Data vs. Information Affiliate Sites: Which way to go

There are a lot of ways to make online from affiliate marketing. You can always try CPA offers and play the PPC game. You can play the social media game and build killer apps for Facebook and Twitter and push affiliate products in the process. Or you can just focus on building portals and make money online that way. Portal building is one of the oldest ways to make money online. The whole portal development field has been around for years but a few years ago, people started realize the power of building a huge portal and optimizing for every keyword under the sun.

I remember watching a review from a conference in 2003 about how you can make money online with portal development. The person who was doing the presentation claimed at the time that he was making enough money from his website that he could quit his events and still have a comfortable life. That strategy may not be as novel as it used to  be, and it may take a lot of work, but it can still be done. With the explosion of the social media and search engines changing their indexes to provide more relevant results to their visitors, the opportunity is there for portal developers to make a killing online.

There are really two types of affiliate portals online. Not every affiliate approaches this business as a long term venture. A lot of people who are interested in quick cash use scripts to gather information from other sites and slap them together to build a data portal with thousands of pages. These pages do get ranked for long-tail keyword phrases and the traffic adds up. The goal with these portals is to make money from Adsense or other types of advertising.

Information portals are more descriptive than data portals. They provide unique value to visitors. There is a difference between listing all the computers in the world on a website than writing real reviews about each and every one. Sure, it’s more difficult to build an information portal with 10,000+ pages, but if you do manage to pull it off, you will have a great shot at making a lot of money online from advertising, affiliate marketing, and other revenue sources.

Using a script to grab data from retailer sites and slap together a portal actually does work. But that’s really in the gray area, and you do not get too much long term benefits from them. Google and other top sites will eventually reduce your rankings, and you’ll have to change your strategy and do it all over again. With informational portals, you not only create content that get ranked on search engines, you provide real value to your visitors. It’s much easier to encourage people to buy using your affiliate link when you are providing real value, and while you may still get slapped by Google, it won’t be due to your portal being flagged as a sportal. Perhaps the best way to go is to create a data portal and start building up your content bank step by step. That way you can go live fast and fix up your portal as you go.

Portal development is not as easy as most people think. It takes a lot of time and effort. Besides, it’s not something you can finish and put away for a year. You have to keep updating it. So it takes time and effort. But if you are looking for a no brainer way to make money from affiliate marketing, portal development is the way to go.