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submitted: 2008-04-12 19:59:52 | by: JamesYoungblood
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Find yourself spending more time perfecting you website than you do promoting it? For the affiliate marketer, this means lost revenue. Your site must be appealing, however, or your visitors will not stay. One solution to creating an attractive website with high quality content is to use a content management system. Three of the best are Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal.

Wordpress - For Blogs or Content

Wordpress can be used for content, e-commerce, or as a blog which is its primary focus. Many available add-ons make it a versatile tool for the affiliate marketer. If you are on a tight budget, you can host it free at wordpress.com but you will not be able to use many of the additional features available on a self-hosted site. Wordpress can to compared to Blogger, Google's free blog, but Wordpress is much more powerful and flexible. Many affiliate marketers will want to use Wordpress in addition to the other content mangement systems. For example, you can use Joomla for you main site and add Wordpress as a complimentary blogsite. More content means more traffic!

Joomla Has it All

Without delving into too much into its history, Joomla is a re-release of Mambo, a very popular content management system. Joomla currently has two versions, 1.0 and 1.5 which are not completely compatible. Which to choose depends on the affiliate marketer's primary focus. Version 1.0 is the more mature version and consequently, there are more add-ons and modules available to extend and complement the capabilities of the basic system which is quite robust by its self. Version 1.5 is newer and seems to have an easier to use and understand management system. If you need a full-featured e-commerce site, Version 1.0 would be the better choice at the present because the add-on module Virtue-Mart is not yet compatible with Version 1.5.

There are many, many free templates available for each version. However, I have yet to a ready-made template either free or paid for that I did have to modify significantly to work adequately for my sites. You can modify the html and css codes of the templates but this does require at least a basic understanding of html and php. There is a Joomla template tutorial available so you could custom design you own but this may require wasting precious hours reading through pages text and graphics which may be difficult for a new user to comprehend. Even with these cautions, I still consider Joomla one of the best choices for a content management system.

Drupal

If you want to create a community type website where users can add their own comments and content, Drupal may be your best choice. It can easily be used for a blog or content site and has many themes and add-on features available. It is a free program with many free additions, but many expect you may need to buy the additions in the future. Usually the price is reasonable, especially if it does what you want and you don't have the time or expertise to build you own solution. Drupal is relatively easy to learn and you can have your site functioning in a very short period.

Web Host Considerations

Choose a web host that supports MySQL and PHP. These are necessary for many content management system including those discussed in this article. Also be sure to find one that has cpanel with fantastico. You can painlessly install Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal with fantastico. Many web hosts will let you have many domains and sub-domains without any additional fees. Get one of those! You will probably need several sites to be a successful affiliate marketer. Versatile hosting and free content management software is, in my opinion, the way to go!

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