Is yours Fat with a Long Tail?
Nah - not talking about your pet pooch, but your website.
There has been alot of talk of ‘Thin Affiliate Websites’ and ‘Long Tail’ in affiliate marketing circles. Not sure what it is all about, then read on.
I best start by defining a ‘thin’ affiliate website.
A thin affiliate website is an affiliate sites that has absolutely no value other than to make money for the affiliate. They have no value to the user and no value to the merchant - I could cite product feed sites, discount sites and cashback sites. But each of these can have it’s value - but at the same time their are hundreds if not thousands of thin affiliate sites in these categories.
Read this and you will get a better idea
How your site can put on weight?
Content or a very useful tool. Something that will keep the visitors coming back to your site. Yes use APIs and product feeds, but the big thing is what ever application you create make sure that it is both novel and useful to the members.
Ok so on to the ‘Long Tail’ thing.
Keith Bond stated this very well in his recient blog post Wagging The Long Tail For Blogging Ideas.
Basically look beyond the names of merchants, brands, trademarks and product names and try and develop diverse content for your niche, it is all about content at the end of the day.
For example if you are going to use affilistore (a powerful, free product feed tool) continually add content using the inbuilt CMS. So if you set up an affilistore using the PremierCookware (AffiliateWindow) feed, add recipes, discussion of celebrity chefs, cooking tehniques, discussion of supermarkets, ethical / organic foods and so on and so forth.
