How do you setup a Wordpress Theme for a Niche Store? It’s not that much different than the way you would setup any Wordpress site, but there are a few little things along the way that are specific to affiliate stores that help convert and sell products.
This is the third installment in the “Create a Niche Store” series!
Best Wordpress Plugins
If you’re going to setup a Wordpress powered site for a niche store to sell products as an affiliate, here’s a list of plugins that will be very helpful to you:
- Aizatto’s Related posts: this plugin will list related posts and pages, works great!
- All in One SEO Pack: target specific keywords on your posts and pages
- cForms II: the best contact form plugin there is
- Comment Luv: this plugin is a great way to encourage other bloggers to comment on our site
- EasyBay: our flagship product – of course
- Exclude Page from Navigation: This is a handy way to keep certain pages from being listed in page menus
- GoCodes: This plugin will be used to mask affiliate links and redirect them. It’s better than a URL shortening service, and it tracks how many people click
- Google XML Sitemap: this is of course to manage our XML sitemap which we submit to the big 3 search engines
- Insights: this plugin will be used to add pictures, videos, and other things to pages to augment the original content
- Revision Control: this is used to limit Wordpress’ revision feature, which stores unlimited versions of pages and posts when you edit them – I like to limit the revisions to 3
- Robots Meta: this plugin is used to add meta tags to posts and pages telling the search crawler robots what to, and not to index
- Subscribe to Comments: I believe that this should be a default feature of Wordpress. This allows people to subscribe to comments, so if they reply – when you (or anyone) replies after them they’ll get notification via email.
- Wordpress.com Stats: We’ll use other ways to record stats, but wordpress stats are free, and if you have multiple wordpress blogs you can visit any of them via the wordpress.com dashboard. It’s a good daily snapshot of what’s going on in your site.
- WP Spamfree: in my opinion, this plugin works better than Askimet and kills 3 times as much spam. I wouldn’t be without it.
Widgets
On most of my affiliate and niche sites I have just a single sidebar because I want the focus to be on the products. But in that sidebar I usually have some simple widgets, wordpress pages, tags, categories, links, recent posts, and recent comments.
Default Pages
One of the first things I do is write some original content on the default “about” page, and then I delete the first “Hello World” post (which removes the default comment). The next thing I do is setup a “contact” page with a contact form using the cforms II plugin.
This post is sponsored by WP-EASYBAY, the most advanced eBay Plugin for Wordpress online!
