Affiliate Summit West is one of the largest gatherings of affiliate and performance marketers in the world. In 2017 it ran January 15 to 17 at Paris Las Vegas, and on the first day our founder, Brian Messenlehner, shared the stage with David Vogelpohl of WP Engine for a session called DIY Tips for Building Big Things with WordPress.
Why a WordPress talk at an affiliate conference
Affiliate marketers run some of the most content heavy sites on the web: reviews, comparisons, coupon pages, niche publications and data driven landing pages. A huge share of them run on WordPress. Many started with a simple blog and then hit a wall when the site needed to do more.
The session took WordPress beyond blogging. It covered using WordPress as an application framework, along with plugins, themes, tools and techniques for building bigger, more complex experiences without starting over on a different platform.
The kinds of big things affiliates build
The conversations after the session were full of practical problems:
- Product databases with thousands of items, filters and comparison tables.
- Automated imports of offers and prices from affiliate networks and feeds.
- Fast page templates that stay quick under heavy traffic spikes.
- Membership areas and email capture tied to the same user accounts.
- Multiple niche sites managed from one dashboard.
WordPress can handle all of these when it is built well: custom post types for products, scheduled imports for feeds, caching and good hosting for speed, and Multisite for networks of sites.
A partnership that kept going
This was the first of several Affiliate Summit sessions Brian and David presented together. The pairing worked. Brian brought the application building side, and David brought deep knowledge of WordPress hosting and performance. The two went on to present Automate Your Super Affiliate Empire with WordPress at Affiliate Summit East that summer, the closing keynote at Affiliate Summit East 2018 in New York, and at Affiliate Summit West 2019.
How this shapes our work
Affiliate and performance marketing sites are a natural fit for AlphaWeb. They need custom development, solid hosting and constant iteration. We build:
- Custom product and offer databases with structured data for search.
- Feed importers and automations that keep content current without manual work.
- Performance tuned themes and managed hosting built for traffic spikes.
- Mobile apps with AppPresser for publishers who want push notifications and loyal repeat visitors.
If your WordPress site has outgrown its first theme and a pile of plugins, AlphaWeb can help you build something bigger.
At a glance
- Event: Affiliate Summit West 2017
- Dates: January 15 to 17, 2017
- Venue: Paris Las Vegas
- Session: DIY Tips for Building Big Things with WordPress
- Co-presenter: David Vogelpohl, WP Engine
Related: Affiliate Summit East 2018: The Ask the WordPress Experts Closing Keynote, Affiliate Summit West 2019: Clever Ways to Automate Content Creation with WordPress and WordPress as an Application Framework: Web Apps, Mobile Apps and Headless.
Have a question about this event or a project like the ones mentioned here? Reach out to AlphaWeb and Brian will be glad to talk it through. We are always happy to compare notes on WordPress, mobile apps and migrations.
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