There a couple of main new features of Affiliate Theme 2.0.

First, Affiliate Theme 2.0 now introduces the concept of Niche Skins, which are essentially WordPress child themes. This allows you to completely customize the look of your site based on your chosen niche.

Affiliate Theme will come with 5 niche skins.

Second, is the Affiliate Marketplace. This is where you can buy and sell Niche skins. As the developer community around Affiliate Theme develops, hopefully you will find a wide variety of niche skins to choose from.

The Affiliate Theme control panel has also been redesigned from the ground up.

Purchasing Affiliate Theme 2.0

Affiliate Theme 2.0 can be installed on an unlimited number of sites no matter which package you choose. The Standard package is $127 and the Premium package, which comes with an additional 50 header graphics will cost $197.

If you are a previous Affiliate Theme owner, then you can upgrade to the new version for $49. Unless you have purchased within 60 days, in which case you can get it for free.

Click Here To Buy Affiliate Theme

Upgrading your copy of Affiliate Theme is a relatively painless process. Just remember to make a backup of your custom.css file if you have made any changes to it, and then just replace the old Affiliate Theme folder with the new one. Affiliate Theme 1.2 does require you to upgrade to WordPress 2.8 but honestly, all WordPress users should have upgraded themselves already anyway.

The first thing you will notice are the changes to the Affiliate Theme options page. Now at the top of settings, there is a new Quick Jump section that allows you to quickly jump to any setting section on the options page. If you have used it before, then you know that the options page is quite long and this is a rather convenient way to quickly navigate to where you want to go. Another change that I love is that there is now a Save Settings at the bottom of each section. Previously there used to be just a single button at the very bottom of the page. Every time you wanted to save something, you would have to scroll all the way down to do so. This quickly made making major edits a big pain. With this simple change, you are never far away from being able to save and believe it or not, this makes a big difference in productivity.

The next change I wanted to highlight is the new Page Layout Settings section. With it, you can now adjust the the widths of various layout sections on your page. If you are using the left or right sidebar layouts, this means you can dynamically change the widths of the content and sidebar sections on the fly. For a single column layout, you have control over the site width and main section width. This is a very cool feature, and makes Affiliate Theme that much more flexible when it comes to laying out your sites how you want it.

The last feature I wanted to talk about is the new header display system. As a Super Affiliate, I get access to new header graphics every month. However, I never really had much use for them before because they always came with some generic text on them that I didn’t necessarily want. With this new system, Affiliate Theme will allow you to overlay the blog title text across the header graphics. I haven’t figured out if there is a way to overlay your own customized text yet, but even if you can’t, this is still very useful. All fifty of the available banner graphics have been reworked to remove their existing banner text, so Super Affiliates have plenty of pre-made banners to work with. Plus, you can still use your own custom banners if you like.

As you can tell, I couldn’t be more impressed with this new release of Affiliate Theme. It actually fixes a lot of the complaints that I had in my original Affiliate Theme review and it makes using the theme much more enjoyable. If you are an affiliate marketer, you should definitely give Affiliate Theme a look as I think it now solidifies itself as the best way to create affiliate websites.

Nate from Unique Blog Designs was nice enough to recharge my Affiliate Theme Coupon Code, so the next 10 people who order under my link can get 15% off.

More Flexible Media Boxes
Now you don’t need to show the Media Boxes on every post, and they can be configured to show on a post level. There is also an added option to embed videos in the media boxes along with images.

More configurable sidebar and footer
There are now options to configure the titles, fonts, and colors of the sidebar. The footer options now allow you to choose which pages, categories to display.

There were also some other minor improvements like rounded call to action buttons and the ability to add a border around your pages.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the new Affiliate Theme release. I have already moved all my sites using this theme to the new version. It is great that the guys at Unique Blog Designs are very receptive to user suggestions and I am looking forward to future updates. I also read that the next batch of banner graphics will be ready on April 17th. I was actually kind of disappointed in some of the graphics that shipped with the theme, so I’m hoping this new batch will be better. According to the guys, we will now be able to overlay the text on the tagline of the banners which is a nice improvement.

How To Get Your Affiliate Theme 15% Discount

1. Clear your cookies. Otherwise the coupon will not work!
2. Purchase Affiliate Theme using this link.
3. On the order form, enter the coupon code “0D866FC2E0″ in the “Enter promo code” field.

As you can see Affiliate Theme allows you to customize your theme completely through the WordPress Control Panel. While I personally have no problem with customizing WordPress themes for my own use, it usually takes me quite a bit of time for me to find a theme I like, and then additional time to actually modify it. With Affiliate Theme, I should be able to get up an running in a much shorter period of time. I also like the fact that they seem to have designs and banner graphics that cover all the hottest affiliate marketing niches right now including Acai/Weight Loss, Grant Offers, Dating, Ringtones, and more. If you are trying to figure out how to promote these products with the big boys, Affiliate Theme might be just what you need.

