Having a single site in a particular affiliate space is a great way to test out the market, you can test plenty of variables like:

1. How difficult is is to rank for profitable keywords
2. Is it a high traffic niche?
3. Which merchants convert the best
4. How responsive mailing lists are

Once you find that magic formula what do you do next? Move onto the next niche, or build more?

We all know that finding a profitable niche is hard, there’s no doubting that. But holding a position within that niche can become incredibly difficult if you don’t have a network of sites to back you up.

Eli made a great post which discusses the need for a larger network of relevant websites to help you dominate the SERPS for particular keywords. The exact same principle can be put in place to help you totally dominate an entire niche & potentially take a larger share of the pie that you’d be able to get with only one site whilst also covering your back from potential outrankings. Allowing you to sleep pretty at night knowing your competition has no chance.

Lets take a quick look at the finance niche & how I would approach it from a entire network perspective.

Firstly I’d want to have one authority website, this one would cover all these areas of finance:

1. Credit Cards
2. Bank Accounts
3. Payday Loans
4. Personal Loans
5. New Mortgages
6. Refinance Mortgages

Create your main website with all the categories & products/affiliates first. Try to keep all products no more than 2 levels away from the main page of the website (i.e. no internal link wastage = less supplemental results & better rankings).

Check out this earlier post about getting links for affiliate websites, concentrate first of all on getting links to your main mothership website, once it starts ranking we can then gauge how difficult the niche is & competition is.

It’s also worth creating a finance blog as a secondary hub, write 10-30 really good posts & set them all on timestamp to be posted over a few months. Naturally I’d link using relevant anchor text to relevant products & pages within the network of websites from within the blog posts (not sitewide). I do believe that links from relevant posts on topic are much more valuable & pass more authority than a sitewide link, they also look less conspicuous.

Start syndicating your posts on Social Networks. The advantage of this technique is that your Blog doesn’t look like an affiliate site, therefore will get more attention & potentially links, which you can slowly filter into your other sites & product pages.

Naturally, getting the rest of the larger network of sites up will take you some time. You could outsource the work & get it done quicker, it’s really up to how you like to do things. I’ve found that once you have a solid template for one site you can replicate it across the board, making sure that you keep content unique & don’t leave any footprints.

Stay Tuned for More on Building a Lasting Affiliate Network

By now I’m sure you’ve heard of the new Project Black Mask book by the guys who wrote Day Job Killer. Whilst I found the Day Job Killer book actually did contain some useful information Project Black Mask contains a lot of rehashed information that was available freely not so long ago.

The book itself isn’t written by Chris Mcneely but by Alex Goad of Net Frontier Marketing. I know Alex reads the blog here so I’m sure he won’t mind the criticism

Firstly I’d like to say how laughable it is that so many affiliates are willing to jump onto a product so quickly without really reading it first. Just have a look at the Google serps for Project Black Mask.

Secondly I find it very interesting that so many people are now willing to drop all morale issues & promote a Black Hat book. I’m not saying that Black Hat SEO is a bad thing, but what they don’t mention on the sales page is that Black Hat SEO:

1. Will get your websites Banned eventually, unless you prepare properly
2. Could get your Adsense Account banned
3. Could get your affiliate account suspended
4. That the techniques are almost a year out of date & don’t work anymore unless you have some serious mass & automation.

I’ve read the book, it contains useful information like some stuff about Parasite hosting but it is not revolutionary & is not something that will help you earn $12,000 overnight.

If you trawl through blackhat forums like Simplified SEC you’ll see that the guys without automation & mass are losing the battle to build sites that rank quick enough. It’s not just as simple as throwing up 150,000 pages & waiting for the cash to come in, you need to give that site enough link juice so that 99% of it isn’t supplemental, you have to figure out how to do that without tripping the Google Filters. See my previous post on aged domains

In fact, many Black Hat’s aren’t using these tactics anymore. Just look at the serps for things like buy xanax. THIS is where the serious cash is. Aged domains with a lot of authority ranking for high grossing products like viagra, xanax, levitra etc.

So before you throw your money at this book wanting another pipe dream just remember that these books thrive on the hype the Affiliates create for them, regardless of whether the book will help you achieve that hype is another story.

Whilst the book does have good content, it’s nothing new & nothing you can’t find out by either reading my blog or somewhere like wickedfire.