You'd guess wrong m8 I'm not aware of any affiliates that supply recipes? I use the same general techniques to create sites like http://www.hp-inkjet-cartridge-refills.com/ from affiliate datafeeds though, if you don't care about uniqueness you could create a site similar to this in under an hour from a Shareasale datafeed, but so far all my test sites have done spectacularly badly in Google (thin affiliate content). So little point in spending time making sites from an affiliate datafeed that will never do well in Google. To save time for anyone thinking of trying this themselves I can tell you the following doesn't work- 1. Only cloaking the affiliate links does not help. 2. Number 1 and hosting the images on your own server and editing them (batch process) so they have different quality and different filenames (should be considered different images) does not help. 3. Number 1 and only using the text based content from the datafeed, but still aiming for affiliate sales does not help. 3. Not linking to the affiliates site in any way (so no images from the affiliate, taking no sales, just aiming for AdSense income due to the text) does not help. 4. Spending a day or two editing the content so there's some uniqueness (but not that much: would take weeks to create truly unique content) to the title of the products and the descriptions does not help. As you can see I've tried a variety of ways to get affiliate content (from datafeeds) ranked well in Google and so far no joy. Last time I had a thin affiliate site do well was 2006 using Amazon XML feed. David Law
Don't waste your time clicking the link, someone trying to make cash from a referral link that has nothing to do with the thread! Can't you get banned from DP for posting affiliate links like this? David Law
Well I don't know about using datafeeds, but ive made thin affiliate sites like you describe and they have definitely gotten traffic. About a thousand to 1500 or so unique visits a month. Perhaps 1500 though is what you consider poor. To me anything above 1000 is good.
Depends on how much effort you put into the site and the niche. Even a penalised site can gain some traffic from Google, so the right niche, enough content and you can pull in a little (50 visitors a day isn't a lot) traffic to a thin affiliate site. All my thin affiliate sites are penalised, some get over 1,000 visitors a month, but comparing that to what they used to get and there's no comparison. I have one poetry book store (Amazon) that was pulling in around 8,000 uniques a day (took the site it was on to 20K visitors a day) until it was penalised and dropped to around 50 a day (the poetry store not the whole site)! Poetry is a CRAP AdSense niche, the CTR was low, payment was low so I hardly made anything from the traffic (worst traffic I've ever got!!). So yes the way I see traffic they aren't worth the effort. Biggest problem is the links they need, if you sent the same links to another site the traffic would be 100x higher. I hate to waste backlinks/PR for little gain. I'm moving towards making forums, user generated content. Just working on a SEO'd version of BBpress with AdSense included at free-recipes.co.uk/forum/ (don't want links to it yet as not finished, just started). Got a lot of sites where a forum would work well. What is it with forum software and tables! It's not that hard to use floating divs to replace table based coding. David Law
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