Types of Affiliate Web Sites

Everyone in the affiliate marketing chain wants you to succeed.  The merchants want to make more sales.  The affiliate management companies want to earn larger commissions.  You want to get paid!  Don't be afraid to call on your affiliate marketer for assistance.

Affiliate marketers usually rely on one of three types of sites or a combination of two or more or these in a single site.

Content Affiliate Site:

A content site hoping to make affiliate sales is much like an Adsense site, so you should read about that, as well.  The major difference is that instead of relying on advertising revenue, you are convincing your visitors, through your content, to click on your affiliate link (linking text, banner, etc.).

As with an advertising site, you need to generate a lot of content (articles) related to your niche.  These content pages should be what your visitors are looking for.  They should have high quality, unique (original) content.  As a rule, there should be no more than one affiliate link on each page, because some search engines are suspicious of pages that have multiple affiliate links.  There are ways that this rule can be avoided, however.  We address those in a special report.

Product Review Affiliate Site:

A product review site is largely self explanatory.  On such a site you would include one or more pages in which you review products with which you are affiliated.

Remember that you want to develop a relationship with your site's visitors so that they will come to trust you and rely on your reviews.  Consequently, you don't want to decide that a particular product is best simply because it pays you the highest commission.  Instead, always recommend the best option.

Many review pages recognize that people have different criteria when making a purchasing decision.  To one visitor, price may be the most important factor; to another visitor it might be quality service or product durability.  Let them know as much about the product as you can.

A lot of product reviews have multiple affiliate links one the same page.  For example, there may be one link for Product A, another for competing Product B, and so forth.  Since the search engines may not rank such a page very highly, you should have other pages that will be ranked highly by the search engines, then direct your visitors to the product review page(s) after they have arrived at your site.

Product Affiliate Site:

This type of site has actual product displays and descriptions of the companies with which you are affiliated.  When your visitor clicks on the product image or name or the "add to shopping cart" button, she or he is immediately transferred to the merchant's site.

This is my least favorite approach because it is often seen as duplicate content by the search engine and because it usually required multiple affiliate links on a single page.

My Recommendation:

If you choose only one, the content site works well for most situations.  However, what I actually recommend is a combination of the content and the review sites.  Your choice will depend somewhat on your niche.

In addition to this section, be sure to explore the web design section of the site.

You should also use the following 99Site.us free resources before launching into your new affiliate marketing business:

Our free seven day course on starting an online business, which comes with a bonus resources guide.

The page that further explores the foundational concept of keyword research.

Our essential information on article marketing.

The crucial primer about search engine optimization, including the page about anchor text.