Building a lasting Affiliate Network – Part 1

Having a single site in a particular affiliate space is a great way to test out the market, you can test plenty of variables like:

1. How difficult is is to rank for profitable keywords
2. Is it a high traffic niche?
3. Which merchants convert the best
4. How responsive mailing lists are

Once you find that magic formula what do you do next? Move onto the next niche, or build more?

We all know that finding a profitable niche is hard, there’s no doubting that. But holding a position within that niche can become incredibly difficult if you don’t have a network of sites to back you up.

Eli made a great post which discusses the need for a larger network of relevant websites to help you dominate the SERPS for particular keywords. The exact same principle can be put in place to help you totally dominate an entire niche & potentially take a larger share of the pie that you’d be able to get with only one site whilst also covering your back from potential outrankings. Allowing you to sleep pretty at night knowing your competition has no chance.

Lets take a quick look at the finance niche & how I would approach it from a entire network perspective.

Firstly I’d want to have one authority website, this one would cover all these areas of finance:

1. Credit Cards
2. Bank Accounts
3. Payday Loans
4. Personal Loans
5. New Mortgages
6. Refinance Mortgages

Create your main website with all the categories & products/affiliates first. Try to keep all products no more than 2 levels away from the main page of the website (i.e. no internal link wastage = less supplemental results & better rankings).

Check out this earlier post about getting links for affiliate websites, concentrate first of all on getting links to your main mothership website, once it starts ranking we can then gauge how difficult the niche is & competition is.

It’s also worth creating a finance blog as a secondary hub, write 10-30 really good posts & set them all on timestamp to be posted over a few months. Naturally I’d link using relevant anchor text to relevant products & pages within the network of websites from within the blog posts (not sitewide). I do believe that links from relevant posts on topic are much more valuable & pass more authority than a sitewide link, they also look less conspicuous.

Start syndicating your posts on Social Networks. The advantage of this technique is that your Blog doesn’t look like an affiliate site, therefore will get more attention & potentially links, which you can slowly filter into your other sites & product pages.

Naturally, getting the rest of the larger network of sites up will take you some time. You could outsource the work & get it done quicker, it’s really up to how you like to do things. I’ve found that once you have a solid template for one site you can replicate it across the board, making sure that you keep content unique & don’t leave any footprints.

Stay Tuned for More on Building a Lasting Affiliate Network