WordPress is the best CMS to create a website for affiliate marketing as it is fully customizable. The very first thing you need to do before start creating a website for your affiliate marketing business is to pick the best theme. You can go to the WordPress theme directory for a free theme. If you prefer a paid theme, one of our recommendations is Divi. You will learn shortly why Divi is one of the best themes to run your affiliate marketing business.
Affiliate marketing means you sell third-party’s products in which you will earn a commission for every product you sell via your affiliate link. Most affiliate marketers promote the affiliate product they sell via articles, be it in the form of review or listicle. There is also a practice whereby an affiliate marketer creates something like an online shop, but for affiliate products only. In WordPress, you can use WooCommerce if you want to adopt this practice. WooCommerce allows you to sell affiliate products other than your own products. Whichever the practice you want to adopt, Divi can provide the solution. You can use it to create a customized WooCommerce-based online shop. You can also use it to create a regular website (e.g., blog) that consists of several content types.
Also, Divi comes with tons of features you can make use of to create campaign materials.
Top Reasons Divi is the Best WordPress Theme for Affiliate Marketing.
1. It Comes with a Visual Editor
While articles are great to promote your affiliate products, as well as to generate traffic to your website from search engines, you might want to try running a campaign on platforms like Facebook Ads or Google Ads. Before running a campaign, you definitely need to create a decent landing page first. To do so, you can use a page builder that offers a visual editor like Elementor, Zion Builder, and Brizy. With Divi theme, you don’t need to install a page builder plugin anymore as it already has one called Divi Builder.
Divi Builder is an integral part of the Divi theme. It is not a separate plugin although a standalone plugin of Divi Builder is also available if you want to use it on a WordPress theme other than Divi theme.
You can use Divi Builder to create a landing page before you run a campaign on any advertising platform. You can create a more appealing page by adding some visual elements in order to make your landing page can convert into sales or leads according to your purpose. Divi Builder itself offers 30+ elements (called modules). Some key modules are:
- Button
- Call to Action
- Email Optin
- Contact Form
- Image
- Text
- Toggle
- Video
If you need more modules, you can install a Divi plugin. Elegant Themes — the developer of Divi — offers a marketplace whereby you can download Divi plugins, Divi child themes, and Divi layouts. To give you an overview about Divi Builder, you can watch the following video.
Regarding campaign materials, Divi offers 200+ ready-made landing page layouts to streamline your workflow. Divi Builder itself can be used on posts on pages.
2. Native Integration with Gutenberg
WordPress has a default editor called Gutenberg which you can use to create content on your website. Be it blog posts or pages. Although it has evolved in the recent years by allowing users to add more visual elements, the emphasis is text, still. In Divi, you can add more visual elements to your Gutenberg-powered content thanks to the native integration between Gutenberg and Divi Builder.
In what form is the integration between Divi Builder and Gutenberg?
You can add a Divi module (which you have customized before) to Gutenberg. This is great if you often create blog posts to promote your affiliate products as you can add elements like call to action, email opt-in form, stylized button, and so on. Blog posts, in any case, are the best material to generate organic traffic from search engines. The concept of this sort of integration itself is also available on other page builders like Elementor. But unlike Elementor, you don’t need to install an additional plugin to integrate Gutenberg and Divi Builder (read: Elementor vs Divi). You can read our previous article to learn how to use a Divi module in Gutenberg.
3. Ability to Create Custom Templates for Site Parts
Your WordPress-based website consists of the following main parts:
- Header
- Footer
- Single post
- Single page
- 404 page
- Search results page
The layouts of those parts are controlled by template files of the theme you use. For instance, the layout of the header is controlled by the header.php file, while the layout of the footer is controlled by the footer.php file. You can go to Appearance -> Theme Editor on your WordPress dashboard to find the template files of your theme.
WordPress itself is written in PHP. In other words, you need to understand PHP to edit the template files with the aim to edit the layouts. Divi comes with a theme builder feature to eliminate the PHP knowledge requirement to edit the templates. The theme builder feature of Divi allows you to create custom templates — using Divi Builder — to replace the default templates of your theme.
When it comes to affiliate marketing, theme builder is useful for the following case.
- To create custom templates for custom post types
What is a custom post type?
Simply put, it is a type of content that is different from default content of WordPress such as blog posts and pages. When it comes to affiliate marketing, a great example of the implementation of a custom post type is for review articles whereby you can create a custom post type dedicated to review articles. You can then use Divi theme builder to create a custom template for the custom port type. You can read our previous article to learn more about WordPress custom post type.
When creating a custom template for a custom post type, you can also add custom fields like dynamic star rating, overall score, and so on.
