Product review sites are a major part of my internet marketing business, so it should be no surprise that finding the best product review WordPress theme was a top priority for me. After trying several different options I have found the best option for my business. If you are looking to create a product review site then definitely take a look at the following theme.

The InReview Theme

If I am looking to create a straight-up product review site (without a blog) then I definitely will use the InReview theme. Not only is it gorgeous, but it has many awesome features which are a necessity for any great product review theme.

It has an extremely easy to use star rating system which also allows for your readers to leave ratings as well. It also has awesome affiliate link integration which allows you to automatically insert a call-to-action sales button at the end of each review. There is also a really great automatic thumbnail resizing option as well which allows you to upload your product image once and then have it resized on the appropriate pages. You will also really love the beautiful custom ratings widget which will display your top rated products on the sidebar of each page.

This fantastic theme is included in your membership to ElegantThemes. This is an amazing WordPress theme membership site because not only are there several really gorgeous themes to choose from but membership is only $39 per year! I have a membership here and I must say that it is probably the best investment I have ever made. All of their themes come with an amazing shortcodes collection as well, so you will have a lot of options to make all of your posts look really great and cohesive. ElegantThemes has an extremely large user base and forum, so if you ever need help with any of the themes it is really easy to get answers to your questions.

Just take a look at all of the templates that come included with the ElegantThemes membership and you will definitely be impressed.

Squidoo Lens

Squidoo is a really cool site which allows you to create a webpage (they call it a “lens”) about whatever you want. This is a heavily trafficked site so it is good to have a presence on there. I always like to create a lens in the same niche as the website I am trying to promote. This way I can place several backlinks to my site in the lens. Squidoo is completely free to use, so feel free to make as many lenses as you can.

EzineArticles

Although EzineArticles isn’t as popular with the search engines as it used to be, it is still a relatively good way to some traffic back to your site. Just write a simple article in your website’s niche and then have a backlink to your site in the resource box at the end of the article. If the article is good and gets a lot of hits you will definitely get some free traffic from this.

SocialAdr

This is the best service around for social bookmarking your webpages. Although I use the paid account which makes the process much more automated, SocialAdr also offers a free account which can be just as effective, providing you are willing to do a little of the work manually yourself. This service can share your bookmarks to over 20 different social bookmarking sites at the push of a button. If you have a budget I suggest you go with a paid account, but if you are just starting out then the free account will definitely be good enough for you.

Twitter and Facebook

To be honest with you I really hate Twitter and Facebook. That being said, they are obviously ridiculously popular right now so it is definitely good to have some sort of presence on there. I pretty much just use them to announce every time I post a new blog post or product review. It is a good way to get some extra free traffic.

Have your link in your forum sig

Make sure to post regularly to the most popular forums in whichever niche your site is about. For instance, if your site is about internet marketing you would want to post a lot in the Warrior Forum. Most forums allow you to have a link back to your site in your forum signature. If you become a valuable poster you would be surprised at how much traffic that little forum sig generates for you.

Write an eBook

Writing a small eBook is a great way to generate free traffic to your site. All you have to do is put a link back to your site in the footer of each page. There are many sites which accept free eBooks, but the most popular is Free-Ebooks. If your eBook becomes popular you will receive a lot of free traffic to your site.

Summary

I have just scratched the surface with these free ways of getting traffic back to your sites. These are a few of my favorite methods but I’m sure you could come up with many more yourself. Always remember, even though there are many excellent and effective paid backlinking services, it is always good to take advantage of free opportunities whenever you can.

Create Authority Sites

As far as I’m concerned, the days of making 100 slim affiliate sites are over. Now I focus on a few high quality authority sites. The search engines tend to favor legitimate content rich sites as opposed to flimsy 5-page sites. There is no concrete definition of what makes a site an “authority site”, but I would say somewhere around 100 pages of high quality content is a really good start. I always like to have a good mixture of informative articles, product reviews, and blog posts. It can take a little while to amass all of that content, so just be patient and your site will grow eventually. This can definitely be a lot of work so you may want to outsource a lot of the content creation if it is too much for you to handle.

