Third Party Content Sources

Life as an affiliate can get pretty brutal when you sit down at your computer day after day and write more and more articles, until you can barely stand the sound of your own pen. If you're bored of yourself, think of how your visitors must feel!

Indeed, the vast majority of affiliate marketing sites are utterly banal.

Looking to spice up your affiliate marketing website? Think about how you can have other people generate content for you, and then you make money from that content, not them.

Be a Part of Something

A fundamental truth of affiliate marketing on the Internet is that no man is an island. You will need allies and partnerships to build a long-term successful affiliate marketing business.

There are many things you can do to find allies and even partners:

-- Join a LinkedIn group about your website topic

-- Subscribe to someone else's newsletter (you'd be surprised how grateful some people are)

-- Go into a forum and answer someone else's question

-- Join a MeetUp group about your website topic

-- Talk up your Internet business in the "offline" world

No matter the specifics of how you go about it, before you can understand how to make money from other people's work, you have to know other people and hear what they are saying.

Meanwhile to becoming part of some things, you'll be identifying the some people who may provide you with much content and much money over the next few years.

Reporting Other People's Wisdom Is Not Plagiarism

Let's say that you are starting a poker affiliate marketing website, so you join a local poker group where one regular player is particularly insightful about the game of poker and how to play it.

As an affiliate, you can turn this person's wisdom into your dollar bills. After a game night, document bits of wisdom that were shared by this player over the course of the session. Turn that person's words into your Internet content, surrounded by affiliate marketing offers.

This kind of approach can be useful for any topic. Find someone who knows a tremendous amount about your topic, and then listen to that person closely, write down what they say, and put it in your own words and use it as content. There's nothing wrong with that.

In fact, many dispensers of such wisdom will be flattered that someone finally listened.

Ideas for Third Party Content Sources

There are many sources of third party content that you may be able to access to improve the value proposition of your affiliate marketing website.
You can reference other people's blog posts through your blog posts, summarizing them for your readers.

You can enable visitors to your site to review your articles, so they are interacting with your content and not just skimming over it.

You can ask visitors to add their review of a product that you're reviewing.

You can incorporate a Twitter or Facebook "news feed" onto the front page of your website, publishing other people's responses to your posts.
You can use RSS feeds to bring in related content.

You can invite guest columnists to write for your website.

You can use XML product feeds to create a "virtual store" that constantly restocks its own shelves.

You can add a forum to your website so that users will generate content for you.

You can do many things to get other people to create content for you. If you ever get tired of hearing yourself blabber on and on, quick find someone else's voice and let it be heard.

If you don't ever tire of hearing yourself blabber on and on, well, perhaps you have a different sort of issue.