WordPress has become the content management system (CMS) of choice for not just blogs, but also websites and even landing pages/review sites for affiliate marketers!

Why? Ease of use, familiarity, and more uses than Grandpa’s Swiss army knife.

We have worked closely with and picked the brains of some of the top names in blogging and affiliate marketing, including:

• John Chow
• Jeremy Schoemaker
• Yaro Starak
• Zac Johnson
• Paul Bourque
• Jonathan Volk
• Jim Kukral
• Gobala Krishnan
• John Reese

They have all told us the one thing they wish they had was a WordPress theme optimized for affiliate marketing websites. Well, now the wait is over…

Affiliate Theme is an innovative new WordPress theme built exclusively for affiliate marketers and make money online bloggers who build landing page, review sites, and other mini-sites for niche products and offers.

Watch how Affiliate Theme works

How is Affiliate Theme different from other WordPress themes?

Unlike ALL other WordPress themes, this is not a WordPress theme built only for bloggers.

This is the first WordPress theme built exclusively for affiliate marketers and those who build mini-sites, review sites and landing pages.

While you can easily use Affiliate Theme as a blog theme, its true value lies in the fact that you can build multiple variations of your affiliate marketing landing pages/review sites and track the conversion rate of your changes.

We give YOU options!

An innovative Theme Options panel allows you to change virtually everything about your theme – from layout, colors and fonts, to logo, header graphics, and even the wording on your call to action buttons! Save time and money! No longer will you have to re-input all of your offers each time to make a major change to your landing page or review site.

Why use WordPress to build affiliate marketing websites?

There are a few distinct advantages when using a CMS to build your websites. Just like you can change the look of your site without having to recreate all of your content, you can now build multiple variations of your affiliate marketing web pages without having to re-input all of your affiliate offers. This means you save time from the tedium of creating multiple variations of pages. Of course, this means you can spend less time building and more time testing and making money!

Who should use Affiliate Theme?

Both new and veteran affiliate marketers will appreciate Affiliate Theme’s ease of use and the time they will save when it comes to building affiliate marketing sites. New affiliate marketers who are generally unfamiliar with creating effective affiliate marketing websites will be able to easily create, test and track the effectiveness of landing pages.

Not just for code monkeys

You don’t need to be an expert web developer to use and customize Affiliate Theme. Affiliate Theme features one of the most customizable Theme Options panels a WordPress theme has ever seen. This means you can customize the look of your landing pages to suit any niche or vertical.

What else?

• Create affiliate websites using the best content management system! The first affiliate website creation tool built for the best content management system in the world – WordPress.
• Whatever kind of site you want! Six (6) unique layout options means you can easily split test and find the highest converting layout, which means more money for you.
• Perfect for any vertical! Photoshop-like color picker allows you to easily change the colors of your page background, headlines, navigation, call-to-action buttons.
• Brand your Affiliate Theme easily! Choose from a variety of header options – including integrating your logo, full header graphic, a pre-made UBD Niche Header Graphic, or plain text.
• Gorgeous affiliate websites, ready for your use! Forget about having to upload custom artwork. You can automatically choose from dozens of professional, pre-made header and background graphics, all for popular affiliate niches.
• Customize the heck out of your Affiliate Theme! Take your CSS-level modification to the next level by enabling and utilizing the custom stylesheet.
• Get featured! Add a “Featured” offer box to any layout, giving you, in effect, twice as many layouts!
• Insane typography options! Select the font, font-size, and font color for your headlines, post captions and main body font.
• Improve conversion with simpler navigation! Remove the navigation from your Affiliate Theme to make it more like a landing page. Otherwise, select between displaying the categories and pages in the navigation.
• Less coding for you! Integrate header and footer tracking scripts without touching a single line of code.
• Get more clicks! Customize the call-to-action buttons for all of your offers! Choose font, background color, size and rollover changes as well.
• Affiliate blogging made easy! Easily enable/disable RSS feed, author name, date, post headline, comments and trackbacks

Incredible Support – vast knowledge base and video screencasts show you how to do everything!

Affiliate Theme is not just any WordPress theme. With your purchase of Affiliate Theme, you get access to our incredible Affiliate Theme Resource Center.

We have put together a wide array of video tutorials (screen casts) and knowledge base articles you can access to make the most of your affiliate marketing efforts.

Not only that, but with your purchase of Affiliate Theme, you get access to the helpful Support forum where you can post your questions and see how other members are using Affiliate Theme most effectively.

Get access to exclusive super affiliate podcasts

UBD goes the extra mile by giving you access to podcasts with super affiliates such as Jonathan Volk, Zac Johnson, Jim Kukral, John Chow, Ryan Wade and Yaro Starak.

So, what are you waiting for? Get Affiliate Theme now and create affiliate sites faster than ever!

In September, my biz partners and I spent three weekends of the month at blog and Internet conferences. One of the conferences we attended was IZEA Fest in Orlando, Florida, where my biz partner, Matt Blancarte, gave a speech on blog design for the Blog Design Makeover panel.

Needless to say, IZEA Fest and the Blog Design Makeover panel were incredibly successful for both UBD and IZEA. Matt and the other panelists did an excellent job at discussing the blog designs they made over. You can watch the full video presentation here.

