What to build? - Affiliate Site

Building an affiliate site is very similar to building an adsense site with a couple of key differences.

Reviews are where the money is.

Firstly a good affiliate site for a beginner is built around REVIEWS.

A reviews affiliate site is the way to maximise your income from affiliate revenue. It also looks the best and is the easiest to keep adding to and keep up to date.

Now, the reason I suggest that you start with an adsense site is because you can use that as the building block for your affiliate reviews site.

None of this stuff works without traffic and so we'll come on to that later but suffice to say at this point that by creating fifty or more pages on your first site you are going to be picking up a reasonable amount of traffic for search terms that you are number one for without trying. This is simply because of the amount of original content that you have developed.

A common mistake....

is to reprint articles with the authors permission and count this as "content pages". You can't do that. Not in the spirit of website making that we are talking about here. If you think it's a good article take it to bits and rewrite it in your own style. Don't be lazy. Everbody else is lazy, stand out from the crowd.

Back to reviews.

An "independent" reviews site is what you need to be making for affiliate revenue. But there is of course a catch. You actually need to go and do the reviews.

You've seen hundreds of "reviews" sites right? How many of them actually did a good job of a review? Mot many I bet. Reviewing and comparing the product with other products and spending the time doing so will make you a lot of affiliate revenue.

Everybody uses the internet for "research". They research topics to death so when they find a review site that actually does a decent review this is gold dust because it saves hours of searching.

Your first affiliate marketing site should be a "reviews" site based on the topic you chose for your adsense site. You can keep the reviews in a seperate section and make a different template for these pages which I explain in templates and library items.

Reviews - Key Concepts

When you make a reviews website there are some key concepts that you need to incorporate in your site to give it vitality and vibrancy.

Firstly you need to introduce the idea of "user reviews". These are reviews that are made by users of the product. Now, being as we don't have enough traffic to gain user submitted reviews yet and as we are ethical enough not to make them up what can we do?

Usually the product manufacturer will have reviews or testimonials that you can use until your site gets enough traffic to start gaining it's own originals. Create a "user reviews" link after each review that links to a page with these on. Don't get fancy. Noy yet. Keep it in simple HTML. Keep focused on creating original content and don't get bogged down in trying to do advanced scripting or anything that detracts from your content focus.

Secondly you must pick a first, second and third choice. What's the point in doing a reviews site if you don't actually make a recommendation! Make your recommendation based on actual usage of the product or borrow a friends or do what it takes to get a picture of yourself with the product so that users can see that you actually made the effort to do a good job. Once this is seen it builds trust and trust = affiliate sales.

So now we have a clear path to make money. Build an adsense site and then when that has built up a good amount of traffic add on an authentic "reviews" section.

Now it's time to learn about affiliate programs