Frequently Update Your Content

It used to be that getting backlinks was really the only thing you needed to do to get high rankings, however recently it seems that high quality content is just as important. Not only that, but also regularly updated content. I am not saying that you need to write a new blog post every day (although that would be great if you could keep up with it), but I recommend that you put up a new piece of content on your site at least once a week. This is not a scientific rule or anything, but in my experience my most updated sites tend to rank higher.

Go Easy On The Ads

Although you may be tempted to litter your site with banner ads everywhere to make some extra revenue I would advise you keep them to a minimum. At the very least keep most of your ads “below the fold”. One of the ranking factors Google uses is to check how much content is “above the fold”. This refers to the content that is visible when a user first arrives to your site. If the first thing they see are a bunch of ads with no content then obviously your site will have a very high bounce rate. This is an ironic ranking factor for Google to use seeing as how the top performing ad slots usually occur “above the fold”, and ad clicks are where Google makes most of its revenue.

This is just one more thing to consider when setting up monetization for your sites. You have to walk a fine line between having an attractive site and maximizing your revenue. So don’t rely solely on affiliate banner ads and Adsense ads, try to have a good amount of affiliate text links as well.

Which niche markets are good for Adsense?

My favorite method to determine which niche markets have the highest Adsense cost-per-click (CPC) is to get the information directly from the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Just make sure the “Approximate CPC” column is displayed then you will be able to clearly see which keywords pay the most.

You can also use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to narrow down which niche market you would like to enter into. A great way to explore new niche markets and find out what they pay is to use the “Category” drop-down. You can use this to search through all of the categories that interest you. Just select a category and a sub-category and then press “Search”. This will give you a bunch of results which you should then sort by “Approximate CPC” to find out which pays the highest. If the highest result is less than $1 I usually ignore the niche market and look for another one. I also like to make sure that there is a lot of competition for the keyword results. If you see that competition is high then you know that you will get top dollar per click.

Which WordPress theme is the best for Adsense sites?

Although there are several themes which are made specifically for Adsense sites, I like to use the Heatmap Theme for most of my sites for several reasons. For starters, most Adsense-only themes are designed to get the highest possible CPC, so they are by their very nature unattractive. It is a little known fact that ugly Adsense themes with bad color schemes with ads and navigation placed in certain locations encourage users to want to click on ads. I actually prefer good looking sites that also have a high CPC which is why I use the Heatmap Theme. Another main reason I use this theme is that it is so versatile. It has every possible Adsense banner location you could ever want, but it also performs equally well for when you are promoting affiliate products.

Summary

Adsense revenues are a major part of my overall business, and if you are careful when selecting your niche markets in the beginning you can be sure you are maximizing the CPC for each keyword you go after. It is also very important to use a WordPress theme which is highly optimized for getting the highest possible CPC. I personally use the Heatmap Theme for most of my sites, but feel free to use whichever theme works best for you.

What to do now?

So now instead of going after obscure niches with relatively low competition I tend to go after the more competitive niches and build up authority sites instead of smaller micro-niche sites.

This process definitely takes more time and patience, but I think the results are worth the effort. Not only is it easier to focus all of your efforts onto a few large sites, but they will also have more success in the search engines because once you start to consistently add a lot of content, they will become authority sites in that particular niche.

Which niches to go after?

This is a difficult question simply because there are many high competition niches with plenty of potential for profits. I personally have about 10 sites in total spanning 4-5 different niches, and I am eventually going to narrow them down to the top 3 sites with 3 different niches. I have found that it is difficult to consistently update 10 sites (at least it is for me).

The niches I am currently in are internet marketing, home fitness products, beauty products, education, electronic cigarettes, and musical instruments. Within the next few months I will narrow it down to 3 niche markets. They all are performing fairly well, so the decision will be based primarily on which niches interest me the most.

