Chow also offers an e-book on JohnChow.com that is a must read for any aspiring blogger. It outlines how he went from making zero to $27,000 a month. Long before I created FatCatReport.com I had been toying with the idea of starting a blog. After reading Chow’s e-book, I was sold on the idea.

Visit JohnChow.com.

How to enable URL Rewriting in WordPress 2.6.5
Log in to the admin control panel and do the following:

1. Click on ‘Settings’ in the top right corner.
2. Click on ‘Permalinks’
3. Select the one of the options under ‘Common Settings’ besides ‘Default’ (‘Default’ is the only option for static URLs.)
4. Copy the text in the form field at the bottom of the page.
5. Create a text file called htaccess.txt on your desktop (or anywhere you can get to it easily) and paste the text you just copied into it.
6. Log in to your hosting account using FTP software. Copy the htaccess.txt file to the root level of your hosting account.
7. Change the name of the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess. If a .htaccess file already exists in that location, delete it first before changing the name.

Including Keywords in Your URL
Like I’ve done here at FatCatReport.com, I recommend using keywords from the title of your post in the URL. Check out the URL of this page for an example. According to SearchEngineNews.com, including keywords in your URL can boost a page in the search results of major search engines.

To add keywords from your post title to the URL, select the ‘Custom Structure’ option under ‘Common Settings’ (step #3 above) and then enter %postname% in the input field next to it.

After you create a post, you can also manually modify a URL. To do this, go to the edit screen of the post. Near the top of the page, you will see the URL of the post with an ‘edit’ button next to it. I like to use this edit feature to shorten my URLs if my post titles are too long.

(Just a note: In my URLs, you may have noticed that I added the numerical values for the month and year before the post title keywords. This way, just by looking at the URL, I can tell the year and month the post was created. There is no SEO benefit to doing this. It’s simply a matter of personal preference.)

Apart from search engine performance, here are a few other good reasons to use WordPress blogs for affiliate marketing:

1) There are several resources out there limited to blogs that you can use to promote your blog. Some of them are:

MyBlogLogs.com – This a great social networking site for blogs. They let you create a profile and create a communities with other blogs. As an added bonus, you can link back to your blog from your profile page. It never hurts to get another link to your blog.

Blogsearch.Google.com – Blogsearch.Google.com is Google’s answer to blog search engines. To get your blog indexed, submit your URL to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping,

Bloglines.com – Bloglines.com is another widely used blog search engine.

2) Seems to be easier to get page rank. Google seems to be more generous when assigning page rank to blogs. My blogs seem to get a higher page rank more quickly and easily. A blog site of mine recently got a page rank of 3 with only one inbound link from the blogroll of another blog with a PR of 4. I can’t be sure if the reason for the high PR is that my site is a WordPress blog or because the inbound link is from a WordPress blog.

3) SEO friendly WordPress plugins and features. WordPress offers a lot of SEO friendly plugins and features that can help your blog perform better in search engines. Some of the more popular features and plugins include:

WordPress URL Rewriting Feature – WordPress allows you to change dynamic URLs to static URLs quickly and easily from the admin control panel. Why is this important? Search engine prefer static URLs by a wide margin. In fact dynamic URLs tend to perform very poorly in search results so they should never be used.

For the SEO newbies out there who are wondering what the difference is between dynamic and static URLs, here is a brief explanation. With a dynamic URL the file name is followed by a ‘?’ and a bunch of data after that so it looks something like:

http://www.seoflavor.com/index.php?page-1&title-2

This data often determines what is displayed on the page.

A static URL does not have this data string, only the names of folders or files. A static URL might look something like this:

http://www.seoflavor.com/ipage1/title2/

Or this:

http://www.seoflavor.com/page2/title3/index.php.

URL rewriting changes a dynamic URL to a static URL. The data that is passed in the string following the ‘?’ is disguised as folder and file names.

Search Engine Pinging feature – WordPress lets you turn on pinging from the admin control panel. Pinging notifies search engines whenever you publish a post so they get indexed faster.

Optimal Title Plugin – This WordPress plugin let’s you place the title of your post at the beginning of the page title. Google and other major search engines place more importance to keywords toward the beginning of your page title so using this title will likely improve the search engine rankings of your posts.

Your can download the Optimal Title plugin from here. This functionality is built into WordPress v2.5 so you won’t need to download a plugin to use this feature.

Social Bookmark Links WordPress Plugin – This plugin let’s you add social media bookmark links to sites like Digg and Del.icio.us to your posts. If enough people click on these links, your post could appear on one of these social media sites and that could mean a lot of traffic for your blog and links from authority sites.

Go here to download this plugin.

Google XML Sitemap Plugin – This plugin automatically creates a Google compliant XML Sitemap file. This file informs Google and other search engines when pages are added or removed to your site so they can update their index accordingly. A sitemap xml file will help your posts get indexed faster. Even if you have pinging enabled it won’t hurt to download this plugin.

Go here to download this plugin.