4 questions to ask yourself before building an affiliate site

Before you start building your new affiliate site take a few minutes out and ask yourself these 4 questions. Be really honest when answering them and if you can ask a friend, colleague or family member what they think of your idea. I've seen lots and lots of duplication in the affiliate arena lately and not very much originality. Maybe some of this can be avoided. 1. Is it a cashback site? If your answer is yes then scrap it and move on. Seriously there are hundreds if not thousands of cashback sites out there so you are going to have to either have some really Unique Selling Point to stand out from the crowd or about a hundred million pounds advertising budget to build your brand and make it memorable. The cashback market is absolutely saturated right now, and besides you have the massively popular Quidco offering 100% cashback so how on earth are you going to compete with that? You have other huge brands like GreasyPalm owners Submission Technology (We Promise To) and Rpoints (Cashback Kings) now offering 100% cashback too. Sure you can make your cashback site a little bit quirky by say giving half the profits to your local cat shelter or whatever, or promising to pledge your profits to help save the icebergs from melting but at the end you will never beat the established leaders in this sector. It's a bit like a few year ago when loads of affiliates were trying to build their own auction sites to take on eBay. Yeah right, where are they now? 2. Is it a white label site? If your answer is yes then scrap it and move on. The ONLY time a white label site is worth doing is when you already have an existing brand with a huge loyal audience. Then it will work. Examples of this are sites like ITV Bingo, ITV have a massive audience so it makes sense to get a white label bingo site knocked up by St. Minver and then just pimp it out on the TV. Job done. But unless you already have this type of huge audience then don't bother. White label sites are notoriously hard to promote in the search engines as they are basically the same as all the other white label sites that sit under the same umbrella. Plus they normally don't offer you much in terms of flexibility to change things like tags and unique content. So you can't rely on them to do well in the search engines. I understand that white label sites can seem tempting to many affiliates as for little or no work you can get a huge ready built site that requires little or no maintenance. All well and good but take it from someone who has been there, bought the T-Shirt then sold it again on eBay; its just not worth the bother. 3. Is it useful? You need to be really honest with yourself when you are asking yourself this question. Take a step back and ask yourself if the site really serves its purpose and gives you, the user something unique. Then ask yourself if you would come back and visit the site tomorrow or next week? Would you really? Case in point, the owner of Home Touches asked on the A4U Forum for some feedback on the site. Now besides from the broken links, broken pages, awful colour scheme, design and layout there isn't much to be positive about. The site doesn't seem to serve any purpose other than to display a few banner ads. If you found this site in the search engines would you stay for longer than a couple of seconds? Never mind come back for another visit? Another example is GoToBarcelona, the winner of the Sunshine affiliate competition. Before I go on it's only fair to say that the rules of the competition were only to create a 2 page site. So mission accomplished, and the blog owner has won a holiday so maybe that's all they wanted. But...if the site is ever going to have a chance of growing and attracting some real visitors then a LOT more content is going to be needed. Thin sites like this just won't cut the mustard in the search engines any more. 4. Is it a shopping directory? If your answer is yes then scrap it and move on. Believe it or not I still see these old school type of directories cropping up. You know the ones I mean don't you? They have a nav bar down the left hand sites with categories like Books, CD's, Computers, Electronics etc. Then when you click on a category you are presented with a page full of nothing but 468 x 60 banners relating to that category. Lol, seriously these type of sites still exist and new ones are cropping up all the time. The key to making a successful site of any kind is to ask yourself would you visit it? I think that sometimes we as affiliates focus too much on "gaming" the search engines and getting visitors to our sites at almost any cost that we forget to engage the visitors when they get here. We see the popularity of cashback sites and think that we must start our own, because they are popular. Instead we need to innovate and bring something different to the market. It doesn't have to be an all singing all dancing full of widgets and social networking tools either. Sometimes the simpler the site the better, one of my favourite sites of all time is AutoBlog. It's simply a blog about cars written by car enthusiasts, nothing else, and its awesome. I'll be following up this post with another later in the week that shows what I think are some of the best and original affiliate sites around. What I'm listening right now: Eric Benet - "You’re the Only One"