Problems with brand new affiliate sites

Michael H asked:

I have recently obtained a domain name. Under my domain are products sold through Amazon.com sure you are well aware of associate marketing. I guess i need somebody to be honest about forthcoming costs in relation to registering on search engines and how to go about it successfully with minimum cost, maximum effect. Can you help ?

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My reply: You are in for a long uphill battle if you want to compete against Amazon itself for the sale of the products you are selling as one of their affiliates.

Google doesn’t like affiliate sites and penalizes them in various ways.

For example, there are thousands of Amway distributors in the USA, but the organic search results of sites that come up in a search for “amway” are pretty focused on corporate amway and anti-amway sites, because of something called “QDD” or “query deserves diversity”, a rule within the Google algorithm that says for some queries, it’s better to have a diversity of websites that present different views of that subject. So instead of a list of Amway distributors, you get all kinds of other stuff. Same with queries for “judaism”, “christianity”, “amish”, and so on. Rather than just present sites that deal positively with those things, you get results from Nazis, apostates, muslims, etc., bashing whatever you’re looking for at Google.

When you search for the products that you are trying to sell, are there ANY affiliate sites showing up in Google’s search results? If so, they will usually be the best optimized and oldest of such sites. But Google won’t show new sites in the natural search resulst for anything, for about six to nine months (look up “Google sandbox”).

Which means that as a new site you’ll need to get a ton of links to your site from other relevant sites in order to have any chance of ranking well at Google, and you’ll have to wait for most of a year to have a chance to come up in the organic search results at Google.

Of course, you can use Google Adwords to get immediate visitors to your site (because they can’t find you in the organic Google search results you’ll have to advertise with Google), but then you’ll be spending money to get traffic to your site with no guarantee that those visitors will buy anything from you.

You’ll need to spend a lot of time getting links to your site. And you’ll need to spend a lot of money on Google AdWords.

So the question becomes – at what point do you think this project is going to make you money instead of costing you money?

If you create a blog or website that a lot of people visit, you can set up affiliate links to Amazon and sell stuff that you talk about. But the odds of havnig a new blog that people visit are pretty slim. Unless you’re a great or funny writer or very clever in some way and generate some buzz that gets you noticed.

Are you?

It’s your call.

Best,

Jeré Matlock
https://www.wordsinarow.com
Website Design & Marketing / SEO