Is it possible to succeed as an affiliate while maintaining your integrity?
I’ve been working with a few friends to setup a new affiliate website called Web Site Host Review. One of the dilemmas that we’ve encountered is the fact that there are competing interests when running an affiliate website. On the one hand, you’d like to make as much money as possible so you are tempted to promote the highest paying web host affiliates as “the best” hosts. On the other hand, if you’re like me, and are concerned with quality, you want to make the site a valuable resource and avoid being just like all the other web hosting affiliate sites.
At the end of the day, we have made the decision to go the quality route in the hopes of profiting on volume rather than deception. Unfortunately, this means that our earnings per conversion will go down, and quite possibly even our conversion rate per visitor. This is a common compromise that plagues those of us who earn money off affiliate sales.
So what we’ve set about doing (still in the early stages) is creating the kind of web hosting review site we’d want if we were looking for a good web host. First off, we are setting up a Web Hosting FAQ to answer common questions in an objective manner. Rather than copy other web hosting faqs, we’re starting from scratch with questions that we think common folks have when choosing a web host. Second, we are starting a unique blog called The Firewall which will provide tips and tricks to make running your website a smoother process. Third, we will only be reviewing web hosts that we’ve actually used, and will break reviews down based on the purposes they serve well. We recognize that different hosts are good for different reasons. If you’re looking for a host to run your personal blog you’ll want a different host than if you plan to run a high-volume e-commerce site.
So those are our three PODs for this review site. There is some compromise to the bottom line, but ultimately we hope the site will become popular enough to make up the difference in volume.
What are your thoughts? Is the purpose of setting up an affiliate site solely to make money, or is there room for integrity?
Share your thoughts!!!