The Need for a Credible Guide

A friend of mine is creating a how to website. I recently wanted to purchase an item related to his field, so the first thing I did was go off to his site to look for information about the product I wanted to buy. His article about the topic was quite thin in nature and perhaps even looked like I might have wrote it, which is bad since I know nothing about the topic.

If someone is buying a cheap accessory then you might not have to sell much or sell hard or go in much depth to convert them. If someone is buying something

• that they know little about

• is expensive (in terms of opportunity cost - time, money, other factors, etc.)
• is hard to return

then you might have to provide more information to be able to build up enough trust to sell to them.

When creating an affiliate database driven site it is easy to give 1,000's of items the exact same weight, but if you can instead answer one or a few questions far better than anyone else does it is much easier to create a longterm stable income stream. Plus if most competing sites consist primarily of thin compacted data and your sales information and product guides are link worthy that provides a huge marketing benefit.

Also consider that as search engines dip further into vertical search and more thin compacted data sites are created one needs to provide better or more unique and compelling information to be citation worthy.