Too Many Amazon Products on Affiliate Site?

I don't think there really is a right answer to how many products is too many -- or too little. It all depends on your business model. I have thousands of products on my site and we do quite well. Goodreads.com is another very successful Amazon affiliate site and they feature tens of thousands of products on their site (actually they aren't really an affiliate site anymore since they were so successful that Amazon actually bought them).

Personally, I find the whole "review site" Amazon affiliate model very lacking. The content is usually thin; it's hard to build a following or relationships based on selling just a few products; and even if you're successful, you're unlikely to make repeat sales since once they buy your widget they have no reason to go back to you. I suppose this model might work if, like the poster above, your traffic strategy mainly consists of trying to rank a few products on search engines, but relying on search engines seems like a hard -- and precarious -- way to make a living. This sort of model is essentially conceding that every sale you make will be to a new customer. But as just about any successful business will tell you, it's a lot easier to sell something to an already satisfied customer than to try to find and earn the trust of a new one.

Thus, it's far better in my mind to have a website that targets a type of customer rather than promoting a single type of product. For instance, if you were creating a photography site, you could create a website where you reviewed 10 or 20 of what you think are the best digital cameras in a bunch of different price ranges and in a bunch of different formats, from point and shoot to DSLR. This would be the "review site" model.

Alternatively you could build your site around a type of user, for instance the "prosumer" (i.e., people like me who think they are better photographers than they really are and aren't afraid to drop quite a bit of money to prove it) and feature a variety of product types that you think that your target users would like. In this case, you might only have DSLR cameras (and probably ones without full-frame sensors), but you'd also feature things like flashes, tripods, filters, etc.

By doing so, it's true that you'd be reducing the total amount of people who might be interested in your site (goodbye casual photographers and true pros!), but you'd increase your odds substantially of getting the customers that you do have to buy from you again and again.

I'm not saying you're right or wrong, but I do want to push back a little. Why do you think it's important that he have customer descriptions? What's going to be better about his descripitions than (for instance) the descriptions he can access and use for free using the Amazon Products API?

And though you didn't mention them, the same thing applies to reviews. Why should someone go to his site for reviews when they visit Amazon.com and get multiple reviews -- many very comprehensive, very well written and provided by real experts -- from (a) people who are probably more objective (since their goal in writing reviews isn't to sell you something and (b) have actually used the products they're talking about.

Fundamentally these two things illustrate very nicely a big reason why I don't like "review sites": they often don't really add much (if any) value over anything a user can get on Amazon. Now the usual solution is to provide some "authority articles" as the OP mentioned above. But honestly, when I hear people say things like, "I have 15 authority articles" that reads to me like either (a) I'm trying to rank some (probably not-very-helpful) articles in search engines or (b) someone told me I need to write "authority" articles so that's what I did (and now I can check "authority articles" off of my checklist of things to do).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying writing "authority articles" (whatever "authority" means) is a bad thing, but the content on your site should be trying to serve a specific purpose. Is it to help people make a purchasing decision, is it to try to draw people to your site or is it just a space filler or an attempt to look like your site has more "authority" than it really does? Too often, I see Amazon review sites with content that doesn't really add anything -- or at least doesn't really add anything for the type of user they're targeting.

As an example of what I'm talking about, with the photography example I used above, one might write an article on "What's the best digital camera" -- actually, I see articles like that all the time. Usually in an article like that the author will choose five or ten products then rattle off a bunch of features that they read off of the manufacturer's product description before crowning one particular product "The Best". They might say that this camera takes pictures at 24 MP resolution and this other has 11 auto focus points. But that's not really helpful -- or at least it's not adding anything that they couldn't get reading the Amazon product description or the company's own marketing materials. (And sorry, just calling something "the best" doesn't really count as adding something.)

The types of questions that really are helpful are things like "When does a high resolution matter?" and "What are those auto focus points going to give me?" "Under what conditions is it worth it to spend a little more for feature X?" and "How do the products stack up against each other in the important ways that can't be measured or represented by a set of product specifications, things like picture quality?"

