This is awesome! Never before has it been so easy and fast to set up dedicated landing pages and mini-sites. I love working with WordPress and Affiliate Theme makes it MUCH more efficient!
- Zac Johnson
If you are truly serious about creating a PPC business then this is hands down a product you need in your arsenal! I am only promoting this because it really is a gem to have for those that want a quick and easy way to create LPs. You really need to jump over to their website and read about all of the features this product provides! They even have several examples set up for you to view. If anything, look at the examples so you can get a better idea of what truly great review site should look like!
- CashTactics.net
Last month, when Affiliate Theme was released by Unique Blog Designs, the quotes above were a sampling of some of the hype from the Super Affiliate’s pumping up this new theme. And why not? With commissions ranging from $48.50 to $98.50, affiliates can make a healthy chunk of change promoting Affiliate Theme. I’ll admit that I got caught up in the hype myself. I bought myself the Super Affiliate Package for $197 and registered the domain. My plan was to setup a review site using the theme itself, do some case studies of making money online using sites created with the theme, and rake in some affiliate commissions. But after playing around with the theme a bit, I became kind of underwhelmed with what it could do. Not to say that the theme is completely awful, but for the price they are charging for it, I expected much more.
The premise of Affiliate Theme is that affiliates with limited or no coding can create affiliate marketing websites for their PPC and SEO campaigns. All customization of your site is controlled from within the Affiliate Theme Options control panel. Creating a quality landing page is a time consuming process and imagine being able to pump out several of these affiliate sites in less than an hour or so. That’s a pretty effective selling point.
First, take a look at the Affiliate Theme test drive page and you check out some of the pre-made landing pages that were created by the designers. Do any of them really look like they are highly converting landing pages to you? Just my opinion, but to me they look pretty plain at best, and amateurish at worst. See the Call to Action buttons on the Ringtones page? They are just colored squares with text. I was looking around on the support forum and I found a couple of other examples of people using Affiliate Theme for some of their sites (Site1 | Site2). Not terrible, but are these really something that couldn’t be done with a free Wordpress theme?
Another selling point of the theme is the 30 unique banners that are included and as a SuperAffiliate I also get 10 free banners a month. I must say I am really disappointed with these. All of them are completely generic and uninspiring. Supposedly a new feature is on the way where we can overlay our own text on them, but even if that is the case, I am still not sure that I would ever use them.
Affiliate Theme does give you 6 different layout options and you can dynamically change between them. There are quite a bit of options you can tweak from the control panel like fonts, background settings, layout options and much more. This makes the page quite long which makes it slightly annoying to find the options you need. Plus the Save Settings button is all the way at the bottom so you every time you change an option, you need to scroll all the way to the bottom to save your changes.
What irks me the most about this theme is that its billed as a super fast and customizable way to build landing-type pages. However, if you are customizing everything from the control panel, it actually ends up fairly inflexible and your sites end up looking like the ones on the test drive page with maybe a different color or background. Where’s the support for building a sales letter type page? How about a review style page like the ones you see everywhere? Sure I could customize the CSS and muck around the php code to do what I want, but I could do that with a free WP theme too. Doesn’t doing that defeat the whole purpose of purchasing this theme?
I do give the Unique Blog Design guys credit for providing decent support. The forums are fairly active and they have responded to the few of the questions I’ve had it a timely manner. Plus, I can see they are working hard on improvements to the theme. The latest version added the ability to have a separate blog from the site, and I see some more signs they are trying to improve the flexibility of this theme. However, for $197 and all the hype it received, I had high expectations. Unfortunately, Affiliate Theme doesn’t live up to them for me.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Chris,
Great honest review. My website was one of the ones that you referred to. I agree that the exact same effect could be achieved by using a free wordpress theme.
I tried the Affiliate Theme because it looked like something I could recommend to people who wanted something that was simple to use. So far I’ve only created very simple landing pages that I can direct people to through article marketing. I do like the ability to not have navigation appear on those pages but like you, I feel that $197 is a bit rich just to do that.
I’m still hopeful that I’ll be able to create some useful sites using the theme and am looking forward to the updates, hopefully they will bring out some more flexible options.
The Thesis theme that you have created this blog on looks very nice and clean. I will look forward to your review of that.
Cheers,
Steve Anderson
Hey Steve. I’m glad I didn’t offend you by using your site. It was one of the few examples I could find. =)
I’ve only been using the Thesis theme for a couple of days, but I’ve actually been quite impressed with it so far. I love that the layouts actually are flexible, so besides being able to switch between 1,2, or 3 columns, you can also specify the widths of each. I definitely will be writing a review of it once I get more experience with it.
