[Allie]

Hello everyone!

I am a newbie in the affiliate marketing world, so I have a few questions.

As far as the most effective approach, are you better off creating a lens on Squidoo (or somewhere else?) about a product or a full web site just around that product. Say I want to try to sell Kindles (may be too far fetched, but this is just an example.. hmm, actually, is that too popular of a product to have any success?), would it be better to create a lens about the Kindle or a full website about "book reviews" or something similar to sell the product?

How many URLs do you own?
How many products do you focus on?
Do you work across multiple niches?
What are your "must do" actions when creating a new website for a product?

I am a marketing manager in my day job, focusing largely on performing SEO, email marketing, social media, etc.. I love my job, but I find affiliate marketing so fascinating that I would love to see if I could have any success with it. I have a background in web design, although my skills could be polished quite a bit. That being said, what is the best advice you can give someone new just getting into things? Judging from my questions above, do I seem like I have any sort of understanding of this industry or am I way off?

Thanks so much for your time!

[Chuck Hamrick]

A lens on Squidoo is a good place to start to understand how to create a page. In the long run it won't get you much if any traffic unless you are micro niche. You need to understand how to make a page, join an affiliate network, join merchant programs then create affiliate links on your page. You also need to learn basic SEO to get that page ranked.

[davidh]

I'd say your best bet is to build your own site, and use the third-party platforms such as squidoo, social networks, etc, as bridges to your own site rather than direct-to-merchant-site. This way you have your own ground to stand on when the tides of the internet ebb and flow.

[teezone]

Ditto to what Chuck said...

Personally I wouldn't create a website "for" a product, I would focus on a theme for a website, and the add products to that site.

There have been lots of discussions here about how to choose a niche - if you have some website skills, your technical learning curve will be less than most (to create a site), but in order to get properly ranked in google, you have to offer something different online. A site dedicated to one product might work if you filled it with bucket loads of original content, but that's different from a one-page sales pitch approach.

Unless you have a team of people, it's very difficult to work across multiple niches - it's easier to expand on one than try to be an expert in a few.

To achieve success in affiliate marketing you need (some) search engine success, and I don't think a Squidoo lens can get very far on that front. A unique technical idea, or interesting and relevant content would go further.

[Brett_Oranum]

Does anybody build there own site from scratch anymore? I never really go into WordPress much, made a tutorial once for others. I've used a few social network scripts, PHP fox is pretty good and I built a couple forums. But just building a site with just the code you put in is still the most fun I think

[affilorama]

Does anybody build there own site from scratch anymore?

I do. I still build sites but not really from scratch. I use Wordpress and decide on a theme based on my chosen niche and all that.

You don't really have to have a site to do affiliate marketing but I've gotten better results and find it easier too to have one.

Have a good day!