New to here, looking to revive an old passion

[dmcardle]

Hi all,

I just discovered this forum a few days ago, and I find it very encouraging.

I ran an affiliate marketing website for a niche category in the 90s that did fairly well. Then the dotbomb bust happened and I moved on to other things. I've kept the (semi-premium) domain all these years, and recently thought to try to revive it. It seems like the world has changed a lot, although when I did some market research I did run into some familiar names from back then.

The one major change since the late 90s is Google, which didn't exist back then. I built up a small site on the domain, and followed all the SEO wisdom when submitting it into Google, and then got crickets. I've read all sorts of conflicting views on their algorithm, and one that sticks out is that apparently Google has started to really heavily penalize affiliate marketing sites. Given the name of this community, I figured this is the place to ask about that.

Judging from some of the other posts I see here, affiliate marketing certainly is not dead, so it sounds like I could learn quite a lot from people here.

Regards,
Dan

 

[T J Tutor]

Welcome to AffiliateFix!

The fast paced days of "run & gun" are over. Landers are considered uninformative and not in the users best interest by SE's. Social media platforms are where most lend themselves to utilizing the older pitch fest funnels got affiliate offer funnels.

The one thing that has grown constantly are content sites. True, well maintained, frequently updated, in depth niche content sites where you can sprinkle great affiliate (no crap) offers and do very well.

 

[xlovecash]

welcome to the community and great response by TJ

 

[dmcardle]

Welcome to AffiliateFix!

The fast paced days of "run & gun" are over. Landers are considered uninformative and not in the users best interest by SE's. Social media platforms are where most lend themselves to utilizing the older pitch fest funnels got affiliate offer funnels.

The one thing that has grown constantly are content sites. True, well maintained, frequently updated, in depth niche content sites where you can sprinkle great affiliate (no crap) offers and do very well.

Thank you for this warm welcome.

This comment also brings a question to mind: as you likely know, in the 90s, Yahoo served as a sort of directory, and Google supplanted it with Pagerank. Both approaches served as solutions to the discovery problem. But now it appears that with ChatGPT and other AI tools, Google has pivoted from discovery, towards trying to capture "intent." So they are no longer a library, and are now more of a fancy ad serving agency. I guess that element was always there, but the balance seems to have shifted.

If that assessment is true, do you think Google's days are numbered?

 

[Graybeard]

If that assessment is true, do you think Google's days are numbered?

Most likely not, however 'Google SEO' will continue to pivot into a much smaller segment probably.