
Ask HN: How do I start building an affiliate site? - haliax
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<p>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.<p>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.<p>Does anyone have experience that they're willing to share?
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josefresco
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.

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emanuer
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...](http://www.problogger.net/31-days-to-build-a-
better-blog-join-9100-other-bloggers-today/)

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

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pinksoda
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!

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josefresco
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.

