The Niche Affiliate Site Doing Everything Right

Affiliate Examples #1

I mention a range of websites and tools in this newsletter. I was not paid to do so and have no affiliation with any of them.

If I told you there was a niche site getting an estimated 681,000 visits per month from organic search (source: Ahrefs), employed multiple writers, had a solid social media presence and a genuinely nice website despite being focused around product reviews, there’s a good chance you’d be thinking that it sounds like an affiliate marketer’s dream.

This was true for myself: I often found myself looking at this site for inspiration and slipping into daydreams about running a site of this magnitude and quality — despite having no interest in the niche whatsoever…vaping.

Vaping360.com is my go-to example to share with people looking for an affiliate website that seems to be doing everything right.

The site also monetises with ads, but my suspicion is that affiliate links are the primary driver of their revenue.

And despite the fact they frequently publish vaping-related news, making the site a genuine authority in the industry, the foundations of the site are little more than your standard Amazon affiliate site — a large chunk of “Best Vape for X” or “Y Vape Review” articles — though they link to multiple retailers and appear to use the ShareASale program rather than Amazon Associates.

I genuinely think I could write 10,000 words on why they’re such a great site — and one that currently appears to be going from strength-to-strength even with multiple confirmed and unconfirmed Google algorithm updates rolling out.

However, I want you to be able to apply some of the great stuff they’re doing on their site without feeling overwhelmed, so I’m highlighting one of the great things they’re doing here and I’ll leave you to check out the rest of the site, should you wish, to find some other gems.

Using Awesome Product Photography to Build Trust (& More Importantly…Backlinks)

One of the biggest opportunities you can take to differentiate your affiliate site from the tens or hundreds of competitors in your niche is to actually buy the products.

I won’t offer further comment on that (mainly due to guilt and shame) other than to say it’s very evident that most ‘review’ sites do not actually review a product — they simply offer an overview of it.

The simple fact is that it can be very hard to generate profits if you’re buying products to review on an affiliate site, even if you end up selling the products afterwards. After all, it adds more financial cost (obviously) but it also adds a lot of time and difficulty into the mix — especially if you’re using external writers to write reviews.

The trick with this is to make the products work overtime for you.

Vaping360 go above and beyond with their product photography. They don’t just take a photo and include it in their review to prove they’ve had access to it and fairly reviewed it, they take high quality shots that wouldn’t be out of place on the nicest websites in the world or even in news articles.

They then make use of their Flickr account to allow these other websites to use their images for free — in exchange for link accreditation. This strategy is nothing groundbreaking and has been around for a number of years (I found this guide from 2014 for example) but they’re pulling it off really nicely.

At a quick glance, I can see they’ve picked up links from Harvard.edu (DR92) and Vice.com (DR91) from this strategy, and a load of other sites within their >5k referring domain count.

The best thing with this approach is that it can be totally passive after the initial workload is complete.

Once you’ve uploaded your product photos to Flickr (consider using other image sites too), enabled them for Creative Commons usage, and included a description that says something like “Please include attribution to mywebsite.com when using this image”, you could — if you wanted — just leave them to pick up links passively over time.

If you wanted to be more active and drive more success with this strategy, you can do two things to significantly boost the performance of this linkbuilding strategy.

1) Use image detection software to find websites that are using your images without linking; I’ve used Infringement Report successfully with this strategy before. Simply drop the sites an email to say “Hey! You used our image in this post (provide the URL), please could you credit mywebsite.com as the original source?”

2) Use backlink monitoring on a tool like Ahrefs to find websites that are linking credit to your Flickr page. Many websites use plugins to pull images from Flickr that automatically give Creative Commons attribution — but they give it to your Flickr page. Drop them an email to say “Hey! Thanks for using our image, would it be possible to change the credit from our Flickr page to our actual website?”

It might be hard to turn buying a product and reviewing it into a profitable business model, but if the products start generating you backlinks on autopilot long after you’ve gotten rid of them, the ROI of the exercise can increase significantly.

I’m giving this newsletter away (yes, the entire Affiliate Examples account and brand) to someone that will do a good job with it. For more information, watch my video here: https://youtu.be/AQZ8M9LI0Ew

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