Successful Affiliate site

How many links

[longen]

With a content site its relatively easy to get backlinks, but not with an affiliate. I'im making my first attempt at an aff site - its cheaper than pcc and a good way to learn. My question to the big fish in the pond is - how many inbound links do you need to start making an impact in a competitive area? 100's or 1000's or 10,000's.

[chrisnrae]

Why not merge the two. Put some content on an affiliate site. Works for me and makes backlinks a lot easier.

[longen]

That should work - i will out-source the content writing rather than attempt it myself.

[hdpt00]

Where do you outsource the content writing and what are the going rates? I have some content sites where I write articles in the 200-400 word range and take me about 15 minutes to write. Do you use a site like elance or rentacoder or something like that? Is the content quality just horrible because it's by someone whose native language isn't english?

Outsourcing these articles would free up a lot of my time for more important things. Any information would be greatly appreciated!

[ogletree]

I have a sites that have 17 backlinks that make several hundred dollars a day. It's not how many backlinks you have it how you use it. People just don't seem to understand that ranking number one for some hyper competitive kw is futile waste of time. It also has a lot to do with age of site and age of backlinks. It is real hard to do anything quickly with a new site or an old site with no backlinks.

[longen]

>>is real hard to do anything quickly with a new site <<

So buying an old domain wouldn't help - if google treats expired/transfered sites as if they were new.

[longen]

>>Where do you outsource the content writing and what are the going rates? <<

I've used rentacoder for a small Delphi application to automate some html work.
I'im also looking at rentacoder for content. Some outsourcers are asking for articles at $3 - $5. I think that at that rate you'll get content scraped from the web, and thrown together as an article.

I've chosen an author for some content, at $20 an article, for about 1000 words each. I couldn't live on that, but he is a westerner living in the far East where the cost of living would be cheaper. It will be a few weeks before i get the content, so i can't vouch for the quality yet.

Another option is getafreelancer.

[longen]

>>It's not how many backlinks you have it how you use it<<

Do you mean that its about the affiliate program/commissions you choose (in the short term), and in the long term its about ageing sites with ongoing quality link development.

[anallawalla]

Some outsourcers are asking for articles at $3 - $5.

One site has hit upon a clever idea that is worth adapting - he runs weekly competitions for college students to write articles about his niche. The winner gets some paltry amount, which is a lot in that country, and all entries go on the site - so he gets a lot of dirt-cheap content, all properly attributed to the authors, and acreage for his affiliate ads. :)

[killroy]

I usuaslly start with just one decent link... that's enough to kick-start an aff site, get it indexed and make a sale within 48 hours or so (thanks google).

All my projects overlap about 10-30% industry-wise, so they're never off-topic and I'm never really starting from scratch. If I want to make something really unrelated, I'll do 1 or 2 sites inbetween to bridge them... Sort of about.com one site at a time ;)

SN

[Watcher of the Skies]

Dozens of backlinks should be fine - just make sure you've got 3 or 4 top-shelf ones.

[surfgatinho]

I know one guy who runs a few moderately succesful aff sites with no links pages.
He doesn't actively seek links as a rule either.

I think his (travel) related sites seem to do OK because of one site he set up in about 1999 which was a local directory.

It was fairly succesful at the tim but hasn't had fresh content for a long time. Still I guess it has a few important regional links.
Strange thing is though most of his bookings are outside of that region.

I wish I understood it - he claims he's just great at SEO

[DavidT]

I'd build a purely content/informational site first, get good links esp. .gov and .edu, wait till it's doing ok in Google, then make a subdomain or folder and put your customized datafeeds/affiliate trash pages in there.

[longen]

>>get good links esp. .gov and .edu, wait till it's doing ok<<

During this waiting phase it might also help to build credibility by inserting good outgoing links, not in a seperate links page, but in the content itself by linking keyword/phrases to relevant external content sites.
Early web documents by scientists/educators probably had a more "natural" linking pattern. They were linking to ideas and documents, not web-sites. And of course the google pair came from stanford.

[NoClue]

One question from a newb.
I did put up a one-page site to promote a certain product. It's a content page with some nice info and affiliate text links to the product I'm tryign to sell.

Now how would I be going about getting nice backlinks? Do I buy them? Request reciprocal links from other sites that deal with the topic?

And if I have some good links in place, would it be enough to rank high in the SERPS. I can imagine google doesn't like one-page sites alot...?

tia!