Multi-Pronged System for Success with Affiliate Products

Once I find a merchant with whom I can develop a relationship with – and has products that actually sell – I market them in as many ways as I can think of. Basically the same line of products marketed differently on many different websites.

Personally, I have settled on the personalized gift niche. There are half dozen merchants I work with who feature personalized gifts and whose products I market on my main website The Mail Order Shoppe.  Here are some basic techniques I use to make the most mileage of the products from my merchants.

I’ll use engraved crystal products in this example. They do well, so I gave them their own category, Personalized Crystal Gifts. All the crystal products also fit into other categories. For example, an engraved crystal vase also works in grandmother gifts, Mother’s Day gifts, housewarming gifts, office gifts, etc.

As I promote the same crystal vase in different categories, I make sure I alter the description to fit the category. I promote it as Engraved Crystal Vase for Mom in the Mother’s Day section, Housewarming Crystal Vase in the housewarming gifts section, etc.

So on just this website each product is marketed a half dozen ways and results in significant search engine traffic for various searches on the same topic. Then I niche down and make a separate website for the product line, like Engraved Crystal Shoppe. The same 1,000 crystal products that are already well covered on the original site now also have their own dedicated website. Again, it’s important to alter the product name and description to match the interest of the target audience.

On The Mail Order Shoppe, everything is titled “Personalized Crystal” then followed by the “ProductName”. On Engraved Crystal Shoppe, everything is titled similarly “Engraved Crystal” again followed by “ProductName”. Yes slight difference, but it attracts different visitors through search engines.

The LeftNav categories on the Crystal site are noticeably different than the ones on MOS: Crystal stemware, wine glasses, vases, etc. So this site attracts people searching for engraved crystal beer steins, rather than personalized barware (which hopefully MOS is ranking on).

And since every page on the site is about crystal, the search engines know exactly what the site does, and visitors sense the authority in your brand because of the focus of your site.

Then I go one step further, and create a niche site for each crystal category, something like engraved-crystal-wine-glasses.com (not a real url). These niche sites attract people who know exactly what they’re looking for, and all I have to do is cater to their interests and help them complete their shopping.

The last trick is the kicker. I now have the engraved crystal vase on many websites in many categories. My “backlinks” are the actual product links to each site. For example, the link to the vase from the Grandmother Gifts section on The Mail Order Shoppe actually goes to the crystal site. I mix it up. They all link to each other. And since the links are definitely relevant, it helps tremendously for PageRank.

There’s many more different ways to do this, but I’m not giving away ALL my secrets!

I’ve been employing this strategy for several years, and it has never failed me. It takes some work up front and requires more than simple copy and paste, but it produces traffic from many different angles and has always been sustainable for me.

About Billy Kay

You can find Billy Kay on Twitter @billykay.