Let’s say you’re the owner of a company that provides great services or products on the internet. Wouldn’t you want an internet audience to know about your site and trust it enough to buy items from it? One way to accomplish both of these goals is by setting up and promoting affiliate and feeder sites. Here’s a great affiliate site idea for clever internet marketing:

Purchase a new domain name that is relevant to the area of your product or service (i.e. if you sell sponges, try something like”spongeinfo.com”). Develop this site with information about your product/service, as well as like information about your competitors. Maintain an objective tone while subtly highlighting the positive differences between you and your competitors. Make sure to provide contact info for not only your site, but your competitors sites as well. If you do a good enough job highlighting the positive differences about your product/service, it will sell itself and people will click through to your site over the sites of your competitors. So no, people won’t know that you–the owner of the site you’re trying to drive people to–created this affiliate/feeder site, but if you’re honest, it won’t matter. To the average consumer it looks like one more credible source attesting to the quality products/services that you promote on your business site.

Remember three things:

1) Be honest. Don’t deceive people and use this as a tool to trick consumers. I guarantee that it will come back to bite you. Besides, it’s bad karma.

2) I’ll say it again, be objective. If you’re too subjective or biased, people will sense it and your affiliate site’s credibility will be compromised. Consumers are smarter than you think.

3) Create original content for your affiliate site! There was a post recently about Yahoo! penalizing affiliate sites. If you read further, however, it was only because people were filling them with duplicate content that they copied and pasted from their other sites (yes, even their own). I can’t say it enough, duplicate content=trip to Google hell (a.k.a  the supplemental index).