UBD Affiliate Theme Review
By Review Boss on Mar 22, 2009 with Comments 10
WordPress Affiliate Theme by Unique Blog Design:
You probably saw many Gurus, including John Reese, Shoemoney, John Chow and Zac Johnson etc. promoting new "Affiliate Theme" by Unique Blog Design. Yes, I bought it and now slightly disappointed. Though it contains some unique features it’s not the BEST for affiliate marketing cause.
My BIGGEST disappointment is it really lacks "total customization" feature.
My question is "what is the purpose of having a blog?" or most importantly "what is the purpose of promoting an affiliate offer through WordPress powered landing page?"
A blog helps you to publish useful content quickly and easily. And you can optimize your blog for both website visitors and Search engines.
Coming back to UBD’s Affiliate Theme:
In my opinion this theme is good for CPA offers where you show a bunch of payperlead offers. I definitely don’t recommend it for genuine review blogs where you periodically update your blog with articles, short industry news, product reviews and videos etc.
Affiliate Theme’s home page design looks good. But the single/individual page (now you are reading "single.php" on ReviewBoss.com!) looks nasty and totally unprofessional. Currently you can’t even customize the size of your sidebar (sidebar.php). But they promised this feature on future release. And if I add any widgets to my sidebar it shows on the footer. (And I don’t know if that’s how it’s supposed to work)
Alright…I can just keep listing all the bugs
If you want a great theme for affiliate marketing I suggest Flexibility Theme. As the name suggests, this theme is highly flexible and so customizable though the interface is not very user friendly… but… hey… it’s FREE. In fact the idea behind Affiliate theme seems to be Flexibiltytheme2.
If you want to promote CPA offers then use XsitePro to create your landing page. Design-wise and SEO-wise none of the website builder can match XsitePro.
I’m in no way hammering the creator of Aff-Theme (and don’t want use words like scam, rip off sucks etc for obvious SEO benefits!) Creating a theme like this is technically very challenging. I hope that they’ll fix all the bugs and make it really useful to their customers.
Finally my question remains unchanged. Why do you want to use a blog to create your landing page if you are not updating your website regularly? You must be moron (like those Gurus!) to believe that people would buy more stuffs from you if you pitch them an offer on a blog landing page.
A blog can convert more visitors into customers — BUT only IF it builds "trust" in your visitors’ mind.
Blog should look and sound like BLOG only- NOT like a sales broacher right?!
Now after reading this review at least 50% of the people, who decided to buy Aff-Theme earlier, won’t buy it. That’s the power of REAL blog…similarly people don’t buy stuffs from FAKE blogs!
However, there some people who will buy things no matter what you say… reviews, blog entry, direct sales pitch or SPAM email… they simply don’t care…they would buy it because they just want it! Are you one of them? 
Have a great day- RB 
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Filed Under: IM Products
I regret myself for not reading this review earlier. But I only bought single user license. Can’t justify myself paying $97 for this theme!
If you know PHP and CSS you can completely customize the theme. But if you have technical skills you better create your own theme -LOL
You are doing a great work here. I have been surfing the net and all i found was product affiliate reviews. Honest reviews are hard to find nowadays because everyone wants to receive comissions.
Hi RB,
Thanks for the coverage of Affiliate Theme. I did want to point out a few things that may have been misconstrued in your review.
First of all, any bugs that are being mentioned on the Support Forum are being immediately fixed. You can witness this first hand on our Support Forum. Any member who has requested support has gotten virtually immediate help and solutions for any problem they encounter.
Secondly, I think it is a matter of opinion whether you think the single post layout is “unprofessional.” A lot of bloggers specifically ask for a wider sidebar so they can display several rows of 125×125 ads or even a 300×250 ad.
In a future version of the theme, people will be able to manually change the width of the sidebar.
We truly believe in Affiliate Theme’s ability to make setting up affiliate marketing websites easier. In fact, we have had numerous emails from customers telling us how much time they are saving in setting up their affiliate marketing websites.
Just to touch briefly on why people would use WordPress to create landing pages – the fact remains that WordPress is one of the easiest content management systems for setting up a variety of websites – not just blogs.
People now use WordPress for e-commerce stores, membership sites, squeeze pages, affiliate marketing review sites and even landing pages. Why? It is so easy to use and it offers a virtually unlimited amount of customization. People can easily update their websites without touching virtually any HTML or CSS code.
Affiliate Theme just makes it easier for people to set up a wide variety of affiliate marketing websites. As mentioned earlier, numerous customers have already told us how much time they have saved by using Affiliate Theme.
Thanks again for your coverage.
Best regards,
Nate
Hi Nate,
Thanks for coming here and posting clarification. I would really love to have more customization features on affiliate theme. So I hope that Aff theme would be as flexible as Felexibility2 theme
Whoa… this site is pretty awesome
your layout is really well designed, and your blogs are (judging from what i’ve read) very interesting. heehee… consider yourself favorited. 
I used google translate to understand, because my English so bad. I think this great article. Thank for sharing.
Good review. Theres some reason nice templates out there. Seems like every month they get better and better.
that themes is great many people recommended, but i’ll stuck with freebies for now…
If you know PHP and CSS you can completely customize the theme. But if you have technical skills you better create your own theme