If you have been into affiliate marketing for awhile then you must know how awful it is to work on a site that you have no interest in. While some niche markets definitely have a huge profit potential, I wouldn’t even bother with them because the topic is so boring. For instance you could probably make a lot of money with Adsense sites going after the insurance niche, but I wouldn’t wish that boring topic on my worst enemy.

Conclusion

All I can say is that before you pick your niche market make sure that there is enough potential traffic and to make sure you have an interest in the subject. You will hopefully be creating an authority site containing a lot of consistently updated content, so you will definitely want to have an interest in the subject matter. Be patient, high competition niche markets can take awhile to break into (6 months to 1 year in my experience), but if you put in the effort you will be rewarded.

If you are going to be a serious affiliate marketer then you will definitely want to start using a cloaking script for all of your affiliate links. Out of all of the cloaking solutions I have tried, I can definitely say that the Easy Redirect Script is by far the best. Here are just a few of the main reasons that you should be cloaking your links with this tool.

Easy Redirect Script Features

Makes your affiliate links more attractive – In my opinion, nothing is more off-putting to visitors than when they see long ugly affiliate links filled with nonsensical letter and number combinations. Look at any Clickbank affiliate link to see what I am talking about. Cloaking the links makes them much easier on the eyes and less intimidating to your visitors.

Better for SEO – If you have a bunch of uncloaked affiliate links on your site then the search engines will see them as outbound links. However, if you use the Easy Redirect Script for cloaking your affiliate links, then they will all appear to be inbound links which are much better for SEO purposes.

Stealth redirects – This is one of my favorite features of the script. Stealth redirects allow you to redirect your user to any page you desire. For instance, if the affiliate link provided by your affiliate network leads to the home page of the product, you could do a stealth redirect to the product order form instead. Having complete control over where your visitor ends up can definitely be crucial in increasing your conversions.

Promo redirects – This feature is a really great way to increase your conversions and get more clicks to your affiliate links. Promo redirects can be setup to automatically appear on-screen for a certain amount of time. The user can either click on the link (or banner image), wait until the time expires, or click to proceed to the destination. This is an excellent way to “force” your visitors to interact with your promotions. This is an extremely powerful feature which no other cloaking script has.

Stat tracking – Tracking the stats of your affiliate link clicks is crucial in determining whether your campaign is performing or not. I use this all of the time to see my conversions and also how different link placements effect clicks. Keeping a close eye on your stats is a great way to optimize your pages.

Multi-site license – I really love the fact that the Easy Redirect Script comes with a multi-site license. I use this product on all of my sites so I definitely am getting my money’s worth out of it. If you have more than one site then this product is perfect for you.

Prevent commission theft – Having a cloaked affiliate link is the best way to prevent commission theft. You will notice many affiliate links have the marketer’s affiliate ID right in the link, which means that the user would only need to swap out their ID to receive the commissions. This tactic is very popular with traditional Clickbank Hoplinks, however, a properly cloaked affiliate link prevents this shady behavior and allows you to receive your well deserved commissions.

Easy Redirect Script Final Verdict

Well, the very fact that I use the Easy Redirect Script on all of my sites should tell you just how much I truly love this product. It is so easy to use and setup so there is literally no learning curve with the product. So if you aren’t cloaking your affiliate links already you definitely need to start as soon as possible. The Easy Redirect Script is by far the best cloaking solution on the market.

Your Easy Redirect Script Bonus Offer

If you decide to purchase the Easy Redirect Script using this link, as a bonus you will receive a free 3-tiered SENuke campaign for 2 of your keywords. Click here to claim your Easy Redirect Script bonus now!

