WordPress Affiliate Marketing Themes & Plugins
"Just find out what successful people do and do the same things until you get the same results."
~ Brian Tracy (International Success Coach & Best Selling Author)
Discover The WordPress Marketing Tools That Successful WordPress Affiliate Marketers Use
Summary - The following are the WordPress marketing tools I have purchased and use everyday for my WordPress marketing websites, as well as for all of my client websites.
I consider them to be essential building blocks for successful WordPress marketing. Each is highly recommended.
This list of the best WordPress affiliate marketing tools keeps growing - and does update over time, so check back frequently.
If you're anything like my coaching students, you'll be glad to have each one.
WordPress Affiliate Marketing Theme
Thrive Themes - I used to be a fan of Thesis Themes, but to me they became fairly difficult to work with when they changed from v1 to v2. But, through some exhaustive research, I discovered that the themes from Thrive are even better. And now, they're the only themes I want to work with for my own projects. I even use them for client projects.
Although only an afterthought to many people, one of the absolutely most important things you want to have is great after-the-purchase customer support because I guarantee you will need to have questions answered - or problems resolved. Now, keep in mind that applies to any WordPress affiliate theme - not just those from Thrive.
Thrive has a great forum where actual Thrive developers will responded quickly to solve whatever issues pop-up along the way. That's extremely valuable because everyone has questions or issues about WordPress themes (e.g., how do I do "this"? How can I fix "that"? etc. Everyone.). Plus, they have several great-looking themes to choose from. And, each Thrive theme is fully responsive for all devices. Very important, especially with Google beginning to push non-mobile-friendly listing down in the search results.
You can buy an individual Thrive theme, but, the absolutely best way to go is to get a Thrive membership. For only a little more, not only do you get your choice of multiple themes, but you get the ability to use them on multiple projects, AND you get all of their other very useful tools, too - including the truly useful Thrive Architect (see below), Thrive Landing Pages, Thrive Leads, Thrive Quiz Builder, Thrive Ultimatum, Thrive Ovation, Thrive Clever Widgets, Thrive Headline Optimizer, AND instant access to ALL future Thrive plugins! You will also get continuous updates for all products. They even offer Thrive University so that anyone can become a Thrive products expert right away - and serious Internet marketer.
The DonRobertsOrg.com website uses the mobile-responsive Thrive "Rise" theme - and it's powered by Thrive membership plugins. Get Thrive themes here!
WordPress Page & Post Layout
Thrive Architect - By now, you know that WordPress is the website-framework-of-choice for smart Internet marketers (like you), and that Thrive Themes are naturally the way to go. And, to make it extremely easy to layout pages & posts, you'll want the companion Thrive Architect plugin (formerly know as the Thrive Content Builder plugin). It's got super easy-to-use "drag & drop" interface and has numerous predefined landing page/post templates to select from. I struggled with laying out a WordPress site in the early days (before Thrive). Then, I saw the Thrive Architect plugin when it came to market (I got early access). I quickly realized that this is a must have plugin for a WordPress site.
With it, it's so simple to add those great-looking image or video background sections - complete with overlaid text. You can add responsive video & images, as well as tables of content, HTML code, animations, countdown timers, and so may more modules.
The good news is that the Thrive Architect is a plugin that makes it easy to have a great-looking page or post. Do yourself a favor and check-out the must have Thrive Architect page layout plugin.
WordPress Website Speed Optimization
WP Rocket - In the age of the modern Internet, people have little tolerance for slower-loading website speed (i.e., the time it takes to fully load a website page). Studies show that site visitors tend to bail on a website that hasn't loaded in just seconds. That means they hit the Back button and never see your site - or ever return to it.
And, because of the typically slower wireless network speeds associated with mobile devices, site speed is more important than ever. More & more of my websites are seeing 50-60% of total visitor traffic coming from mobile devices...
I've mentioned that I believe that the WordPress platform is the best website creation tool available to affiliate marketers.Yet, there's a challenge that comes with it. And, that is - because of the way WordPress is designed (it's a Content Manage System), it literally builds a page from scratch for every page a site visitor sees. That involves downloading numerous files to your device for each page you visit - and that takes time.
Along the way, someone came up with the idea of setting up a "WordPress cache" on your device so that the same elements on any given page do not need to be downloaded again for each page visited - just the files that are different. That greatly speeds up WordPress speed.
There are several free WordPress cache plugins available, like WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, etc. The problem I've experienced with all of them is that they are very challenging to configure. And, more than one of them conflict with a plugin I use called BulletProof Security. And, that caused me endless frustration. Then, I came across the WP Rocket WordPress cache plugin. And, I'm glad I did.
WP Rocket is a paid plugin, but it's easy to set-up - and it doesn't conflict with my other plugins. Best of all, it's made some of my pages that formerly took 7 to 15 seconds to load - load in just 2 seconds. Wow! If you want to speed up WordPress website (and you should), click here to check-out WP Rocket - and easily make your WordPress website load quickly on all devices.
WordPress Website Back-up and Disaster Recovery
UpdraftPlus - Your website is in danger if you're not backing it up - period. Between hackers, WordPress & plugin updates that go terribly wrong, and hosting server issues, it's just a matter of time before something bad happens to your WordPress website.
