[smokedouthaze]

Hi All,

Please excuse my ignorance on the topic but I've been trying to search for an answer and keep getting mixed answers.

I had the idea to create an online store selling affiliate products only. Only a million other people have had this idea as well lol. BUT I'm hearing this idea will work and I'm also hearing it won't.

The main reason I'm hearing it won't is because the search engines will label this site as a "thin" affiliate and not index it. I've read that in order to avoid being labeled as a thin affiliate is to have more original content on your site.

I was hoping someone could clarify this for me. If you take a product feed from CJ for example and just load those products into a fontend site, using the description and other product information from the feed, and then have a Buy button which points to the buy link, will that get labeled as "thin"? What sort of extra content would I need to add for it to avoid that label?

[skum]

You need some unique content on your pages. Those product descriptions are probably used by many other sites.

An easy way to get some unique content on product pages is to allow user comments/reviews about the products.

[jsteele823]

It would be thin.

In order to be perceived as a valuable site - add value.

There's too many ways to do this to just say "do this" "do that" "blah blah blah" - you'll need to come up with a way to make the site valuable to the people that find it. Give them a reason to be at YOUR site, instead of one of the other millions of affiliate sites out there.

[smokedouthaze]

Originally Posted by jsteele823

It would be thin.

In order to be perceived as a valuable site - add value.

There's too many ways to do this to just say "do this" "do that" "blah blah blah" - you'll need to come up with a way to make the site valuable to the people that find it. Give them a reason to be at YOUR site, instead of one of the other millions of affiliate sites out there.

Thanks skum and jsteele. I picked up a book on affiliate marketing and after reading the first two chapters, it answered all my questions.

I was looking for more of a project to work on. I was going to develop the system myself and I figured having it make me some money would be nice. But I don't like what I was doing. Posting products with the hopes that my SEO ranking would be higher than the actual seller, so I can get people to click through my site, just to end up at the seller, but I make money off it. I know its not shady, but it seems like it is. Seems cheap.. maybe 'thin' is the more appropriate word lol. Then adding reviews or comments just seems half-efforted and unoriginal. (I'm not knocking the idea from you skum, I actually thought about that as well)

And I'm not into one particular thing enough to make an affiliate site about one product, and that also goes against what I wanted to do in the first place which was develop a system to handle getting products and adding them to a "frontend" so I don't think affiliate marketing is for me.

Thanks for the answers though! Definitely helps

[skum]

Yes it's true that user reviews/comments is quite unoriginal. It probably makes more sense if you already have an online store and want to add some more content to the product pages.

The best way to create unique content would of course be if you created your own product texts with information not found elsewhere. This could however take too much time depending on the number of products.

[smokedouthaze]

Originally Posted by skum

Yes it's true that user reviews/comments is quite unoriginal. It probably makes more sense if you already have an online store and want to add some more content to the product pages.

The best way to create unique content would of course be if you created your own product texts with information not found elsewhere. This could however take too much time depending on the number of products.

I agree. From reading part of that book and other people online, it sounds like the most successful affiliate marketing sites are the ones that concentrate on one product or a specific group of products. Apparently most people who have sites like that, will have multiple sites, each for a different product / product group.

It's definitely good to know but not quite what I was looking for.

[100castles]

I agree that adding value is essential. Consumers are smart and will click away from an affiliate site that isn't delivering on their needs.

My understanding of Google search is that it treats each page separately so you can have pages dedicated to individual products and optimized for keywords within a larger and more varied site. So you don't have to have a site for each product - although many affiliate marketers work this way currently.

But you will have to write about your products. Your writing needs to be a good read for the buyer and also what the search engines need to rank.
You can't just put products on a site and expect much in return, I shouldn't think.

[88dbsakthi]

I have a blog


Once it ranked first for post keywords when
the post ratio will be 5:1 ( 5 quality and 1 affiliate )
And after some i have written only the affiliate sponsored posts ( But some quality lengthy posts) but now the posts keywords ranking has been dropped and the original website ( The affiliate product i am selling ) is getting first on SERP.

Is this all about thin affiliate or am i missing something.