Unrealistic Expectations

When most internet marketers first start out, they put up a website and then build a bunch of backlinks to it and then wonder why they aren’t on the first page of Google within the first week. Unfortunately it just doesn’t work that way. If you want instant traffic then you need to use PPC, however, I prefer to get free traffic so I focus mostly on free search engine traffic, which definitely takes some time to get. In my experience, I usually do not see any significant traffic for the first 6 months of a new site. Like I said, you definitely need patience if you want to go this route, but I definitely think the results are worth the wait.

Set Your Sites Low At First

Another problem many people have is that they initially target highly competitive keywords which they stand little chance for ranking for at first. I like to target the low hanging fruit first, and then when I start to get some decent traffic then I go after the competitive keywords.

Tips For Success

While there is no exact blueprint for getting top rankings in the search engines there are a few things I like to do for all of my sites to ensure maximum success.

• Make sure my on-page SEO is perfect. I use Clickbump SEO for this.
• Make consistent updates to the sites. Search engines love regularly updated content. An easy way to do this is to have a regularly updated blog on your site. Even if you have a review site or a sales page you can still add a blog to it to achieve maximum rankings.
• Obtain high quality backlinks using a high PR blog network. I have had great success using Build My Rank for this.

Conclusion

If you keep your expectations realistic and you put in the work, you will definitely start to get a significant amount of free high quality traffic from the search engines. Don’t expect any miracles though. Do not be surprised if it takes you several months to see great results. However, once you do start getting your keywords on the first page of the search results you will start to see the traffic snowball. You will really see your patience paying off when you start making regular sales, affiliate commissions, Adsense clicks, or whatever your monetization method of choice happens to be.

Always use the keyword in the title

I always like to have the keyword I am targeting to appear somewhere in the post title. I believe that this helps to really make clear what the post is about and also, more importantly, what your keyword is.

Always use your keyword towards the beginning of your post

Most of the time when your Build My Rank post is actually posted on one of the blogs in their network, it appears on the blog’s home page as an excerpt. This usually means that only the first couple of sentences actually show up on the front page. So to make sure your keyword actually appears on the page with the actual high PR (the home page), you want to make sure that your keyword is contained in the either the first or second sentence.

Try to vary up your post lengths

When most people use Build My Rank they tend to use mostly 150 word posts. I actually try to make sure I use an equal amount of 150 and 300 word posts. I obviously do not have any inside information on what the search engines are thinking, but I imagine it looks a lot more natural if posts containing backlinks to your site actually have some variation to them. If every single post is exactly 150 words, then I think that that might raise some red flags in my opinion. I also like the fact that you are allowed to use two keywords in every 300 word post.

Try to vary up your keywords

Another important thing to consider when creating your Build My Rank posts is to vary up your keywords. It is not a good idea to create all of your posts around just one keyword. For every page I am building backlinks to I try to have a few different keywords I actively try to rank for. I think it is definitely more natural looking to build up backlinks to several different keywords as opposed to only one.

Conclusion

While these are by no means hard-and-fast rules, I generally like to use these guidelines to get the most out of all of my Build My Rank posts. I have had great success so far using the Build My Rank network and I highly recommend you try the service if you are not yet a member.

Check out the Build My Rank network at the official site!

Top Affiliate Networks

Peerfly – This is an excellent network if you are looking for the best email submit CPA offers. They have so many high converting CPA offers to choose from it is ridiculous. They also have every “As Seen On TV” product available as well, so if those products are in your niche then you will love Peerfly. They also have a large amount of health/fitness/beauty products to promote as well.

What is really great about Peerfly is that it is really easy to get accepted into their network. Many networks require an annoying phone interview, but Peerfly didn’t require any of that (at least they didn’t when I applied).

As far as payouts go, I have been paid on-time every time with Peerfly. They are definitely a very trustworthy affiliate network.

ShareASale – I really love ShareASale for the vast amount of products they have to promote. No matter what your niche is, they will definitely have several different products to choose from. Belonging to a network of this size is extremely valuable, because no matter how obscure your niche is, they will always something you can promote.

