Ask HN: How do I start building an affiliate site?

6 points by haliax 16y ago ↗ HN

There was an article on here a few days ago about using low PageRank sites to find good terms to optimize a page for, and the author demonstrated that they bought geek-watches.com because of that information. That got me curious, and I started playing around with Google Keywords/Google Insights for Search. Most domains (sans dashes) for the keywords I tested that had more than 1K hits per month were taken, but I found and registered one that looks quite profitable: 17jewelwatch.com

The query has a strong average on Google Keywords, a good history on Insights, and directly refers to products which can sell for quite a high price.

Right now though, I don't really know what to put on the site, or what format I should use. I've been thinking of putting some general/historical information about the product, and then specific information for buyers, and some images/videos/etc. and doing this in a wordpress blog with a minimalist theme -- at the same time I remember reading many good things about the "Parrot Secrets" type one page layout, and I'm not sure overall what is the right way to go.

Does anyone have experience that they're willing to share?

4 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 19.5 ms ] thread

emanuer 16y ago ↗

I guess the best for you to do is follow the http://challenge.co/training/ They try to sell you a lot of stuff, but never the less they give you an amazing insight into building your own online site.

An other great resource is from problogger http://www.problogger.net/31-days-to-build-a-better-blog-joi...

In your case I would go with the challenge, it just started 3 days ago. so you are perfectly in time

pinksoda 16y ago ↗

You probably missed the boat with this one. Google has been making it harder to rank with these kinds of sites. Sites like these are considered spam.

Create something of value, it's the only way!

josefresco 16y ago ↗

If you publish unique content Google doesn't discriminate between an affiliate site, and a non-affiliate site. If you build your site out like a normal business would you have nothing to worry about. If you throw up one page with scraped content and expect to gain rank you're crazy.

josefresco 16y ago ↗

Publish unique content regularly and run the website as if it were your own business. It's the only path to succeeding with affiliate sites, skimming small profits over thousands of sites will never work unless you go deep into it. Sounds like you're new to the market. Lay low, make a little money and use this time to learn what works and what doesn't. End of the day a real site with real unique well though-out content will rank well in Google over time and may attract real customers as opposed to skimming random people who land on your page/site.