Furthermore, users don't want to be told what the "best thingamajig" is anyway. First of all, all people are different and have different needs, so there really isn't a "best" and second they want to make their own choices. What they do want is help deciding what's going to be the best thingamajig for them -- helping them narrow down their choices and make sense of things like megapixels and AF points and figuring out how these products stack up against each other in all the intangible ways that really matter -- but aren't in a standard product description. Unfortunately, I rarely see reviews like this on a "review site" (1) because it's a lot of work and (2) because most of the authors of these review sites haven't actually used the products themselves.

As for the "clone stores" mentioned above, if all you're doing is copying categories from Amazon to your site (perhaps filtering out the ones with bad reviews), you're really not adding anything that people can't get on Amazon either. Unfortunately that's what most "Amazon clone" sites seem to be and so it's not at all surprising when I hear sites like these aren't making money.

Fundamentally, the two questions that I think are vital to ask with any business model are (1) why should someone go to you other than somewhere else and (2) why should someone go back to you again and again. If you don't have a compelling answer to those two questions, you're not going to do well no matter if you have two products or two million.

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P.S. If you're looking for an example of a great review checkout Ken Rockwell's description of the now obsolete D90 camera (note: I have no affiliation with Rockwell, except I used this very review before buying my own D90 back in the day). Here are a few choice quotes to illustrate what I was talking about above:

• "The D90 is fast, but not as fast as a D300, D700 or D3." (Compares the product to similar products in simple terms, not in meaningless numbers)
• "Data Transfer: The D90 has one design flaw: when plugged into a computer, it does not always appear directly as a hard drive, as other Nikon cameras do." (You'd never get this sort of information without actually using the product.)
• "Autorotation: Pointed straight down, it's not uncommon for shots to be rotated incorrectly. The rotation sensor is worse then the D3; it's not unusual for it to get fooled. No big deal, it's easy to right these later." (Again, you'd have to use the product to know this. Also, he puts this flaw into context: "No big deal")
• Rockwell even has a section on "Sales Fluff" which goes through all the features that they try to sell you on, but that don't really matter.
• He also has a section on "What's missing" so you know what the flaws are and can decide for yourself if you can live with them -- much of this is in relation to other products so you can decide for yourself if a better product might suit you.
• He also has a section "What's Better" comparing how the product is an improvement over other models.
• Rockwell is also very honest and doesn't appear to be trying to sell you stuff you don't need: "If money makes any difference, forget the D90. Digital cameras are a rich man's game. You don't need to spend $999 every other year just because Nikon or some web site says so. If I was on a budget and didn't shoot these cameras all day, every day, I'd never want anything other than the D40 for $499, complete with a great lens. I have no problem making great 20x30" prints from my D40 and its dinky kit lens."
• And on and on and on...

The point is while Rockwell's site looks pretty crappy, the navigation isn't all that great and it really needs help with the user experience, all those things aren't his schtick. You go to Rockwell for great reviews. Period. And he delivers.

As an aside, I should also point out that Rockwell has a lot more on his site than just cameras. He has flashes, tripods, etc. And I should also note that (for what it's worth) his site is ranked under 8,000 on Alexa, so he's doing something right!

It is actually pretty simple to generate a massive amount of longtail focused product pages when using the right tools. You could eventually use a wordpress plugin called "gravity form" create an output template and a form for the relevant data for your category, add a featured image with alt tag, add a review video if you find any on the product, etc etc... fill out the forms in one swoop (3 days work for around 400 products) and have 400 longtail optimized pages on your WP website.

The downside is that all data added this way is hardcoded, so you cant use names, dimensions etc as meta data, but you can add different products to different categories and add tags to them so you make the navigation and "surfing" simpler for your users.

Add a comment function and let visitors generate additional content on your pages to increase the word count,... etc.. pp this is a million dollar recipe if you keep on scaling it up

Hello azhaze,
From my own experience, I am inclined to lean towards more narrow niches with fewer Products offered.

This seems to be a more true and tried method.


- Robert Andrew