okay, call me crazy, but someone please answer me this. Lets say I have an article/review/blog or whatever, and its talking about or promoting a certain product. Lets say a webhost. So i talk about how great this host is and post my affiliate link in the text. Why would I put that on my site thats brand new with NO links and a PR 0 . . . when I can put the same blog on a Hub or Lens??? These sites are PR7 with millions of links!!! Wouldn't they get indexed and ranked WAY better than my site no matter what I do??? I mean seriously. Even if I had to bookmark the Hub and get some pagelinks to it, I would still be way ahead of the game. Please someone tell me what I'm missing. Everyone says to put it on your own site and I just dont understand why thats a good idea when you can put it on a hub or lens and get indexed in 24 hours. The damn affiliate link is the same either way! The commision is the same eithe way! Who cares if its not on me site? Am i misguided?
I would not be surprised to see some affiliate managers get upset if they see your traffic coming from free article related sites - it looks very spammy. Secondly, what if you want to sell the website somewhere down the road - you have no website and therefor nothing to sell. On top of that, do you really think some little article on hubpages is going to rank high for a good/competitive keyphrase? I think the main reason people don't use this method is because it would piss off their affiliate managers and they may lose their account.
It's much more valuable to build quality content on your own domain. A Squidoo Lens or Hub Page can be a good supplement but will never replace a real niche-focused site. They should be used to build traffic to your site, not for the affiliate links.
Your mailing list is where you are going to get all the money from. The best way to get a huge mailing list is to have a site with content.
well if you write an article about what host you recommend, and then anchor in your affiliate link for that host, I dont see that as spam. If you link to your own site and then have an affiliate link, wouldnt you say thats just a spam funnel? Is this not allowed by hubpages or something?
well said..., @Tango4Cash, using your affiliate links with squidoo is totally fine as long as you stick to the rules. They are petty strict with spam these days. About hubpages, well they are a little serious kind of stuff; they dont allow more than 2 links and affiliate links might turn them off
I don't see how there is a magic uplift in the SERPs just because you have a Squidoo page (or any other free page). You will still need to optimise that page to get rankings. The fact that Squidoo has a PR of 7 (or whatever it is) is neither here nor there - your own Squidoo page will be PR0 and will have no backlinks until you start doing off-page SEO. Forget the millions of backlinks pointing to Squidoo because they won't be pointing to YOUR page and that's what really matters! Have a look at the SERPs for some competitive niches and keywords and see which sites are ranking top 5 - are there any Squidoo or Hubpages there? If you're in it for the long term, you want your own site which you have complete control over. Not some free account that could be deleted at any time because they decide it's against their TOS.