Here goes:

“I’m a new affiliate and I’m wondering what’s the best website platform I should use?

I’ve heard a lot of people talk about using Microsoft Front Page to create a HTML site. While others have mentioned blogs.

What do you suggest?”

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My Answer:

There’s no right or wrong answer when it comes to choosing your marketing platform, and there’s no “best” platform.

It’s very situational in nature.

If you’re starting out, creating a HTML site might be easier.

I started out using Microsoft Front Page (which has since been replaced by Microsoft Web Expressions). It is alright for single page affiliate sites.

However, with Google’s stricter implementation of Quality Score and having to insert secondary pages like an about us, privacy policy, contact us page, sitemap, etc, using Front Page can be quite cumbersome.

I’ve been using XSitePro quite a bit recently. It’s a pretty intelligent website builder and lets you create sections and sub-sections pretty easily. Best of all, it links your pages seamlessly, creates a site map for you and automates your HTML creation.

I’ve created content sites with about 60 pages of content within 2 hours before, mainly because you can create pages in bulk.

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If you’re more advanced, you might like to look at using WordPress as your marketing platform. Super Affiliate Ros Gardner mentioned that WordPress is a key element in her marketing strategy and you can take a look at the Dating blog attached to her Sage-Hearts dating site.

Another Super Affiliate, Kim Rowley, who’s been featured in the September/October issue of Revenue, has mentioned that the bulk of her sites are on the WordPress platform. You can take a look at her Key Internet Marketing portfolio of sites.

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Blogs are great because they get indexed quickly by the search engines, especially if the content is frequently updated.

One thing I don’t like about blogs is that the information is presented in a chronological manner (like a diary), rather than in a categorical manner (like how information is sorted).

So the solution is to point your blog, or direct blog traffic to a content site.

While you can use Joomla as a content management system, especially since it’s got categories down pat, do note that it’s essentially a PHP script, so if you have a heavy trafficked WordPress blog and a Joomla site (both of them use PHP) you will put a strain on your hosting resources, especially if you’re using anything less than a VPS or dedicated server.

Right now, my preference is to go with a HTML site (created and more importantly, managed with XSitePro) and WordPress as a traffic generator.