wordpress click here
Secondly we have used widgets. Widgets are standard sets of code to create items you can put in your WordPress blog’s sidebar without needing the knowledge on how to edit a web page. Initially we were trying to modify php code to do things like add Categories and other sections to the sidebar but with widgets they give you the code to do this and through the widgets dashboard option you can modify them to appear how you want without having to modify code. Again for a beginner this is a very useful tool.
In time we hope to create some “How to …” guides such as “How to install”, “How to use plugins” so please keep coming back for updates.
Wordpress for Dummies
This book is a must read if you are new to Wordpress and blogging.
It will help ease the process of setting up your Wordpress blog site.
Wordpress for Dummies is a comprehensive and easy to follow book, which covers everything from Getting started with Wordpress, to Designing your blog site, using Templates and Plugins and also some examples of good templates and plugins.
We created this website using Wordpress and as well as this book we came across Revolution which has some great themes that are easy to use and customize.
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