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Question about Affiliate Structure

Need your input on a affiliate model.

Snix

9:25 pm on Mar 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I will try to frame this as simple as possible.

I sell "Widgets" on my website. I want to expand the reach of my business by introducing affiliate network.

The affiliate network will allow anyone with a site involving "Widgets" to sell my products through their site. They actually don't have to do anything, except act as a front for my store (for unique whois info). By signing up as an affiliate they would give me access to make thousands of keyword optimized landing pages for "widgets".

All these optimized landing pages would then push traffic to the shopping cart which is uniquely installed on their server and some what branded to the site. The shopping cart would be set to not be indexed and is all managed by my business. So all the emphasis is placed on the landing pages and not the shopping cart.

The idea behind this is if I were to sign up 300 affiliates I could have 300 different landing pages for any given variation of "widget". Essentially this will allow me to gain 3/10 to 5/10 organic search results by using others sites as kind of a dummy site for mine.

I would also think it would be a good idea to contract out the landing page creation (outsource), so I can make each one of those 300 different landing pages a little different to avoid duplicate content. I would also take great care to make everything appear different, funnel all services through contact forms, forward live chat links to a call center and provide the phone numbers which all route their traffic to my business.

Keep in mind, the goal is 300 different sites with at least 5,000 pages each, that's 1,500,000 "Widget" pages.

This seems to be completely viable from what I can tell, just cut the affiliate a 10% check and call it a day. What do you think? ;)

mademetop

9:12 am on Mar 15, 2011 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Sounds very year 2000 to me :)

With a few differences (hosting pages on other peoples websites), schemes similar to this worked in the past for a while. I know, I did it - without using affiliates but using hundreds of different sites, with different content plus look and feel! All had good links (ODP, Yahoo Directory - even .edu and .gov) - however they all eventually got zapped as it was spamming (although extremely elegent in my humble opinion). But my personal feeling is that your idea, even it it did work initially, would soon be reported for spam and could not only effect your results but also could lead to the zapping of the poor affiliates own websites.

However, your question is could it be a viable method? Yes, IMO it could work for a while - but not, I think, for 5K pages per affiliate. I think the game would be up long before you got to 1.5 million pages!

It is classic spamming after all.

Oh - and welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Snix

4:47 pm on Mar 15, 2011 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I for sure know it is against the quality guidelines. However, it seems there is a trend of taking advantage of the short sightedness and being successful.

I already know this model currently exists and made it fine through the farmer update which makes me think it is actually something worth looking into. After the farmer update, reading through mountains of comments on a lot of different sites, it seems a lot of SEOs are fed up and going to start leaning to gray areas more with the "if you can't beat them, join them" attitude. At least that is what I perceived as a whole.

What if you could make money fast enough short term to buy reputable competitors which can then be used as another doorway in the same fashion? It seems that Google does not penalize a website when a competitor eats it. You just get another sweet ranking site, from what I have seen.

If and when the rug gets pulled under, can't you just pull a JCP and say "I didn't know they were running an affiliate program like that, I am shocked and had no clue!". The idea is to keep your main (any well ranked) sites clean as a whistle and pump much more quality content and effort into them. That way when the cookie crumbles, you have big sites to fall back on.

It seems like if you done correctly, you could really make this work. The company I got this model from doesn't even do a good job hiding it, which makes me really wonder how many people are already doing it better, they would be hard to spot, especially in SEO weak industries.

Thanks for welcoming me back, I use to be around, but that was probably 7 years ago. The farmer, overstock, jcp conversation drew me in again.

mademetop

10:17 pm on Mar 15, 2011 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Well, I am certainly not going to say don't give it a go, if you really want to try it out. Goodness, I've pushed the envelope enough times in the past. Just be aware of the possible consequences and - good luck!