One caveat is that Affiliate Theme looks to be somewhat pricy. Unique Blog Designs is offering three different licenses:

• Single-Use License $97 – Can only be used on one domain/website.
• Multi-Use License $147 – Can be used on unlimited domains/websites. Free lifetime upgrades and 10 pre-made UBD niche header graphics.
• Super Affiliate License $197 – Same as the Multi-Use license, but includes 30 pre-made UBD niche header graphics plus new headers every month. Also earn 50% affiliate payouts instead of the standard 30%.

The single-use license seems kind of pointless to me, so you are looking at spending either $147 or $197 for Affiliate Theme. That’s no chump change and if you are an experience WordPress hacker, you might want to pass on it. However if you don’t have the technical skills to create good landing pages yourself and you are serious about doing PPC, Affiliate Theme might be a good investment for you. I’m going to be picking up a copy of Affiliate Theme for myself, so if you are still on the fence, be sure to check out my Affiliate Theme review in a future post.

The thing that attracted me most to the Affiliate Theme was that it looked like an easy way to create landing pages for my pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. If you have done any PPC at all, you know how important it is to have a well designed landing page. A compelling landing page will definitely increase your conversions and provide you with a good quality score which is critical if you use Google Adwords. What makes Affiliate Theme unique is that it allows those with limited WordPress skills to create nice looking landing pages with a minimal amount of effort. I’m decided to test this out by seeing how well it works to create this blog.

Getting Started

Installing Affiliate Theme is the same as any other WordPress Theme. Just unpack the zip file into your themes directory and select it from the Manage Themes page of your WP control panel. Once the theme is installed, an Affiliate Theme Options menu item will be added to your control panel sidebar. This options page is where you’ll spend most of your time customizing your theme.

The first thing I wanted to do is to change the layout of my site. Affiliate Theme offers 6 different layouts. I decided to go with the 1 Column Layout for this blog. I also chose a pre-made Banner and set my Page Background Color to a shade of gray. One of the selling points of Affiliate Theme is their in-line color picker. It looks really slick, but it didn’t quite act how I expected. First off, the little cursor doesn’t always move when I click on a color. It seems to work better when you drag instead of clicking, which doesn’t seem typical of most color picker widgets. My other big beef is with the placement of the Save Settings button at the bottom of the options page. See, the options page is filled with a lot of different configuration options and it requires quite a bit of scrolling to get to the bottom. So every time I change a setting, I have to scroll down to the very bottom just to save. I found that to be somewhat aggravating after awhile.

Those complaints aside, customizing the rest of my blog was pretty easy. I created my own custom header and input it into my Header Settings. I didn’t change any of my fonts, but the Post Headlines, Captions and main body fonts can all be customized. I was able to change the post meta info to turn on displaying things like my Post Date, author, and comments. I also liked the fact that I can paste in my Google Analytics code here and it will be automatically added to my site. All in all it took me about 30 minutes to get my site configured the way I wanted it. I’m sure once I get more familiar with how all the different Affiliate Theme options affects things, I bet I can cut that time in half.

Conclusion

I think I’ve only explored about 20% of what Affiliate Theme can do so far. As you can see, this page has a pretty clean look, although a little sparse at the moment. The theme is meant for creating landing pages which is not what I’ve done here and I haven’t yet taken advantage of any of the pre-made banner graphics which is another selling point of this theme. If you are looking to get into PPC and you don’t have any coding skills, you should investigate whether Affiliate Theme can work for you. It’s definitely meant for affiliate marketers who lack design or coding skills, or for someone who wants to throw up a decent looking landing page really quickly. It’s not perfect and it is a little bit pricey. But if it helps you throw up nice looking landing pages, then the profits you make from your PPC campaigns will definitely pay for your license of Affiliate Theme.

Thesis Theme gets all the hype, but I’ve discovered another premium wordpress theme called Frugal Theme that looks great and is very powerful. It was developed by Eric Hamm who has done a great job with developing this theme. For non programmers, Frugal Theme is very easy to use and you can change the look of your blog very easily without any coding necessary on your part. Everything can be customized within the powerful option menus inside your WordPress control panel. Below is my Frugal Theme review.

Here are some of my favorite Frugal Theme Features:

Easy to replace headers. With Thesis Theme, you have to do some hand coding to replace the header with your own custom logo or graphic. With Frugal Theme, it’s just a matter of uploading your own image and selecting it in the control panel.

Tons of Control. Frugal Theme is jam packed with customization options. It has 6 different option pages that let you basically tweak any part of the theme to achieve the look you want. Layout, fonts, colors, borders you name it can be tweaked and modified. When you first look at all these options, you may be a little overwhelmed. However Eric has done an excellent job with providing a comprehensive set of training videos and a manual to explain what everything does. You can also refer to the inline help as well next to each option. All this means is that Frugal Theme is completely customizable from within your WP control panel and no coding is required at all.

SEO Friendly. Frugal Theme comes with all the SEO options you’d expect from a premium WordPress theme. You have control over your individual post titles as well and a host of other SEO options that will make sure your blog is indexed properly and ranks well in the search engines.

