Affiliate Tool Spotlight: Theme Showcases to Sky-Rocket Your Content Strategy

As you already know from one of our previous affiliate tool spotlights, you can incorporate banners and widgets into your content marketing pieces (articles, infographics, etc.). But how to produce content it in the amounts sufficient to make money passively?

Writer’s block is not a myth, and constant writing will exhaust your inner resources very quickly. Guest posting could have been a good way out, but no one will write for an unknown blog with zero traffic. So, what’s the solution?

We continue our series of affiliate tool reviews with a quick guide on TemplateMonster theme showcases. These handcrafted article templates can be effortlessly customized to provide your blog with unique, easily scannable content.

What is it About Our Ready-Made Showcases?

Publishing unique content works towards the increase of organic traffic attracts backlinks and makes it much easier to grow audience. That’s why we regularly build fresh ready-to-use showcases for our affiliates.

Instead of writing template roundups from scratch, just download one of our showcases, enrich it with unique introductions and template descriptions, and publish it on your blog.

In our collection you will find 70+ structured template lists for various categories and CMSs: WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and much more. This number is steadily growing, plus you can modify each showcase by adding new TemplateMonster themes from the same category, or templates made by other providers.

Moreover, you can order a unique roundup, which will be written and assembled especially for your online project. To get one go to this page, and tell us about your blog by filling in the form. We will handcraft a roundup that perfectly fits your target audience.

Tips and Tricks on Using Theme Showcases

Here we’ve prepared some tips on how to fine-tune your content strategy, and make your blogging process more streamlined.

1. More articles mean more traffic.

For a better result, try covering as many keywords, as you can. Given that one blog post is typically responsible for promoting one keyword, you will need a lot of articles to get your blog ranked in Google and get enough traffic.

2. Post articles regularly.

Regular website updates are not only beneficial for SEO; they will also help you build a community, and decrease your marketing budget if any. If your blog is brand new, you can publish articles in bulk to speed up the development process.

3. Long articles rank better.

Due to the research, longer posts have a higher chance to rank higher in Google, and therefore, bring you more traffic. That’s why we recommend writing descriptions for every template in the showcase, and also add meaningful introductions.

4. Replace default text links with buttons.

Having a well-optimized call-to-action is crucial for conversion rates. There are plenty of tools that allow creating catchy CSS buttons such as Mango Buttons for WordPress. You can set custom colors, change the text style, and even add icons to make them more prominent.

5. Use power words.

Any roundup of premium goods is a selling oriented content, so treat it as a landing page. Use action words in CTA buttons, choose only the most visually appealing screenshots, and don’t forget to mention numbers whenever possible. Check out this article to learn about the most efficient ways of improving your landing page copy – all of them can be applied to your roundup articles.

How SourceWP Makes Money with Affiliate Tools by TemplateMonster

Now we are happy to reveal the success story of Dhiraj Das, founder of SourceWP. In just one year his brainchild managed to evolve from a small website with almost no organic traffic into a super-popular blog about WordPress resources, which brings his owner a steady income. Dhiraj will tell you about his first steps in online business, his experience in using TemplateMonster tools, and the best practices of affiliate blogging.

TemplateMonster: Please tell us a couple of words about yourself. Where are you from? How do you spend your free time (sure if you have some free time because I know that you are a quite online busy bee and SourceWP probably takes much time)?

Dhiraj Das: Hi, I’m Dhiraj Das, a professional blogger based in India. I started blogging as a hobby alongside my day job, and soon it became the full-time profession for me. I don’t have a lot of free time because there are a lot of activities involved, other than just writing, such as replying to emails, editing the articles written by other authors on the site; testing products we review on SourceWP, etc.

I’m a huge car lover, so whenever I get some free time I like to take my car out and go for a drive. I like to travel to various interesting places. In fact, I have a trip planned to Indonesia by the end of this month.

TemplateMonster: How long are you in online business? What was the starting point? How you came up with the idea of SourceWP?

Dhiraj Das: I started my online journey in 2009. I started learning about web designing and blogging at that point and continued to make and break things till the time I founded a WordPress news blog called IndexWP which I eventually sold on Flippa for $22k; it was a nice price tag for a 9-month-old site.

The main reason why I decided to sell the site, I wanted to move away from the news niche and start a full–fledged resource based site and I decided to start SourceWP.

TemplateMonster: You are posting lots of collections with free and premium WordPress themes, and I know that you are an expert in it. How can you estimate a perfect WordPress theme?