ShareASale is a relatively easy network to get accepted to. I didn’t have to have a phone interview with them which is a plus. Just fill out the application honestly and make sure to have a nice website to show them. You should have no problem getting accepted into the network.

ShareASale is a highly respected network that has been around for a long time, so you know you can trust them. They always pay me on time every month.

Pepperjam Network – This network also has a very vast amount of products to choose from. You can find very big name products to promote here, so whatever your niche they have you covered.

Acceptance into this network was relatively painless as well. I did not have a phone interview, all I did was fill out the application. You will definitely want to have a nice website to show to them to let them know you are not some sleazy spammer.

Pepperjam is a very large and reputable network. They always pay me every month on time like clockwork.

Summary

While there are hundreds of affiliate networks to choose from, these are my in my opinion the absolute best affiliate networks. I have had great experiences with these networks and I recommend them all highly. If I were to give you one piece of advice, it would be to have a nice website created before you apply to any of these networks. While the admission requirements aren’t too strict, they at least want to know you are serious about your affiliate marketing business.

One of the most popular WordPress themes for internet marketers is the Heatmap Theme. I am currently using this theme on this site, so it should be quite obvious just how much I love it. In this Heatmap Theme review I will show you all of the awesome features that make this theme a personal favorite of mine.

Heatmap Theme Features

User interface – Although there are tons of features and options included in the Heatmap Theme, the settings control panel is laid out very well and I was able to easily customize the theme without even looking at the documentation. Is is all very self-explanatory.

Beautiful skins – When you install the theme you get over 30 different skins to choose from, so you should have no trouble finding whatever look you are going for. I am using one of the default skins on this site. I just added my own header logo to make it more personalized.

Advertising options – There are over 20 different ad widget locations in the Heatmap Theme. So no matter how you want to layout your site, you will have no shortage of monetization options. There is also a new ad rotation feature which allows you to randomly change where the ads appear with every page view so your visitor never ignores your ads. This will increase conversions a lot for you.

Social media and feed integration – Getting the word out about your articles and posts is so important. Heatmap Theme has awesome social media and feed integration so all you have to do is give your profiles for all of your various social media accounts and then your site will be all setup and ready to be shared. There is even a great Feedburner widget which will allow people to subscribe to your blog by email. All you need to do is give your Feedburner ID and then add the widget into the sidebar. This is a great way to get repeat traffic to your new posts.

Versatility – The Heatmap Theme is awesome for affiliate review sites and Adsense based sites. This is really why this theme has become a favorite of mine. I have several affiliate review sites as well as several Adsense sites. This theme is great for affiliate review sites because of the custom click through buttons and the featured images review pictures. This makes the reviews look very professional. As far as Adsense goes, you will not find more ad placement options in any theme. There are several high converting templates which will allow you to get optimal CTR right out of the box.

Value – As of this writing the Heatmap Theme is $67 (that is what I paid for it), which is really a great deal when you consider the fact that it comes with free lifetime upgrades. Another really important thing to consider is the fact that you can install it on an unlimited number of sites. So if you have multiple sites, you can see how much of a bargain this theme really is.

Support – The Heatmap Theme is always under constant development so you always can be assured that you won’t be stranded with an outdated version when the latest WordPress update is released. This theme is extremely popular, so you know that it will never be abandoned by the developer. The product itself is extremely easy to use, but for some reason if you ever need help there is an awesome support forum.

Heatmap Theme Final Verdict

It should go without saying because of the simple fact that I am using this theme on this site that I am a huge fan of the Heatmap Theme. It is so easy to use and I really love all of the built-in monetization and social media integration features. You can really tell that this theme was designed by internet marketers. To sum it all up, I highly recommend the Heatmap Theme.

Your Heatmap Theme Bonus Offer:

If you decide to purchase the Heatmap Theme with this link, you will receive a free 3-tiered SENuke campaign for two of your keywords as a bonus. Click here to claim your Heatmap Theme bonus now!