Win A Blog Design Makeover From UBD

At the recent Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, Ted Murphy, CEO of IZEA, mentioned the idea of doing a monthly promotion to for bloggers to win a free blog design makeover. Of course, we thought it was a great izea, I mean idea!

We are huge IZEA fans and we are proud to partner with them for this opportunity. Even cooler, the first Blog Design Makeover promotion is now launching.

Entering this monthly contest is super easy! Read more details here »

Thanks to IZEA for their promotion and support!

Just like last year, Blog World Expo has come and gone way too quickly. This was my second appearance to the second annual Blog World Expo, held in Las Vegas Nevada. Overall, the BWE08 weekend far surpassed last year!

Last year was our first conference ever and first time we exhibited, as well. This year, UBD designed and implemented the official Blog World Expo Blog, so we were upgraded to a 10×20 booth (twice as big as last year). KA POW!

On Friday afternoon, only four days after returning from Orlando (IZEA Fest), we packed up our monitors and UBD supplies, and we drove the 4.5-hour trek from Phoenix to Las Vegas.

Friday

We arrived in Vegas around 9:00PM, right when the Tech Set party was kicking off. We first met up with our Blog World Expo buddies from last year, Ms. Danielle and Greg Morgan.

New friends Gary from iPhoneinCanada.ca and Derek Semmler also joined us and we went to the Tech Set party at the Mirage where we met up with our Market Leverage home girls, Dina and Debby, and ShoeMoney.

At this point, the bar was closing at the Tech Set party, so we went another bar in the Mirage where we saw IZEA CEO Ted Murphy and also Pete Cashmore from Mashable. After a few drinks with everyone, we basically called it a night.

‘

Saturday

Saturday was the first day of the conference, so we spent the majority of the day at the conference hall talking to a wide range of different businesses and individuals. As you can see, I look a little more tired than the night before.

ShoeMoney and Ted Murphy stopped by to let us distribute some of their t-shirts, stickers and buttons. Did we mention we love IZEA?

Later that night, the fun started when we went to the Market Leverage-hosted Super Panel dinner with Internet stars such as Zac Johnson, Ian Fernando, John Chow, Jeremy Schoemaker, Brian Clarke and Jim Kukral. We had dinner at an awesome steakhouse. Big thanks to Market Leverage!

Sunday

Sunday was the final day of the expo, but luckily, I was much better rested than the previous night. We exhibited all day, and afterwards, we had dinner with John Chow, ShoeMoney, the Market Leverage girls at the Red8 Chinese restaraunt in the Wynn.

Unfortunately, my camera died earlier that day so I wasn’t able to snap any more pictures.

Overall, it was an incredibly productive weekend and some of the best networking I have done since, well, the week before.

Sometimes people ask me if I have any tips or tricks for people looking to get started online and how they can become more well known in their online field. My answer is always:

Remember that next time you are thinking about going to an industry conference/tradeshow.

More photos here »

Back in the Olden Days, when I used to work at the Apple Store, I met friend and fellow Apple enthusiast, John Ellenich.

Almost two years since I started working at and quit Apple, John and I decided it would be smart to design and release a premium theme together in conjunction with Unique Blog Designs. We are proud to release Citrus Theme in six beautiful colors.

You can learn more about Citrus Theme here… Let us know what you think!

Today, August 22nd, 2008, is the 1-year anniversary of Unique Blog Designs. One year ago, UBD was born with the redesign of John Chow dot Com.

Fast forward one year, and we have worked with over 200 clients, including John Chow, ShoeMoney, Zac Johnson, Uber Affiliate, Fat Man Unleashed, Alex Shalman, MakeUseOf, Here.org.uk, Blog World Expo, Entrecard, and now, Yahoo!

Enter the UBD 1-Year Anniversary Contest

In celebration of our one-year birthday, we will be running a contest for the remainder of August (until Sunday, August 31st). The contest is open to everyone on Earth! If you are not from Earth, you are responsible for the cost of shipping. So, what are the prizes?

Grand Prize – Brand New 8GB iPod Touch ($299 value) and One (1) Copy of our New UBD Citrus WordPress Theme (coming next week).

Three (3) runner-up prizes include copies of our new UBD Citrus WordPress Theme.

How do I enter?

Entering the UBD 1-Year Anniversary Contest is super simple!

• For one (1) contest entry – just reply to this post with a comment. Only one comment per person will be counted.
• For five (5) contest entries – write a blog post about the UBD 1-Year Anniversary Contest and link back to this post. If your blog post does not appear under the “Pingbacks,” leave a comment with a URL to the post.

The winner will be randomly chosen Monday, September 1st, 2008. We will draw the winner via streaming video from the UBD office.

Official Contest Rules

• The contest runs from 12:00AM PST Friday, August 22nd, 2008 to 11:59PM Sunday, August 31, 2008.
• Winners will be chosen Monday, September 1, 2008 through a random drawing.
• Only one (1) comment entry per person and one (1) blog entry per person. The total number of entries any person can receive is six (6) entries.
• Prizes include (1) grand prize of an Apple iPod Touch 8GB ($299 value) and three (3) copies of our new UBD Citrus WordPress Theme ($99 value) – coming next week.
• Contest is open to everyone world-wide.

Thanks to everyone who has supported us over the past year! We have many exciting things planned for this next year!