Hey Chris, I appreciate your review of Affiliate Theme, however, I am a little disappointed.
Most of your points are subjective and I disagree with. For instance, many clients and even designers think the header graphics look great. There are a wide variety of styles for different niches. Of course, not everyone will find every banner attractive, especially when over 40 different headers are available for the Super Affiliates.
To say Affiliate Theme doesn’t live up to the hype is misleading. On our web site (www.affiliatetheme.net), we are very clear about what Affiliate Theme can do and we set a realistic expectation via the use of screen shots, test sites and a hefty amount of explanation and copy.
Like any product, it can take time to orient yourself to how best to use it, but it s a great tool for anyone who is a new affiliate or wants to quickly setup a lot of affiliate marketing landing pages. Therefore, over the long haul, people are saving a lot of money compared to having to purchase and/or modify a WordPress theme from scratch, each time.
The price points of $147 for the multi-use package is very competitive within the premium theme market. Of course, the Super Affiliate Package is $50 more, but it includes 40 additional pre-made graphics, which will save people time and money in the creation of niche sites. This also includes additional header graphics we make, upon request from the community, each month.
All of the features that are present and have been added to Affiliate Theme have been specifically requested by affiliate marketers, including the likes of Zac Johnson, Paul Bourque, Yaro Starak and a number of other successful affiliates.
We have already released a number of updates to Affiliate Theme designed to make it better and easier to use for affiliate marketers. We are committed to taking our user feedback seriously and a number of requested features have already made it into the theme.
We always welcome user feedback and we have a special forum dedicated to user suggestions and feedback. Of course, you are more than welcome to contribute if you want to see Affiliate Theme gain new specific features in the future.
Chris,
I enjoyed your article. You are right, a couple of the examples could have been done with some free Wordpress templates. I think some people buy the more expensive ones because they are really intimidated by making any changes at all. I will certainly keep reading your postings.
Have a great night,
Bruce C Ziebarth
Hey Nate, thanks for responding. Honestly, I never had a problem with the sales pitch of your website at all. The hype that I’m talking about is from the big name bloggers promoting it. Hey, I get it. They stand to make big money from it by writing positive reviews. Whether they made suggestions or not, it is just completely obvious to me that none of them have actually used the theme themselves to make money.
My review is definitely just my opinion, and if people disagree with it, I’m totally cool with that. I know you guys are working hard on future releases and I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with. If I start making money with my Affiliate Theme sites, I will be more than happy to write a follow-up post saying so.
Hi Chris, thanks for the response. One thing to keep in mind – whether people make money with Affiliate Theme is not a function of Affiliate Theme – all of the layouts for AT are fairly common affiliate landing page designs and even newbies can create web sites using Affiliate Theme.
Whether Affiliate Theme makes someone money is a function of their traffic driving efforts, assuming the theme has been properly setup before hand, which we do our best to help get all of our members on the right track.
Affiliate Theme is an enabler, allowing people to bridge the technological challenge of setting up an affiliate marketing website. Making money online takes a tremendous amount of effort and the tools you use can make it much easier. Affiliate Theme is one of those tools.
I can assure you all of our main launch partners have used the theme and give us critical feedback prior to the first launched version.
Not only that, but with all of the videos, resources, and tutorials, Affiliate Theme far surpasses the vast majority of premium themes when it comes to showing people how to use it effectively.
I, along with many affiliates out there, had to start from the beginning at some point. There is no doubt in my mind that Affiliate Theme would have helped me immensely.
Thanks. I was thinking on getting either Affiliate Theme or Thesis. You made my choice, Thesis it will be.
To Nate,
There is no need to get so bent out of shape about an honest review. I too purchased Affiliate Theme and while it’s ok, I find the price to be very high for what it does. You can charge whatever you want for it, it’s your product, but for the same price, I can buy a bunch of tools that put AT to shame.
Yes, I get it’s for newbies as well, but I don’t see whats so great about it. And you are wrong about AT not being involved in the money making process. If the landing pages look cheap or don’t convert, targeted traffic, while still making sales, will be a lot less then it should be.
You should have thanked Chris for his opinion and told him you would work on the issues he had. He obviously is no crack pot. I have a large list of bloggers and affiliates on my IM list and after reading your response here and using the theme, I won’t be recommending it.
Actually Affiliate Theme 1.2 was released a couple of weeks ago and I must say it does fix a lot of things I complained about in my original review. The options panel was reworked to make navigation better, and I like the fact that you can now customize widths of the various parts of your layout. Plus, you the banners are more useful now that you can overlay text on them. I’ll give credit to Nate and his team for continuing to fix issues and listen to user feedback.