May 19th, 2009 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

I’ve been very deliberate to leave this review until all the fuss over the Affiliate Theme from Unique Blog Designs died down. As the blog designers for some of the biggest names in blogging its common sense that a new product like this would be associated with a huge amount of hype, it’s only natural and I bet any of us in UBD’s position would be calling in some favours too? It’s also common sense that many of the big make money bloggers are going to promote this as it comes with a fantastic affiliate program (30%). Personally, I bought the theme (with my own cash) and have used it a fair amount so think I can give an honest and balanced view of what it does and doesn’t give you for your money. If you’re looking for the short version then here it is – it’s good but in my opinion over priced for what it does. For the full version read on:-

What Do You Get?

I paid the full price of $197 for my copy of Affiliate Theme. This entitles me to use the theme on as many blogs as I like plus the added bonus of regular (monthly) new headers direct from UBD themselves. I’ve been a long time fan of their blog designs, their quality is obvious. For somebody graphically challenged like myself the idea of a lifetimes worth of free header graphics seemed well worth the extra $50, unfortunately I’m yet to see any sign of any new headers.

The theme itself is NOTHING like what you expect from a WordPress theme. At its core the Affiliate Theme is 6 separate main layouts in one (plus 3 page layouts) with a multitude of options to customise those layouts. All this is handled through a very simple to use control panel that is automatically available through your WordPress admin when you install the theme. The Affiliate Theme control panel is my favourite part of the whole system, it is very easy to use and they’ve obviously spent a lot of time on getting the UI correct.

At the end of the day however, what you really want from the Affiliate Theme is a simple way of creating landing pages that convert and this is where I’ve struggled. WordPress by its very nature is designed to create content rich websites built around a menu, not individual landing pages. A big part of the Affiiate Theme is disabling your menus, footers, post headers etc so that you end up with a page with as few “outs” as possible. But even with all this it’s just – I dunno – this is very hard to explain but it just doesn’t “feel” like a landing page to me. Remember I’m no expert on this, I always struggle to convert from landing pages anyway but with the testing I’ve done I’ve had more joy with traditional very light in terms of HTML style pages. For example some of the header graphics with the Affiliate Theme top 100k on their own. I actually downloaded a free landing page template from Zac Johnson a while back and I’ve had more joy using that then with the Affiliate Theme so far. Maybe it’s just me but everything I churn out using the Affiliate Theme just looks a little square, slow and plain. I’m sure in the hands of somebody more creative they could make it look much nicer, then again the whole idea of this theme is that it’s supposed to be quick, easy and effective?

Overall

The good points:-
1. Makes creating single page landing pages with WordPress a doddle
2. The control panel is very smart
3. The UBD headers that come with the package are great

The bad points:-
1. It’s still buggy, some of the options don’t quite work as you’d expect
2. No sign of the UBD extra headers each month
3. I have the feeling they’ve got bored of it already – newsletter updates – 20th March, 25th March, 14th April – then nothing

Would I Buy It Again?

In hindsight, probably not. Dumping traffic on landing pages isn’t really my game anyway but even so I’d struggle to justify the price tag attached to this (remember its $97 for a single use license). For $197 it would have to save me a lot of time, it hasn’t. I still find the main bulk of building a landing page is creating the text and sourcing the images. The Affiiate Theme just feels unfinished to me. In fact on the main website I’m experimenting with it I had to do so much customisation of the PHP code to get it to work as I’d like that I can’t really upgrade it. The forum is very active, but again it seems to be mainly people getting stuck. Having said all this though the Affiliate Theme does give professional affiliate marketers an extremely quick way of creating single page websites from WordPress – if that’s all you’re after then I think you’ll struggle to find an easier system.

My over riding gut feeling with this is that UBD have decided to jump on the affiliate marketing bandwagon by creating this theme (which also includes affiliate links to various CPA networks in the control panel, naughty) and have discovered like many before them that supporting something like this sucks. If you’re a website designer you get paid to design a website, once it’s signed off then any changes become chargeable. That’s the incentive. With the Affiliate Theme UBD aren’t getting any extra money for creating those new headers, fixing the minor bugs or anything else for that matter. Maybe they should have hung on a bit and read Yaro’s Membership Mastermind course ;)

You have to remember that my review is slightly biased from the view point of somebody who concentrates almost entirely on ROI and who also happens to be a rubbish affiliate marketer. I’m fairly sure that this is aimed at the newbie though.

If you’ve got your own opinion on the Affiliate Theme then why not leave a comment?

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Paul B