Dhiraj Das: Yes, we do post a lot of collection type articles. Personally, a theme is perfect for me if it's user-friendly and quick. A perfect blend of minimal design with modern features makes the best package, I believe.

I receive a lot of question regarding how to install a WordPress theme, and quite often users get confused even after the installation. That’s because the newbie user base is huge as far as WordPress platform is concerned. So, developers should consider this huge percentage of new users and make things simple.

TemplateMonster: You have a great influence in both free and premium markets and feature products of both types. Is it worth choosing a premium theme over free one?

Dhiraj Das: I always preferred, and I will always recommend everyone to use premium themes because the premium ones come with more features and options than their free analogs. You can look forward to quicker responses as far as support is concerned and updates needed.

TemplateMonster: Business blogging vs. non-profit. Should bloggers invest their time in promoting themes for different business types? What is the percentage of commercial / sponsored posts? How many posts are there that are 100% non-profit and are aimed to feature free, inspirational and guiding material?

Dhiraj Das: It depends on the objective of the blogger. There is nothing wrong with promoting a theme or any other premium product as far as the article is useful to end users. For me, blogging is a full-time activity, so I do promote some premium products.

However, I try my best to keep a balance and promote free products as well. I never say "No" to write about a product for free, if a developer comes with something great and useful to our users.

Regarding percentage, 30% of posts are about free products and 70% posts are dedicated to premium products on SourceWP. Good news is, we have started another new blog around Entrepreneurship niche called www.begindot.com where we will talk about anything and everything that helps new entrepreneurs. In this blog it will be reverse, 70% of our posts will be non-profit, inspirational and guiding material and 30% will be premium content so that we can keep our lights on.

TemplateMonster: How did you get to know about TemplateMonster? Please, describe your experience with us.

Dhiraj Das: I came to know about TemplateMonster somewhere around 2010-11 when I started looking for website templates to create my websites most probably through Google. It’s been a great association with TemplateMonster as an affiliate; the team is supportive and as I know a few in the team, so it is much easier for me.

TemplateMonster: How is Template Monster Affiliate Program different / similar to other ways of earning money online? Maybe you prefer working with our competitors?

Dhiraj Das: As there is a huge number of products, it is a lot easier to find a good one to promote. I can get any niche design while writing a post, so TemplateMonster can be a constant source while I am writing about any theme compilation.

Yes, we do promote products from other stores as well so that we can offer a variety to our users.

TemplateMonster: What affiliate tools you are using at the moment and which of have them you tried? Could you please provide some statistics, screenshots? That would be outstanding and could evoke the mutual interest of the readers!

Dhiraj Das: As I have been blogging for a long time now, I have tried most of the tools. However, I like to keep things simple and use the required basic tools such as Pretty Link Lite to mask the affiliate links which is really important from the SEO perspective and I use a plugin to add no follow attributes to the links which is again important.

TemplateMonster: How do you promote SourceWP and what sources of traffic do you use the most (social sharing, offline advertising, guest posting, SEO, AdWords, etc.)?

Dhiraj Das: Search Engines are the primary source of traffic for SourceWP and I believe the search engine traffic is the best for conversion. We do promote articles on the social sites but it’s not been a great source of traffic for us.

We do promote all the relevant articles on Facebook through their sponsored service. It’s difficult to say the exact amount at the moment.

TemplateMonster: Which way of promotion is the most effective for you? Which is the least effective?

Dhiraj Das: As I've already mentioned, we try our best to optimize each post and get a better ranking in the search engine results which has been working well for us. Google is the best source of traffic for us, and the social media is probably the least powerful.

TemplateMonster: Please give advice to the newbie bloggers who want to make their blogs attractive and at the same time less painful.

Dhiraj Das: WordPress is undoubtedly the best platform to start your blog, you will find a number of amazing designs in TemplateMonster or you can have a look at the best theme collections in SourceWP.

As far as the success is concerned, you must be able to create quality content that is helpful to your users regularly because the quality and consistency is the key. Shortcuts don't really work for a longer run, so get into a niche you are really interested in and be consistent.

Wrapping Up

Have you heard Dhiraj? Affiliate blogging is something everyone can do. So, don’t hesitate! Get a fancy domain name, install WordPress and a blogging theme (you can’t go wrong by picking one of our GPL WordPress themes), download some of our affiliate showcases, and launch your own affiliate empire.

Next week we will tell you more about our conversion-optimized landing pages targeted primarily at AdWords users, so stay tuned!