are you a thin affiliate

Tips to become a value adding affiliate.

So what is a “thin affiliate” anyway ?

The term “thin affiliate” appears in a recently published document that contains instructions for those individuals that are paid by Google for searching the net for “search engine spammy” web sites and reporting those sites to Google.

The document teaches those people what Google think is search engine spam and what type of web site they should report. This includes web sites using deceptive redirects, cloaking and sites that contain parts which are built using search engine result pages (tools like Traffic Equalizer and Ranking Power build this type of sites).

A web site which would be called a “thin affiliate” is a site that mainly consists of affiliate links and product displays from datafeeds, without any original content. Such type of site mainly consists of “bridge pages”, i.e. web pages that are solely designed to attract search engine traffic and lead the visitors to affiliate merchants.

So the question now is: how can you add value to your site or what does Google consider to be a value adding affiliate ?

It doesn´t really take too much.

First, if your strategy is building niche web sites based on articles and include affiliate links into these articles, then you are pretty safe, because you are providing useful and original content to your visitors.

Second, within the document, Google says that a shopping site like Bizrate.com is alright. Bizrate.com is a huge site which mainly consists of product pages built from merchant datafeeds. So what´s the added value here ?

Comparison shopping and product ratings / reviews.

So instead of promoting only one merchant, you should consider placing links to different merchants on your site and write reviews about them. You could also ask your visitors to give you a feedback on their shopping experience with the merchants you recommend. In order to get more feedback you could offer an incentive like a cash price or a gift card.

If you are promoting only one merchant, don´t just use the data you get from this merchant. You should write product reviews, tips for using and maintaining the products, compare different products, etc … anything that shows you are trying to help your visitors to make a better buying decision.

Third, offer discount coupon codes from your site. Most merchants don´t show coupons to all their affiliates but they would allow most affiliates to offer coupon codes from their web sites. To find out if the merchant you are promoting has coupon codes, simply search some of the major coupon shopping sites or ask your merchant´s affiliate manager.

Shopping coupons are an added value, because it´s something people won´t get if they didn´t visit your site first. You might wonder if this little detail will be enough to be a value adding affiliate. Well, let me tell you this little story:

On my poster site I´ve been promoting the coupon page with Google AdWords for over a year now. All links on this page go directly to the merchant Allposters.com, so it seems to be only a bridge page. A few weeks ago, my ad got reviewed and disabled by one of Google´s employees, saying that it´s a bridge page. So I told them that I´m offering coupon codes from different merchants that people otherwise wouldn´t be able to get and that I consider this little detail making a big enough difference.

Two days later they apologized for the mistake, told me hat the page is alright and re-activated my ad.

I believe that Google is mainly trying to get rid of those very lazy affilites who all use the same merchant datafeeds, plug these feeds into page building tools that spit out thousands of pages in minutes.

So here you have 4 ways to be a value adding affiliate:

1) Build informative web sites based primarily on articles and then recommend
merchants or individual products

2) Compare / review different merchants

3) Compare / review different products from the same merchant.

4) Offer coupon codes