Completely Customize Look and Feel. Don’t like the standard Frugal Theme look? Well you can completely change the look and feel of your blog using one of the available Frugal Theme skins. There are both free and premium Frugal skins available which allow you to make your theme as unique as you want it. Check out the famous ZenHabits blog which uses a heavily customized install of Frugal Theme.

Snapshots of your changes. This is a unique feature of Frugal Theme. What’s cool is that the theme will save a snapshot of your settings each time you make any changes to it. So if you make a mistake that’s no problem at all. Just look at the snapshot history and restore your theme settings to any previous point in time.

So how does Frugal Theme stack up versus Thesis Theme? Quite well actually. I think they are both quite comparable to each other with Frugal Theme being a little easier to use for non-programmers. It doesn’t have the community that Thesis does, but Eric and his team are consistently improving and packing each new version with great new features. Frugal Theme 3.5 is the latest version, and it’s already compatible with the soon to be released WordPress 3.0. Both Frugal and Thesis are excellent premium WordPress themes, so I would encourage you to look at both before you decide to buy. A personal basic license (for one domain) of Frugal Theme is $89 and the developer option (multiple domains) is $169. Definitely give Frugal Theme a look if you are looking for a clean, super flexible, premium WordPress Theme.

Check out Frugal Theme

Although I use Affiliate Theme for most of my affiliate sites, my favorite all-around premium WordPress theme is Thesis Theme. It is a professional looking theme out of the box, but it is also designed to be quite customizable so you can tweak your blog’s look and feel to your heart’s content. Thesis Theme 1.7 was just released last month, and it adds a whole new host of features to make Thesis even better. In this Thesis Theme review, I want to share with you some of my favorite features of this wordpress theme.

Installing Thesis Theme is just like any other WordPress theme. After you have the theme activated, you will notice a new Thesis menu in your WordPress control panel. To customize the basic look of your Thesis install, head on over to the Design Options. The coolest feature here is the ability to change the layout. You can switch between 1 column, 2 column, or 3 column layouts and adjust the widths of each column directly on this page. What normally would be a complex coding operation is no longer any effort at all. And if you change your mind, you can switch your layout as many times as you like.

The Design Options page is also where you can set the colors and fonts of your blog. Almost every part of your site can be changed from within this page. I really like the color picker which makes it easy to find and select the perfect color you want. If there happens to be something you can’t tweak in here, you can also get down and dirty and tweak the CSS using the custom stylesheet. This is separate from the main Thesis stylesheet so you won’t lose any customizations you make during the next Thesis update.

Other cool features of Thesis Theme are the ability to add your own Google Analytics or Mint tracking code from within the control panel. No more mucking around in the footer.php file of your theme to do that. Thesis 1.7 adds new options that allow you to make your WordPress blog more Ajax enabled by automatically including several popular javascript libraries like JQuery, MooTools, Dojo and others. Finally, I really like the Multimedia Box. This is a spot on your page where you can rotate pictures, embed Youtube videos or even add your own custom code to include things like ad banners. Very cool.

Most affiliate marketers are very focused on SEO and normally when I install any WordPress Theme, the first plugin I install is the All-in-one SEO pack to help SEO optimize my blog. With Thesis Theme, that step is no longer necessary as it is SEO ready out of the box and easily customizable. I really like the fact that you can add a custom title, description and meta tags specific to each post, category page, and tag page. This makes Thesis Theme one of the most SEO friendly themes out there.

As you can see, I really like Thesis Theme and it is a really nice general purpose wordpress theme for any affiliate marketer. Support is very good and it has a very large community of helpful members. Plus Thesis Theme is constantly being developed as demonstrated by all the new features introduced with Thesis 1.7, and customers get free lifetime updates. I hope you found this Thesis review useful and if you are looking for a good premium wordpress theme, I highly recommend giving Thesis Theme a look.

Visit Thesis Theme (Official Site)
Or check out my killer Thesis Theme Bonus package

Socrates Theme is a newly released premium WordPress theme that is well suited for niche bloggers. It was developed by Joel Comm and It allows you to create Adsense and Clickbank monetized WordPress blogs in a matter of minutes. You can customize Socrates Theme very easily to look however you like it which makes it perfect for internet marketers looking to create great looking niche blogs.

Here are some of the cool features of Socrates Theme:

Custom Header Design System – With over 160 niche header designs, you can easily insert these pre-made headers into your theme branded with blog title and description. You can easily upload your own custom headers if you like as well.

Custom Backgrounds – Socrates Theme includes over 50 different backgrounds that you can use to fit the style of your site. It’s easy to customize them too so the backgrounds will display however you like them too.

Easy Monetization – With the optional “Ad Bar”, you can easily insert a 728 x 90 banner above your content. You can also enter in your Clickbank ID from the control panel and rotate different clickbank products on the right hand side.

Multiple Layout Design – Socrates Theme is very flexible in terms of layout. You can choose to have a left sidebar, right sidebar, or even a split sidebar design.

Take a look at this teaser video to learn more about Socrates Theme.

Socrates Theme is also SEO ready out of the box, so your site can achieve high rankings in the SERPs with just a minimal amount of effort.

Try Socrates Theme