So, you’ve concluded that blogging for money is too hard to do and take too much time. But you still want to make money online. What do you do? Well, you can create an affiliate niche site like Online Casino Bluebook. An affiliate niche site looks like a normal content site but it’s really an elaborate landing page designed to get people to sign up for various affiliate offers.
The big advantage the niche site has over the landing page is it doesn’t look like a sale page (at least it doesn’t try to). Rather, it looks like a site that provides information on the chosen topic and this can result in higher conversions. Niche sites take less time to build than a blog because they don’t have as many pages and they don’t need to be updated as much. Since they’re sponsoring this post, Let’s take a look at Online Casino Bluebook and see what they did right and what they did wrong in building their niche site.
Focus On A High Profit Niche
There are very few affiliate niches that are as profitable as gambling (just ask Tyler Cruz). Many gambling sites offer huge head hunting fees and some will you a percentage of sales for the life of the customer.
In case of Online Casino Bluebook, they market themselves as a guide to popular online casinos. Their highlight is the Top 10 casino ranking. While I would like to think the ranking order is based on things like support, software, reliability, etc., I have a feeling it’s based on highest affiliate commissions to lowest. Why? Because that’s how I would rank it if it was my site.
Cloak The Affiliate Links
Online Casino Bluebook does a good job hiding the affiliate links on their front page. Cloaking the affiliate links prevents people from robbing you of an affiliate commission by copying the affiliate URL and removing the affiliate ID from it (yes, people do that).
There are many way to hide an affiliate link. I’ve listed four of them in this post. My preferred method for link cloaking is the MBP Ninja Affiliate.
Add Some Relevant Content
Content is what separates an affiliate niche site from an affiliate landing page. You want to provide enough content to gets people reading and attract the Googlebot for SEO. But you don’t want too much content. Otherwise, all they’ll do is read and not look at the affiliate offers.
You can write the content yourself, have others write it for you, or use some free/paid article services. In the case of Online Casino Bluebook, they just wrote a few pages explaining the odds of winning at the various casino games like Black Jack, Craps and Roulette. Another way the site creates content is with an online forum.
Capture The Leads
All affiliate niches site should have a system to capture emails. Having a mailing list is a very powerful marketing tool. One that can make you $4,000 in a day. Online Casino Bluebook does an average job of lead capturing. Their sign form is down below the fold and their call to action is weak. This is one area the site needs to improve on.
Overall, Online Casino Bluebook is a pretty good example of an affiliate niche site. The content is nothing to write home about and the site won’t win any design awards, but it will do its job of sending people to the affiliate offer. You can use them as an example when it comes time to build your affiliate niche site.