Affiliate sites - to blog or not to blog?
I started a new affiliate site
I recently launched a new affiliate site where I write product reviews on products that I actually use that I think other people might benefit from. If you’ve searched for obscure products much on the internet you have inevitably run into several of them - I run a Google Adsense campaign on the sidebar and I have a picture of each product in the review that links to Amazon with my affiliate ID encoded so I get a percentage of each sale that I refer - standard affiliate model. This is a good model because, depending on the quality of your content, you are supplying the reader with information that they are actively searching for - in exchange you are getting some money out of advertising their products. There are some companies based solely on this model - check out Deal News - they are a multi-million dollar company based on this concept.
Blogging is a great way to do it
What I have learned from the experience is that probably the best way to start a site is to start it as a blog. Originally I set the site up as a blog because I love how easy it is to use and how quickly the site is reindexed by the engines. I have noticed that wheras a normal site takes about two or three weeks to be indexed by the engines, every blog I have started has been indexed within a couple of days (in one case within hours). It doesn’t stop there, though - the sites are all reindexed every 24 hours like clockwork - anybody who has waited for a crawl to get a new product page indexed knows how great it is to find out that your content is constantly being updated in the google (or any other search engine) index. Also, if you use Wordpress, check out wp-amazon - it is a plugin that makes adding images to your site a breeze - you can also set it up to automatically tag the image link with your affiliate ID.
I ran into some problems with the blog format
Originally my blog’s home page was being indexed every morning. This was cool, but I was adding a lot of content (which is crucial to any site), so the information that google had stored for my homepage and what was actually there was different (note: on my blog I show a maximum of 10 posts to make it manageable for the reader).
I noticed that a lot of people were searching for products and I was ranking pretty well, but when they would click on the link in Google my homepage didn’t have the information they were looking for (they would have to look in the archives). I doubt that anybody is going to spend a significant amount of time searching for that certain post and the data supported this (I had a very high abandon rate).
So I changed the format
I threw together a quick and dirty site that did everything I wanted it to do. It is still easy to add postings, but now it is more like a traditional page and I am even using mod_rewrite so the page looks static to the search engines (note: most engines can handle dynamic sites now, but you are still better off moving to a more SEO friendly format - even though Google will index dynamic pages I think that they penalize for them).
I’m still being indexed regularly
Well, my site is still being reindexed by Google every morning so I’m happy. I guess the hardest thing about getting indexed is the first crawl and by using the blog format you can ensure a pretty quick crawl. It is important to have a few people add you to their blogrolls or get some links from a site that is being crawled (otherwise the engine won’t know you’re there), but after getting that crawl you should be able to change the format without losing your importance in the engine’s eyes - I could be wrong about this, but so far it appears that I’m right. I’ll keep you updated.
A blog may still be the best format
That being said, if you don’t have a full weekend and some decent php programming skills to put your own site together, you may still be better off sticking with the blog. This is especially useful if you don’t plan on adding a ton of products every day - Google will index your individual pages (posts, category pages, etc.) and so eventually the engines won’t just find your posts on your homepage but on your permanent URL’s.
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Trackback by Abigail — October 31, 2006 @ 5:23 pm
Can anyone recommend me affiliate programs where you can use text links?
I need to know of all the affiliate programs out there where you can use text links and that pay per click.
thanks in advance….
Comment by Jayce — December 15, 2006 @ 1:51 pm