Whether you’re starting a blog as a support platform for your affiliate program (i.e. as a merchant), or as a marketing vehicle (i.e. as an affiliate), the question of the best platform to choose inevitably springs up. The supply is bountiful — WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Movable Type, etc — but you need to choose one.
I personally prefer WordPress. With the abundance of themes and plugins available for this platform (free of charge, or at affordable prices) WordPress blogs are easily customizable. They are also extremely user-friendly, and affiliates with little or no blogging experience can start creating really beautiful (and search engine friendly) posts in no time at all. I’ve worked with proprietary blogging platforms and TypePad extensively, and in my eyes WordPress wins it hands down. It seems that this blogging platform is also the preferred platform for the majority of world’s top bloggers:
According to the last year’s research by Pingdom, 27% of world’s top 100 blogs prefer WordPress (cf: chart above).
A word of warning for affiliates: if you decide to go with WordPress, you must go with their self-hosted solution, because unlike other platforms WordPress disallows all types of advertising on free blogs (i.e. ones hosted on their servers):
Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds and other ads are not permitted on WordPress.com blogs. If you would like to run ads on your blog, please look into running your own copy of WordPress with one of our hosting partners.
In addition to AdSense-type ads, please do not use the following services on your blog: sponsored / paid posts including PayPerPost, ReviewMe, and Smorty; affiliate / referral links… [source, underlining mine]
Hosting a WordPress blog on your own is easy, and it’s installation doesn’t take longer than a few minutes. You want to download the latest version of WordPress here, unpack the archive file, upload it to your server, and they will walk you through the rest of the installation process.
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It’s interesting that WordPress has “only” 27% of the market. I always thought that number was higher.
Hmmmm – I am surprised to see type pad so high above Blogger …..
Karol, Karrine, that chart is just true for the top 100 blogs as things looked in January of 2009. I am pretty sure most of these blogs haven’t changed their platforms, but that pie chart is in way characteristic of all blogs out there. I’ll look for some stats like that tomorrow. If anyone already has links to anything like this (stats for the broader blogging landscape), I would certainly appreciate you sharing it here.
You can offer text link ads and sponsored posts via linknami.com by manually publishing this information on your wordpress hosted-blog and blog post. There is no plugin needed to be installed.
Hi there, I have a travel blog on blogger but have had my own domain. I am so used to blogger platform and I am planning to start making my own amazon affiliate marketing blog. However, I may need to use WordPress as I’ve read other reviews including yours that WordPress is better for affiliate marketing as it has better SEO pluggin.
I am interested to invest in affiliate marketing and before I start I really need to know whether to use WordPress platform or should I find my own platform and my own host?
People say that it might not be safe to use WordPress or blogger as they can easily delete your online business for no reason. Is that possible even though you have your own domain? I am confused! I hope you can clarify my questions.
Also, if I were to choose WordPress which one would you recommend? WordPress.com or WordPress.org for amazon affiliate marketing?
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Thank you.
Isabella, WordPress is a great choice of platform, and I personally know many successful affiliates who run multiple WP-based websites.
To your question of .ORG vs .COM: as mentioned above “if you decide to go with WordPress, you must go with their self-hosted solution, because unlike other platforms WordPress disallows all types of advertising on free blogs (i.e. ones hosted on their servers).” WordPress.com is fully hosted by them. WordPress.org is what you install on your server. Go with the latter, and no one will be able to “delete your online business for no reason.”