Any seasoned WordPress admin will tell you that it's simply a matter of "when" it will happen - not "if" it will happen.
Did you know that not all WordPress backup tools are created equal? Updraft can back-up your entire website manually or automatically at intervals you choose. And, it also backs-up just those elements of your website that change - for example, it backs-up the plugins directory when you update a plugin that has a new version to be installed. It can also back-up your files to cloud storage services of your choice - such as DropBox, Amazon S3, and others. That's great for you because you won't have a single point of failure.
Also, the web hosts that offer daily backups will actually stop doing back-ups when you've used up a certain number of "inodes" of storage. What the heck is an inode? It's essentially a file, and I've had this problem with HostGator for years...
When you choose UpdraftPlus to back-up your website in the background automatically, recovering from a successful hacking attack or a WordPress/plugin update that goes bad is easy - and takes less than 5-minutes. Without it - well, let's just say you'll have a really bad day. Using another well-known backup tool resulted in a migration that went frustratingly wrong for me - nothing but error messages and a crippled website. It was a very stressful situation. My client's site was offline for a couple days, and there was lots of tense effort to fix it.
UpdraftPlus has saved me over & over again, and it makes it a snap migrating a development website on one domain name to the actual "live" domain name. Really? Really...very easy.
Smart WordPress affiliate marketers backup their websites - and get UpdraftPlus to do it!
WordPress Multi-Website Management
ManageWP - It's only a matter of time before you have multiple WordPress websites. And, that means you'll have to login to each once to do the routine updates because not doing the updates is a recipe for disaster.
But, you can significantly streamline the update process and be able to manage all of your WordPress websites from one dashboard. ManageWP allows quick-switching between sites - which is very convenient.
The WordPress core files automatically update themselves these days, but the plugins don't. ManageWP allows you to update all of the the plugins on all of your sites at the same time one click.
I've got 30 WordPress websites in one ManageWP account. I typically see something like this: 15 Themes need to be updated. 22 Plugins need updating. 30 Sites need 15MB of table overhead to be deleted. 6 Sites have a total of 17 post revisions to be deleted. And, there are 7 spam comments to be deleted. Doing it one-site-at-a-time takes forever to do it. Using ManageWP, it's one click for each task, and I can walk away...
And, ManageWP does a lot more. Take a look at this super-convenient, time-saving, web-based WordPress marketing tool. Check-out ManageWP!
WordPress Website Hosting
NameCheap Website Hosting - Hosting a free WordPress website on WordPress.com comes with a boatload of limitations for affiliate marketers, and it's against their terms of service. Smart WordPress marketers start with a solid foundation. I've used several hosting companies to manage WordPress websites - and none of them even comes close to NameCheap in terms of performance, usability, and support.
"Website load time" has become an important data-point in Google's ranking algorithm. I've found NameCheap's SSD-based servers offer fast web page loads (SSD stands for Solid State Drive...much faster than traditional hard drive technology).
And, for usability, all of my critical WordPress plugins work on NameCheap servers - which I have found not to be the case on some of the other hosting company servers (like GoDaddy's shared servers).
After-the-sale-support" is often an after-thought when considering a purchase. That's a deadly mistake with website hosting. While the level of tech support is often marginal at best at other website hosting companies, I've found the tech support team at NameCheap to be responsive and good. NameCheap offers a ridiculously inexpensive first year plan, and the renewal is less than the competition. They also offer a free domain name & privacy for the first year. What a great deal! I recommend that you choose the Ultimate Plan because it allows for adding unlimited new websites to your virtual real estate empire as you begin "rinsing & repeating" your success online. Don't let the name throw you - Get NameCheap Hosting!
Domain Name Registration
NameCheap Domain Name Registration - By far, the best domain name registrar in my opinion. Years ago, I decided it's time to seek a replacement domain name registrar for GoDaddy. I heard story after story from those I followed online allegedly that GoDaddy shuts down websites for what seemed to me to be trigger-happy, overreaction to nuisance complaints. Imagine that happening to you. I decided to seek a replacement registrar. I was happy to discover NameCheap - and have been satisfied ever since. To me, their site is easier to get around on than GoDaddy's site. And, they have great customer support, too. Oh...and when you go with Privacy option at NameCheap (which I recommend), it's free the first year - and just $2.88 to renew it each year.
GoDaddy charges me $8.99 every year for Privacy (to me, that's gouging). NameCheap is the preferred domain name registrar for lots of Internet marketers. Join us, and get NameCheap domain name hosting!
WordPress Marketing Tools Summary
Each one of the WordPress marketing tools mentioned above plays a key role in the success of my websites - as well as in my client’s websites' success.
I recommend that you get each one of the WordPress affiliate marketing tools mentioned above - and take massive and persistent action putting them into play for your affiliate success online.
Don Roberts, CLMC
- https://donrobertsorg.com/
- https://donrobertsorg.com/about-don-roberts/
- https://donrobertsorg.com/affiliate-marketing-niche-selection/
- https://donrobertsorg.com/building-affiliate-marketing-websites/
- https://donrobertsorg.com/how-to-monetize-website/
- https://donrobertsorg.com/wordpress-marketing-tools/