Affiliate marketing

AlisonHarrison

I am trying to understand affiliate marketing.
I hope someone can correct me if I am wrong but, from what I understand, affiliate marketing is when you build an authority site on a niche topic and use that site to promote other's products.
Can anyone tell me of any successful sites which do this?

closed

this one ...

_Andy_

Loads

MSE, GoCompare, all that kind of thing.
Doesn't have to be 'niche' as such

Benet

I used to do a little bit of affiliate stuff, nothing major just well SEO'ed keyworded and linked articles on topics with affiliate links. Stuff like webhost recommendations, etc.

You could always go down the path of setting up a site (SEO'ed to the gills of course) running on autopilot scraping articles etc, supported by advertising and aff. links. That said, Google is getting wise to autopilot sites.

There's money to be made, if you've got the time to actually invest in getting people to visit your site and actually click the link. Takes work, and to be fair the rewards aren't massive. I was only making £30 or so a month. That said, that isn't awful for what is essentially free money, but not every month was even that profitable.

AlisonHarrison

Benet wrote: »

You could always go down the path of setting up a site (SEO'ed to the gills of course) running on autopilot scraping articles etc, supported by advertising and aff. links. That said, Google is getting wise to autopilot sites.

.

What does this mean?
What is an autopilot site and what does scraping articles mean?
Sorry to appear so dim.

jamesd

Scraping is short for screen scraping and it means breaching copyright of other places by taking their content and putting it on your site, then hoping to take the ad revenue that they would have received if they had been the place found in a search.

Running on autopilot is the same as any other running on autopilot - letting some software do the screen scraping work for you.

As Bennet noted, screen scraping is correctly regarded by Google as producing low quality search results and they are active in trying to avoid making such sites prominent in search results.

SEO is search engine optimisation. Doing things with the site design that help search engines to find it and rank it highly.

Pikeyp

You could start off at looking at Amazon , they have an associate scheme.

https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/?_encoding=UTF8&assoc_ss_ref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.co.uk%2Fgp%2Fcart%2Fview.html%3Fie%3DUTF8%26ref_%3Dgno_cart

I tried it for a while , but you need to be really persistent with advertising your site to make sure people buy things from your links and not other peoples ... that's how you get your percentage of every sale.

There's an awful lot of competition out there!

Harry_Coel

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization , Pay Per Click, e-mail marketing, content marketing and in some sense display advertising.