Wordpress is a script that allows anyone to setup a blog or website in as little as five minutes, and that's not just marketing hype.
While Wordpress is better known as a blogging tool, more and more Internet marketers have begun using Wordpress to create affiliate sites. Wordpress is a fantastic option for affiliate sites, and I see a number of key advantages to using Wordpress over more conventional web site editors.
1. Five minute install if done manually. If your host has Fantastico, installation is done in seconds.
2. Since your website is built "online", you can use a computer anywhere in the world to update your site. Simply login to your sites Dashboard and add/edit content to your hearts content.
3. Wordpress plugins are third party pieces of code that can simply be plugged into your Wordpress site. These extend the features of Wordpress. These can include Google sitemap makers, Database backups, spam filters, plugins that help you control the design of your pages, etc. Plugins are really only limited by the imagination of the programmer.
4. What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) style editing. There are a lot of Wordpress plugins that can give you even greater control of the editor in Wordpress. My personal favourite is not a plugin, but a free stand-alone application called Windows Live Writer. It allows you to update multiple sites from within a single desktop application (meaning you can create your content offline, and then go online to publish).
5. When you publish new material to your site, Wordpress automatically updates the necessary menus, adds links to your new content, and organises everything for you based on the "rules" you specified when you set Wordpress up. This is one of the biggest time savers over traditional web editors where maintaining links and adding new content can be a pain.
6. Since Wordpress is free (a major benefit in its own right), there is a huge following of Wordpress, so there is plenty of support and help when you need it.
7. There are a number of theme authors providing both free and paid templates that you can use on your site. There are specific Wordpress templates for affiliate sites, templates that have been designed for SEO benefits, two column and three column Wordpress templates and everything in between. Changing the look of your site can be as simple as selecting a different template from the list you have uploaded to your web space.
8. WordPress has a built-in trackback or pingback feature.
9. Wordpress. org is constantly working on improvements and bug fixes. The tool is evolving nicely, and you wont have to worry about the future of Wordpress, or if bugs will ever get fixed.
10. Your Wordpress posts can have comments enabled meaning your visitors can add their own comments. This means your content is updated frequently as comments are posted and your pages can grow over time due to visitor participation - something the search engines will like. Before you start worrying about comment spam, a plugin called Akismet can help remove 99% of spam without you ever seeing it. By setting up comments to require approval, you can ensure your site visitors never see spam comments.
About the Author
If you are looking for a website editor, you could do a lot worse than consider Wordpress. I have written some free Wordpress tutorials and also run a community of users learning to create affiliate sites with Wordpress.
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