Forum Moderators: skibum
I am running a content site that is working on becoming an authority site for its subject area. It currently has about 5-600 pages and gets about 5-6K page views per day, all organic.
My topic is broad but unified by a main theme, and there are plenty of products related to my articles. I already have "Bookstore" sections with related books from Amazon, and I've just started to add a couple "Store" sections that sell products in a similar way.
But is this the best way to go? My concern is primarily that people come to my site to learn things and not to buy the related widget. Also, perhaps I could better market the store as a "Widget Store" rather than a "Widget Information" site (especially using PPC). So I'm thinking about building a new site to sell the widgets, which I can write small articles about and link to from my content site. On the other hand, I've already got some free visitors and they may well be interested in buying the widget they just learned about, so maybe I should just add on to my current site.
And a related question: any suggestions on how to build an affiliate store with little programming know-how? I haven't been able to find any good scripts that would do this, although rfung mentioned developing one eventually.
Any thoughts? Thanks.
I have monkeyed around with various options, including: putting a "Related Products"-type link at the bottom of the article that leads to the related store page; inserting a small image of a particular product and name in a box within the article; listing affiliate links to various merchants and/or products after or within the article (i.e. bypassing my "store" altogether). Also, "store" is one of the items on my website's major menu that could be seen from any page.
Thoughts or experiences on what works best for a content site? (Content meaning reference-type information, not product reviews.)
The ad should be so well targeted that a very large percent of people who read the content on the page will see the ad and say "Wow! I could really use that!"
"Seamlessly"
The content and the ads should almost be indistinguishable (but not deceptively so). On most sites, the ads are very obvious (top of page, right column, etc.) and people tune them out. Have you ever listened to Paul Harvey on the radio? He does most of the ads on his program. The ads are obviously ads (with a strong testimony from him), but once they start you're already hooked. You have to listen to the rest. That's how seamlessly the ads (or rather the profitable content) should be integrated with the (regular) content.
