Affiliate marketing blogging is one of the ways you can start your affiliate activity, especially if you don’t know much about hosting, domain name, PHP, HTML, CSS and other abbreviations of this sort. So we decided to give a helping  hand to our affiliate rookies with a short series of blog posts that will ease up your way towards affiliate marketing blogging.

The most popular and used blogging platform worldwide is WordPress.com. It’s free, trustworthy, you have a lot of free themes and there’s always some new plugins so you can keep up with thew new trends.

Competing with WordPress, we also had Blogger.com, a Google owned platform, starting 2003. This has lost a lot of the international market along with the WordPress CMS (content management system) evolution.

There are other blogging platforms tumblr.com, medium.com or livejournal.com but, since WordPress is the most used one, we will focus on it.

1. Creating a WordPress account for affiliate marketing blogging

To have a blog  you need to register on the platform.

Once you are on WordPress.com, on the main page you can find a button that says “Create Website” and that will send you to the field where you can add the name of the blog. This name has to be unique and relevant for what the blog is outght to contain. Next there is a form with basic info for creating an account.

To pick a name for your blog you should think of the topics you will include, the tone of voice you will use, but also the redears audience you will have.

 2. Choosing the theme, customizing the blog

The blog’s theme on WordPress is what the blog will look like, the framework on which you will build next. Choosing the theme is a very important decision because once set it would be difficult to change in time.

To see the list of WordPress themes you will have to access the blog’s settings and there, on the left hand side menu you will see the Themes section. WordPress has a lot of themese you can choose from.

When selecting a theme, you should consider if you want a customized header, a customized menu, if you want your blog to be responsive (optimized for different screen sizes, from smartphone to desktop screen) or if you want to have one, two or several columns.

After a careful assessment and final selection (a lot of times you end up flipping the coin between 2-3 themes you consider to fit your vision best), you have to follow the theme customization steps.

When it comes to customizing all blogging beginners need to take some time to play wuth the chosen theme’s features until a satisfactory result is reached.

Regardless of the chosen blogging platform, there are a few universal tips and tricks, to help you in choosing your theme:

• Choose a theme that is consistent with what you want to write about on your blog.

If you want to write about social events, do not pick a futuristic theme. That would fit better a gadget review blog.

• Pick a theme that is as simple as possible

You don’t want your readers to get lost in the blog’s features. Ideally, you should find a theme that has a convenient navigation menu so that the content you post on your blog remains the main focus point.

• Choose a responsive theme

It’s recommened that you pick a theme that resizes according to the user’s device. These are the best because users nowadays go online not only on the PC, but also on smartphones and tablets. Thus an easy navigation will attract the user to stay on the site..

• Select a theme with a smooth navigation menu

After choosing your theme, go on your blog and surf a little on it. If it’s difficult for you to access pages or categories or if the blog posts can’t be viewed easily, you should consider changing the theme. You need to find a balance between the blog’s appereance and its functionality.