4. The Supporting Marketing Plugins on the Package
Divi is developed by Elegant Themes, which adopts membership-based business model. There are two membership types offered by Elegant Themes: yearly membership and lifetime membership. Whichever the membership type you choose; you will have access to all WordPress products developed by Elegant Themes:
- Divi Theme
- Extra Theme
- Divi Builder
- Monarch
- Bloom
Monarch and Bloom are two of the supporting plugins you can make use of to run your affiliate marketing business. Monarch is a social media sharing plugin, while Bloom is an email marketing plugin. The two comes with analytics feature to allow you to monitor the stats like the number of shares and subscribers.
5. Built-in SEO Feature
Most affiliate marketers rely on search engines to generate traffic (organic traffic more specifically) to their affiliate websites. To get traffic from search engines, you need to have your sites on the front page (page one) of the search results page of search engines. To achieve this, you need to optimize your website as well as its content. The process itself is called Search Engine Optimization or often shortened SEO.
Divi comes with a built-in SEO feature you can make use of. You can go to Divi -> Theme Options and click the SEO tab to access the feature.
The built-in SEO feature of Divi allows you to:
- Add custom title for homepage and single post
- Add meta description for homepage and single post
- Add meta keyword for homepage and single post
- Add canonical URLs
While the feature is useful enough, we keep recommending a dedicated SEO plugin like Yoast and Rank Math for a better result.
6. WooCommerce Builder Feature
On the opening section, we said that you can create an online shop using WooCommerce to sell your affiliate products. Related to this, you can make use of the WooCommerce builder of Divi to create a fully customized online shop.
How the WooCommerce builder feature works?
WooCommerce consists of the following main pages:
- Shop page
- Single product page
- Product archive pages
- Cart page
- Checkout page
- Customer’s account page
The layouts of the pages above are controlled by template files which you can find on the folder “wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/templates“.
The WooCommerce builder feature of Divi allows you to create custom templates for the WooCommerce pages above. Same as theme parts like header and footer, you can also create the custom template for WooCommerce using Divi Builder. You can read our previous article to learn how to create a customized WooCommerce-powered online shop using Divi.
The ability to create custom templates for WooCommerce gives you freedom to add the elements you need or like on every WooCommerce page such as single product page. You can also remove the unnecessary ones.
7. One License for Unlimited Sites
The yearly membership plan of Divi costs $89. Looks expensive? At first, yes. But it’s not!
With only one license, you can install Divi (and other products developed by Elegant Themes) on as many websites as you want. This means, if you plan to create several websites for your affiliate marketing business, you only need to spend $89 per year. If you plan to create 10 websites, for instance, you only need to spend $8.9 per site. Think again about the features you will get as we have covered above.
Divi Reviews and Ratings
Divi is not available on ThemeForest or WordPress theme directory. So how to know users’ feedbacks?
Well, it’s normal if you ask the question above. Everybody does it. You can visit sites like Trustpilot and Capterra to learn the users’ feedbacks about Divi.
On Trustpilot, there have been over 17,000 users who gave their reviews for Divi. While on Capterra, you will find over 400 reviews.
- Average Divi rating on Trustpilot: [usr 5]
- Average Divi rating on Capterra: [usr 4.8]
How to Get Divi
You have just learned the features of Divi as well as the benefits of using it. If you are interested to give Divi a try, you can go to the official website of Elegant Themes and select a membership plan you like. After completing the payment, you will have access to all products developed by Elegant Themes, including Divi. Just like other WordPress products (themes and plugins), you will get the ZIP files, which you can upload to your hosting.
If installing Divi sounds scary for you, you can also get Divi by subscribing to a Divi Hosting plan. What is that?
Elegant Themes partners with three prominent web hosting companies: Pressable, SiteGround, and Flywheel to offer hosting plans that are optimized to run Divi-powered WordPress sites. The partnership is named Divi Hosting. In addition to Divi-optimized hosting, each Divi Hosting plan also offers Divi itself.
The Bottom Line
Divi is a perfect theme to start an affiliate marketing business with WordPress. It has a strong SEO fundamental, which is crucial to generate organic traffic from search engines. With Divi, you have a built-in visual page builder to create decent landing pages easily. Another strong reason to use Divi for affiliate marketing is that Divi is available in a very simple plan. With a single license, you can use Divi on unlimited websites.
Here are top 5 features offered by Divi:
- Visual Page Builder
- Native Gutenberg Integration
- Theme Builder
- WooCommerce Builder
- Built-in SEO
And here are three additional reasons to use Divi for affiliate marketing:
- One license for unlimited websites
- Strong SEO fundamental
- Additional marketing plugins on the package
