It's been three weeks since my last Open Niche Project update. Looks like the holiday weekend in the United States (Labor Day) and back-to-school activities got the best of me. I also sang in a 9-11 memorial concert as a guest with the Allen Symphony Chorus. Busy — but that is no excuse.

So, I am going to try to make it up to you by squeezing in an update now and over the weekend.

After thinking about it and doing some product research, I have decided to target the teeth whitening niche. I will devote an entire post to why I decided to do that, and even discuss the critical rule that I am breaking by selecting that niche. Look for that post over the weekend.

In the mean time, I wanted to tell you about the 5 site types that I think about when building an affiliate site, and explain what type of site I plan to build for the open niche project.

Affiliate Website Type 1: Landing Page Site

Once upon a time, affiliate marketers would create a single-page (or maybe 2-3 page) site that was just for landing visitors and converting to an affiliate offer (usually CPA).

Typically, marketers would drive traffic to these sites using PPC or some other paid method. Google does not like these sites very well, because they don't generally add value to the search experience. They are generally junk sites and usually get low website quality scores (resulting in higher ad cost) and are generally hard to rank in search engines. I don't recommend building these sites for affiliate marketing anymore – but they can have applications for sales letters and lead capture pages if you have a good source of traffic (like your list).

Affiliate Website Type 2: Single Keyword Sites

I used to build a lot of these. This is a site that typically has several pages (5-10 maybe), but really is only targeting a single long-tale keyword on the front page. Often this site is set up for AdSense or some other “fire and forget” revenue stream.

In general, the idea with these sites is you target a long tail, low competition, high value keyword like “Austin Healey restorations”. You build the site quickly (like a couple of days or less), rank for the keyword of interest, and move on. Fire and forget. Ranking these sites can be pretty easy, especially if the if you are good at picking keywords, and the keyword that you are targeting matches the domain name.

The last few Google updates (along with lots of google manual review) are making these sites less and less valuable. As they should, Google is trying to eliminate sites that are created just for the purpose of sniping keywords.

Affiliate Website Type 3: Review Sites

My buddy Josh Spaulding has made some good money with these types of sites. He even has a product out there on how to do this called Easy Review Sites.

With this type of site, you target keywords like “Keyword Tool Review” and you review several keyword tools (for example). On each review page, you target longer tail keywords like “Market Samurai Review” or “Micro Niche Finder Review”).

These site can be profitable, and if the reviews are good (and honest), they can add value. But often times these sites are abused. False claims on the reviews can attract the FTC. So, be sure you are creating something real if you go this route.

Affiliate Website Type 4: Authority Sites

In my mind, an authority affiliate site is the kind of site that attempts to do the best from all of the other three sites. Specifically, it captures leads, targets keywords (providing what is being searched for) and reviews products.

This is the sort of site we are going to build in the Teeth Whitening niche.

We are going to answer peoples questions about teeth whitening and recommend products. We are also going to capture their email addresses and send them free stuff by email.

You'll love it (and so will they).

Until next time,
Mark