Darrell Freeman’s Internet Marketing Blog

Recently whilst building a new affiliate site I’ve been using a few tools to make life that bit easier and quicker on the design and programming side.  It always good finding easier and quicker ways to do things.  In the online world you are inundated with offers to use new tools (SEO, PPC, CMS etc….) and if you decided to trial them all, your bank account would soon be empty.

Anyway I recently decided to do a bit of a review site and really didn’t want to get a custom design from a graphic designer due to time therefore decided to go for a Wordpress theme.  After looking through the free themes I couldn’t find one that I liked enough and eventually went to Brian Gardner’s Studiopress and choose the excellent Lifestyle theme.  There are also loads of tutorials to totally customise the theme and a very active forum.  The themes are just $59.95 and after a Google search I picked up a discount code of 25% (PERF25) which made the theme just $44.97 (about £28 - Bargain!).  The theme was easy to set up widgets on the homepage and the one or two design issues I encountered have been cleaered up very quickly on the forum.  Considering using the corporate theme now for a few non blog sites.  Great stuff!

Another tool that is new (kinda) to the affiliate marketing space in the UK is Easy Content Units.  Now I can put products on my sites in super quick time with products from a variety of merchants and networks.  I’ve only just started to use this tool, but the units were very quick to setup in the admin area of Easy Content Units and then it produces some javascript code which you just paste into your webpage (easy!).  To add/delete products just use the simple interface in Easy Content Units, you don’t need to change the code on the page.  I’m currently using the free version (80/20 revenue split) and see how it goes.  If it goes well I’ll upgrade to the paid version (£20 a month, no revenue split).  Give it a play today, it is so simple to use.

So you have Studiopress to create a site and ECU to populate with products.  Need some content and can’t be bothered yourself?  Try Content Now (I’ve not used them yet so can’t comment on the quality).  Now if Tracking 202 would add some UK networks you could have affiliate sites up and running with minimal fuss and best of all, minimal work!