Case Study: Building A Site With AffiloTheme

Hi guys, how's it going?

In case you haven't heard, AffiloTheme is now live! This is our ultimate tool for building profitable, beautiful, and exciting affiliate sites. It also comes with some very nifty bonuses, including a powerful graphics creator, free hosting, and Affilorama Premium trial. Get your copy of AffiloTheme here - before the 60% discount launch pricing ends at Midnight Sunday!

In today's Affilorama blog post, I'm going to do a case study of just how easy it is to start building an attractive site with AffiloTheme. I've already set up my domain and hosting, and I've got my copy of AffiloTheme installed and ready to go. At the end of the blog post I'll give you a link that you can visit to check out my site (and see the power of AffiloTheme for yourself).

Picking An AffiloTheme Child Theme

The first step to creating a great site with AffiloTheme is to make sure that you have a selected a child theme. Basically, "child themes" are the six different site templates that you can pick from in AffiloTheme. For example, Mark's site Enlightenment Gateway uses the SuperMassive child theme:

Now I've decided that I want to use a different theme for my site - I'm going to select the Avenue child theme from the Layout and Theme tab of the AffiloTheme Dashboard:

You can also pick from different color variations for your AffiloTheme site. I've opted for the default gray color scheme.

Now at the moment, my site is looking pretty sparse:

Creating A Header Image

Next I am going to create my AffiloTheme-powered site is to make myself an awesome header image. In my opinion, one of the coolest things about AffiloTheme is its header creator tool, which allows you to make an attractive header image with no design knowledge or expensive tools.

Here's me working on the header image (notice that I can pick from different background patterns and colors, insert stock images - or upload my own custom ones - use different fonts, and change the banner size).

Once I'm happy, it's just a case of inserting the banner into the theme:

How neat is that? Suddenly, my site is taking on a significantly more professional look.

Protip: When you're using the AffiloTheme header creator - hold the CTRL key down and you can move the individual header elements (text, images etc). This gives you even greater flexibility.

Adding My First Post

Okay, so there's a crummy "hello world" placeholder post. But now it's time to add some real content - a useful post that will actually provide value to my readers. Once I've added the post, I'll give you a link so that you can check it out for yourself.

Adding a post in AffiloTheme is just the same as with any WordPress installation:

Protip: it's always worth adding a couple of nice images to your posts and pages, just so that your readers have something exciting to look at. You should select one of your images to be the featured image for the post (this will give attractive preview thumbnails in Category pages etc) and also make sure that you have added alt tags etc.

Now as you can see, this post is starting to look much more professional! That's how easy it is to add a new post using AffiloTheme.

Creating Affiliate Redirects

One of the coolest features of AffiloTheme is the ability to cloak and redirect your affiliate links. This is great news for boosting your conversions and preventing hijacked commissions. 

So I've picked an affiliate offer that I want to promote in my blog post (I've actually decided that I want to promote AffloBlueprint) so what I need to do is grab my affiliate link:

And then I copy that link into the AffiloTheme Affiliate Redirect tool, giving my redirect a unique identifying name.

Once I've created that Affiliate Redirect, I can directly add my affiliate link into my posts and pages with a simple drop-down editor. It's just a case of highlighting the text I want to link, then updating my post.

Now I've created a great blog post. In fact, you can read my "How to Make Money from Your Blog" post here (it's useful additional reading, if you've ever wanted to learn how to profit from blogging). This is also a useful example of an AffiloTheme site in action, if you've ever wanted to see one in action.

Creating An Opt-In Form

My site is really starting to shape up. But now it's time to look at how easy it is to use AffiloTheme for list-building. Let's quickly look at how easy it is to create a simple opt-in form that I can add to the bottom of my posts.

Before you get set up with your AffiloTheme opt-in forms and squeeze pages, you'll need to have two pages set up. You'll need a thank you page (where you redirect visitors after they have signed up) and an "already subscribed" page (where you will send visitors if they have already subscribed, but try to join again with the same credentials). You'll also need an autoresponder account - I recommend Aweber, which you can sign up for here.

When you get your copy of AffiloTheme, you will be able to see  a detailed training video that explains exactly how to set up your opt-in form (there are far more settings and options than I could ever cover in this blog post).

But for now, let me show you what a finished opt-in form looks like, embedded into my post:

How cool is that?

And I could even make fully-fledged squeeze pages and sidebar opt-in forms.

So with AffiloTheme, I've managed to set up a pretty kick-ass looking site in just a couple of hours (including writing the content for my first post!). Now there are plenty more customizations etc that I can make to improve the site - but you can check out AffiloTheme in action for yourself here.

Hey Sam - This Looks Awesome! Where Do I Get AffiloTheme?

I'm sure you'll agree with me that AffiloTheme is seriously cool. It is one of the most effective ways of building profitable websites that I can think of. Not only will your sites make you money, but they'll also look fantastic too!

Until midnight Sunday (September 23rd) you can get AffiloTheme for 50% off the regular pricing. There are also a number of exciting bonuses that I'll let you discover for yourself.

Go here to get AffiloTheme, before the special launch pricing ends!