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From Robert Niles on April 2, 2007 at 10:20 AM
Affiliate sales is a tough business for publishers. It can be lucrative, but it requires more work than slapping up some links.First, you must have some original content to build a readership for your website. Simply creating you own "front end" to the affiliated stores' products won't suffice. Google's duplicate content penalties will dump you to the bottom of the search engine results.
Once you've built original content that attracts an audience (and scraped content, discussion forums or articles you've paid someone five bucks to write won't cut it), then you must carefully select products from the Commission Junction vendors that match the needs of your readers.
Ideally, your content will be geared toward people looking to make an immediate purchase. Comparison reviews and product and purchasing FAQs do well. Then, once you have your content and compatible links up, you must watch them closely, swapping for other links to replace products that do not perform.
Long-term, if you build a reader-driven database of reviews and FAQs, and create an algorithm to match them with affiliate links, you can achieve a strong profit margin. Otherwise, affiliate links remain a high-time-investment, poor-financial-return form of payment for many Web publishers.