Affiliates and SERPS

Hi folks

Affiliate noob here. I'm going to have a crack at building an affiliate site from the ground up.

My plan was to first find a decent merchant or two and build a niche site around a few of their most popular products. The type of products I had in mind were consumer electronics and home and garden stuff.

I expect most of my traffic to eventually come from SE's.

When I check the SERPS to see what kind of competition I am up against the results, especially Google, are dominated by the likes of Amazon, epinions, bizrate, shopping.com etc, etc. with their thousands of pages and hundreds of links.

I'm just wondering is it going to be an impossible task to get to the top of SERPS against competition like that?

No really, depending on the type of products you choose you can beat the giants in SERPS. The key is to find the products and developing good inbound links.

It's tough but not impossible, like PinkPanther said. Just do good KW research to find out how people are searching for specific products, optimize for those and work on lots of link pop.

Agreed. Find your niches. Do a keyword analysis of the top 10 keywords for each niche. How many people are searching for your niches? Take the top 5 most popular niches. Then review the sites that rank well for those top 5 niches in the top 10 keywords of each niche. Find those you think you can improve on and go after those.

Thanks for your replies.

If I am reading them right, I have to look for product niches that the shopping websites do not dominate yet.

I expect such niches will not be as heavily searched. I'm using the Overture tool to see the number of searches a day for a term.
Is 500 to a 1000 searches a day good for niche searches or would you folk be looking for more traffic before setting up a niche site?

Its possible to make money with what you propose. But if you plan to spend Saturday mornings on this project your income will be tiny. Lots of people are doing this and lots of companies are cranking out sites like crazy.

So, you better be smart, you better be determined and you better be willing to work hard and enjoy competition - especially if you have your eye on my SERPs. :razz:

Is there a better.....or smarter way to do it, if so I'm all ears,

or are you saying this is the right way to go about it but it will require continual work.

Am I right in thinking most effort will be spent on getting links?

My strategy:

I am by no means an SEO champion, but hope to be someday... expecially now that I've become a part of this fine forum.

But here's my thought. It's takes a lot of time and effort to increase your IBLs and Optimize your site etc... if your just learning and doing it yourself. That's my long term goal. I know how important they are to search engines these days.

In the short term, the most productive and converting traffic for me has been Pay Per Click Advertising. You get very targeted traffic. It might be something for you to look into.

Of course, then again, it does take some time to learn PPC startegies in the beginning. But once you learn them, you don't have to wait for the SEs to find you to get traffic for any sites you set up.

I guess my situation is different. I promoted affiliate products with PPC before I had a website so I already new what I was doing.

I think it's a good talent to have, as an affiliate, and could be a good compliment to SEO.

Just my thoughts,

Matt Levenhagen

Our most successful affiliates are those who are skilled at seo and pay per click marketing. I'd encourage you to learn both.