Sponsor products plus my own retail items?

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   Bill Manningposted 14 years ago

   As many of you know I have a leather jacket website. I sell them retail; customers pay me through a shopping cart and I send them the items.
   
   My site is getting pretty good now at ranking for anything to do with leather. Soooo, it occurred to be that I could make product pages in my site for other leather items.
   
   Such as leather jewelry boxes, leather briefcases, leather bracelets and a dozen other things. Those pages would work as another way to bring customers in.
   
   However it's very hard to find good wholesale places to get those other items. So, I would make them a sponsor page; clicking an item would take you to Amazon or whatever sponsor I used.
   
   My question is, would that be confusing to customers wanting to buy a jacket? They would see they need to complete my shopping cart to order a jacket.
   
   Yet if they browsed the leather jewelry boxes they would suddenly find themselves on another site!
   
   I could put a big sign at the top of those pages saying items below are sold on a different site. But if they wanted a jacket plus one of those items they can't buy them together.
   
   SO, would doing this be too confusing for customers, or worth a few upset customers in return for a lot more traffic from those keywords?

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   Nelle Hoxieposted 14 years ago

   I would be more concerned about tanking your site rankings by adding affiliate links.

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      Bill Manningposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      Hi Nelle. You think adding affiliate links can make a site drop in rankings? I've never heard that before.
      
      I suppose they would add a lot of outbound links, but I could make them all no-follow.
      
      I have 6 sites in a blog format. Every single blog post is just a sponsor article with two or more links to the sponsor, all do-follow.
      
      The biggest one has thousands of blog post like that, yet it's the highest ranking one, number one for several of it's key words.
      
      So that does not seem to affect it much. Have you had that happen to you? Anyways thanks for your advice.

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         yenajeonposted 14 years agoin reply to this

         I would definitely NOT do that. It would remove customers from the site and they may never come back. Worse? They would now be on Amazon searching for leather jacket to buy from them. It's an awful idea.
         The best solution I can think of is finding manufacturers for those leather goods you want to sell. Ask around in leather business forums and such. Then you can expand on your business.

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            Bill Manningposted 14 years agoin reply to this

            Thanks yenajeon. So you think it's an awful idea huh? Yes it would be much better if I could find those items to stock myself and sell them myself.
            
            I always have external links open in a new window, but they still would be going somewhere else. I admit I have never seen a site do what I am thinking of.
            
            I guess if I want to push other leather items I should just open a new site for leather affiliate sites. Lots to think about, thanks again for your advice.

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         Nelle Hoxieposted 14 years agoin reply to this

         Yes I have. I wouldn't mix the two now.

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         1. 74

            Bill Manningposted 14 years agoin reply to this

            Good deal, I'm starting to think it is indeed a bad idea. Shame, I can make a single blog post about a different type of leather product and get on the first page no problem.
            
            Maybe I will start a new site that is only leather affiliate items and just have it as a link from my main site. That way if they are looking for the other things I have not really lost them but still made a sale.
            
            On a side note, I did do this with my tourist site I have had for a few years. Just before this past Christmas I made a dozen or so pages of Disney and Harry Potter Amazon store pages in it.
            
            The site is still very strong and I rank first page with many of the new product pages as well as other key words.
            
            But yes, you could really screw up a site doing something different.

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