You might know, that you can earn passive income online by promoting affiliate products. In this post you'll learn, how to build an affiliate store with affiliate products. I'm using a WordPress theme for it, that has a good approache to this topic but also some drawbacks.
If you create your affiliate store by hand, it's an awesome way to earn passive income.
In this store you're selling nothing but affiliate products. This is a great internet business idea, because you don't need to create products yourself, nor do you have to take care of shipping or customer service. Nevertheless you'll want to make sure, that you're recommending only high-quality products, because otherwise you would ruin your reputation.
Obviously you need to be a member of a certain affiliate program, when you want to build an affiliate store. In this example we'll use the Amazon Associates program. When you sign in to this network you can promote products listed on Amazon and earn a provision for each sale. Interesting is, that you'll not only earn this provision when your promoted products are bought, but when any product is bought within 24 hours after someone clicked on your affiliate link.
Besides being a member of an affiliate network, you're going to need a WordPress installation and a theme called Covert Store Builder. I won't include a link, because I'm testing this myself and I want to show you my experiences with it. The Covert Store Builder is a payed theme and it automatically loads products out of the Amazon Associates network onto your own site.
The only thing you have to do is to select the products you want to promote by entering a search term. My fully functional showcase presents books on how to hack, since I'm very interested in IT security.
You can download the Covert Store Theme after the purchase in a .zip package. To build an affiliate store you just need to upload the package in the Appearance -> Themes section in your WordPress site.
After you've successfully uploaded and activated the theme, you must enter the credentials of your affiliate network accounts. For Amazon Associates you need the affiliate ID, the API Access Key ID and the API Secret Access Key. Other support affiliate programs are Commission Junction and the eBay Partnernetwork.
To make your store trustworthy you need to apply a custom design. The theme allows you to customize the backgrounds, colors of the header, fonts, links and buttons, and let's you insert images in the product pages (if you don't like the automatically generated ones).
Importing products into the Covert Store Builder is highly efficient and easy to handle.
You just need to enter a search term for the configured affiliate network. That shows related products, which you can import and use to build an affiliate store.
The Covert Store Builder automatically imports the products including images, pricing and description. That takes a lot of work from your shoulders!
For each import you can assign a category, that shows up in the affiliate store. That means, you should only import similar products, that have a matching category and start a new import for the next category.
The most impressive feature is, that the Covert Store Builder dynamically displays the products based on their Click-Through-Rate. The theme optimizes itself to bring maximum value to the visitors and maximum profit for you.
That's it. Each time when a visitor clicks on a product, he's redirected to the product-page in the affiliate network. When you click on a book in my affiliate store, you'll be redirected to Amazon. That's because I imported all products from Amazon Associates.
Please read this carefully before you buy the Covert Store Builder. All is not gold that glitters. There are some drawbacks you have to be aware of.
Duplicate Content - My biggest concern is related to duplicate content. Your store will only earn money, when it ranks well in Google. Since the Covert Store Builder directly imports the product information from existing sites, it is duplicate content. And duplicate content isn't ranked well by Google.
No Custom Posts - I haven't found a method to include custom pages and posts. Posts are totally reduced to product presentation, you can't integrate plain text with a different layout.
No Custom Menu - The only way you can customize the menu is to include or exclude categories. There is no way to include static pages, you'd have to link to them in widget areas via text widgets.
After all I'm very impressed by the theme. It's great how easy you can build an affiliate store. Importing the products, styling and customizing is really easy.
But until I can recommend it to you, I'll have to wait how massive the drawbacks turn out. I'm afraid, that the duplicate content will prevent the store from a high ranking. I would be able to modify the product information manually, but that's not my intention. I want to automate it as much as possible, so for now I'm living with the (probably) duplicate content.
If that drawbacks turns out to be false, I'll definitely recommend the Covert Builder Store to build an affiliate store.
