The basic principle behind the Affiliate Board theme by Color Labs Project is to make it easy to set up an affiliate program. When it comes to functionality, Affiliate Board offers an easily navigated theme that is simple to set up for the user and easy to use for the consumer looking to purchase affiliate based products and services.
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Simply put, Affiliate Board is designed to help you to create a simple, yet professional affiliate site. The layout and features are perfect for a site showcasing services or comparing products. Affiliate Board provides you with everything you need to get off the ground with these types of sites. Before themes like Affiliate Board, this type of marketing was done through the use of plug-ins and believe me when I tell you, things could get very aggravating very quickly trying to bolt plugins together to make a cohesive site. With the introduction of affiliate based themes like Affiliate Board, there is no longer the frustration of sifting through obsolete or poorly functioning plug-ins that don’t “jive” with the theme you have your heart set on. Sure, with Affiliate Board in particular, you won’t find a wide variety of visual layouts (it doesn’t have all the “wow factor” some other themes offer,) but with affiliate marketing, it’s always better to keep it simple.
Affiliate Board Theme Features
The Affiliate Board theme offers all of the basic features that are required from a simple affiliate marketing standpoint. These features are strengthened by an easy to navigate admin dashboard and by eliminating more complicated back-end layouts that make other affiliate theme options a little too overwhelming. If you’re looking for basic functionality then Affiliate Board can get the job done.
● The Affiliate Board theme has three landing page options that are designed specifically to offer you options when it comes to funneling visitors of your site through your affiliate links to make their purchases. One of them is a traditional “squeeze page” layout which helps keep readers focused on what you want them to do – Click the “Buy” button!
● Affiliate Board is also responsive. This means that it will allow users to access the theme from desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices without having to implement tweaks and plug-ins to create a mobile compatible site. Simply put, access across all devices could mean more clicks and more sales for the products you are promoting.
● Affiliate Board is built on HTML 5 and CSS 3. Simply put this means that the coding of this theme means that you will be faced with fewer compatibility concerns with your site in the foreseeable future because the theme was coded with the latest in coding. Website visitors hate nothing more than visiting a website that is not functioning correctly due to an update, so this is always something you should consider.
● An easy access admin panel allows you to easily integrate Feedburner, Google Adsense, GoSquared and Google Analytics in one simple step to increase your social network exposure and grow your social network followers. These things all allow you to create a stronger social network presence to gain more brand awareness and increase loyal followers.
Pro’s of the Affiliate Board Theme
● A email opt-in form is built right into the theme. While it’s a bit old-school in that it doesn’t hook up to an autoresponder, having it built in takes the initial headaches of integration out of the equation. You’ll probably want to integrate some sort of autoresponder eventually, but this out-of-the-box feature lets you get started quick – and believe me, collecting emails is something you should be doing in order to build your business.
● The Customer testimonials feature that has been built straight in to the theme, makes it easy to show off customer satisfaction in a pre-formatted section on the homepage. Nothing sells your business better than word of mouth!
● Affiliate Board offers short code capability which allows you to easily add interactive and pre-formatted elements in to your pages with the click of a button. This is particularly useful for those looking to add multiple columns, content sections, highlighted text boxes, and buttons. Creating a visually appealing website is crucial to gain and maintain visitors to your site and short code helps to do this.
● Social networking is integrated directly in to the Affiliate Board theme; however, this is becoming increasingly common among most themes so it should not be considered a major factor when deciding upon this theme. What this does mean, however, is that you no longer have to rely on plug-in social networking elements that are frequently outdated and not formatted for your website layout! We discussed above how important social networking is to increasing your brand awareness.
● The most appealing “pro” of the Affiliate Board theme is the fact that it is simple to navigate and a visually clean theme, this is made possible by a culmination of the above mentioned elements. Due to this simplicity the Affiliate Board theme is a great option for newcomers to WordPress who are looking to set up a simple to manage website offering affiliate products or services. Additionally, this simplicity makes setting up an affiliate based site quick and easy for WordPress veterans too! Why is simple important? If you spend less time setting up your site, once again, you have more time to focus on your marketing efforts.
Con’s of the Affiliate Board Theme
● The Affiliate Board theme is a little more expensive than some ($79) but if you are looking for a comprehensive yet simple affiliate theme however, this is a theme worth buying and the expense can be recovered with just a few sales.
● The Affiliate Board theme does not incorporate the star rating system which can improve sales by offering first hand rating feedback in testimonial type setups. Fortunately, this issue can be resolved quickly and simply by incorporating the GD Star Rating plug-in which is easy to implement and simple to customize.
● Affiliate Board lacks the typical “Testimonial” section that is present in many of the competing themes in this niche. Fortunately, there are a number of plug-ins that can remedy this depending upon your desired layout format. Testimonials by Aihrus is one commonly utilized option. My favorite option however, is Testimonial Rotator which adds a more professional appearance to the added Testimonial section of your affiliate site.
● This theme doesn’t include any sort of “pretty links” or “link cloaking” functionality or tracking of affiliate stats. I would probably recommend Pretty Links Pro and Yoast’s Google Analytics Plugin to add these features.
Recommendation
While the Affiliate Board theme is just one of many WordPress themes designed specifically for affiliate based sales, it is one of the best for simple and fast site construction. The elements where the site falls short of the competition (rating systems and testimonials) are easily remedied with some pretty spectacular plug-ins that, quite frankly, provide better layout and styling options anyway.
If you are seeking an affiliate marketing theme that is easy to understand, easily customized and fast to set up then Affiliate Board is a good option. With this theme you have endless possibilities for affiliate promotion. Affiliate Board is perfect for promoting hosting services, selling your favorite affiliate eBooks, offering solution based affiliate products, or basically incorporating any ClickBank based product you can imagine!
If Affiliate Board doesn’t quite meet all of your needs when it comes to more unique layout desires or the possibility to create a more “storefront” themed site, I have a few suggestions for you. I like the Smart Reviewer theme for sites going for a less formal review site. Smart Reviewer takes on a Pinterest type format and is likely to make your visitors feel less like they’re entertaining a door to door salesman through their computer screen. Smart Reviewer is only $49. If you’re selling digital products and want a more storefront type of appearance, then my favored theme is Bookstore, WITHOUT A DOUBT – This one sells for only $55.
And, if neither of those don’t quite fit what you’re looking for, you can check out the rest of the Affiliate based WordPress themes here.
In short, if you are looking for a short and sweet theme setup to get your feet wet with affiliate marketing, Affiliate Board will work well.