7 Types of Content for Affiliate Sites
It’s time for another issue of No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest. In the previous article, we talked about types of site to build for no cost affiliate marketing. In this learning affiliate marketing article, we are going to learn about the contents that you should be adding to your affiliate sites.
There are lots of content types for an affiliate site but all of them will have the common goal of helping your to earn affiliate commissions. Following will be the top content types that affiliates can use to drive traffic to the merchants via affiliate links.
I will explain to you the benefits of using each type of the contents and how you can churn out these contents effectively for affiliate marketing purposes.
Reviews
Reviews aim to educate readers about the pros and cons of a particular product or services. To build trust using reviews, you must avoid being bias. Be sure to include the positives and negatives from your experience using a product.
Did I just mentioned “write based on your experience”? What if you have no experience using a product?
Well, request for a review copy or a sample from the merchant. If this is not possible, hop over to shopping sites like Amazon and Epinions. I am sure that there will be some pretty decent genuine customer reviews which you can rewrite as your review content.
If you are promoting digital products on Clickbank, do not write your reviews based on the sales page, especially the testimonials because they are hyped up to boost sales. The best approach will be to ask for a review copy.
Sales Copy
As you might have guessed it, long form sales copy is a piece of content that you use to directly promote a product or services. You need to hype up the tone of your writing and tell your visitors why they should swipe their credit cards for what you are promoting.
The 5 must have points that I will include in such a sales copy are:
- Immediate pressing problem of visitors
- Description of what you are selling to them
- What is in it for your visitors?
- Questions that your visitors might have about what you are promoting
- Call to action - How to purchase or get what you are promoting
Such contents will convert when you clearly outline the benefits that a visitor rather than coldly listing the features of a product. Also, sales copy on an affiliate site is more of a presell, not an actual sales page. From my experience, it must be kept short and sweet to get visitors over to the actual sales page.
Comparisons
Photo by mckaysavage
Comparisons between products and services is another form of soft selling. When you set up a comparison page, you basically let your visitors choose instead of you trying to push them through a funnel.
List out the pros and cons with a brief descriptions. 5 to 10 points will be enough for each item. One way to boost click through rates on a comparison page is to use images. You can use screenshots of the merchant’s page, ratings (stars or ticks) and a call to action button (Buy Now, Download Now, Click Here).
You can get one set of ratings images from me just for reading this article. 
As for call to action buttons, it is available for downloads at Different Type of Sites for No Cost Affiliate Marketing.
Niche Information
Niche information are contents that you can see on authority sites or blogs. Such contents add value to an affiliate site. Most affiliate sites have an articles section trying to disguise the fact that they are affiliate sites.
How to provide value with information on your affiliate sites and at the same time, lead your visitors to click on your affiliate links? Add relevant affiliate links! A couple of the frequent methods that I use are (using diabetes niche):
- Examples Method: You can always get diabetes test strips from places like <Diabetes Store affiliate link>, <eBay affiliate link> and <Amazon affiliate link>.
- Point of Contents: Let’s say I am writing a blog post on diabetes prevention and control. One of the methods will be to get a diabetes diet. Example, Diabetes diet is crucial for diabetes prevention. <eDiets affiliate link> provide great diet programs that help many diabetics reduce their sufferings from the disease.
News Content and Buzz
I usually get my news contents from press releases to update my affiliate sites. Most of the time, the subject of the news will either be related to a company or a product. If it is a product, I will run a search on Amazon or eBay to see if I can actually link to the product using my Amazon and eBay affiliate links in my news content.
Photo by Sister72
If it is a company, I will check out whether the company itself has an affiliate program. Visitors will find them clicking on these links just to find out more about the products or companies that you are buzzing them about. Thus, another soft selling technique for you.
RSS Feeds from Merchants
A lot of merchants (those from ShareASale) provide data feeds for their affiliates nowadays. Affiliates will use these data to present products information pulled out from their merchants’ database. This is an easy way to show your visitors a page full of products if you have scripts like Build A Niche Store. Visitors are likely to convert as such pages have the shopping layout that puts them into a shopping mood.
However, there is one red alert for you. Such technologies is not welcomed by search engines especially Google. They see such pages as doorway pages that serve as a bridge to your merchants and there are also speculations that they will ban you on the base of duplicate content as data feeds are used by merchants and other affiliates as well.
Niche Mash Up
I set up niche mash up affiliate sites to test certain offers, products or services. It is basically a general site which allows me to add all the abovementioned contents from different niches. I will then drive traffic to them using article marketing.
Such sites work incredibly well for CPA offers from affiliate networks like Market Leverage and Hydra because you can test out various offers on the network and it will not be odd for visitors to your site. I will move deeper into this and yes, this method is worth a whole blog post on it because it DOES WORK!
Conclusion on Types of Content for Affiliate Sites
I put this up so that newbie affiliates will now know what to add to their affiliate sites other than just the type of content that they are currently using.
I am not perfect and I know there are probably other types of content out there that have high conversion rates but the above is what I use and has worked out for me.
Any questions? Any great stuffs to share with readers of AffBoom? Add your comments below and I will gladly respond to it.
Also, I will be giving away Top 20 Tips on Article Marketing for Affiliates in a two part series from next week onwards and yes, they are part of No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest as well.
If you are interested, subscribe to Aff Boom RSS Feed using the form below. I don’t update this blog like Techcrunch or LifeHacker so you will not be receiving tonnes of updates everyday. 
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6 Responses to “7 Types of Content for Affiliate Sites”
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Thank you for including MarketLeverage on your list of affiliate solutions. I’m glad you have had success testing our offers on your niche mash up sites. Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions you may have! Thanks again!
No problem. Well, I broke my ML earnings record this month and I am glad with it. Thus, credits to you guys.
I just starting to promote affiliate products and build some sites, but I still confuse how to manage the content that can promote. This article very useful and helpful!!
I am glad that you enjoyed the tips above. Hope to see you here on AffBoom soon.
Reviews and comparisons tend to work pretty well. This is not just theory, I’ve tested both on my sites… usually on blogs work even better!
It is a great form of soft selling and for comparisons, visitors will be given the baton to choose which product to go for. Customers love making their own choices and thus, this will boost the conversion for affiliates.