Pondering on link to merchant or link to product - what are your experiences?

[maxkay]

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So after being full of motivation from smingles thread (thank you again!), I went about setting up my first site gardenpowertools / org / uk. Whilst I've been sitting around waiting for the merchants to approve me (linkshare - can you give the folks at wyevale garden centre a nudge? ), I've been pondering the best way to put the content on.

I've now a bit worried that my choice of site because I'm realising that it's not quite as niche as I thought. I was reading the bloke at entrepreneur.co.uk's (sorry mate I don't know your name) blog about his bean bag site. Something like this lends itself great to having individual product reviews. But realising I might have to write about 50 - 100 products. With a site like this mine would you potentially just look at linking to a merchant and have a few best buys and accept that the conversion rate might be lower than a product link? Or is now the time to get my hands dirty working out feeds etc?

That's quite a rambling post sorry. In summary I have 3 questions: 1) what sort of difference in conversion rates do you see between merchant links and product links? 2) if you realise you've bitten off more than you can chew in terms of content, what do you normally do? 3) Am I just being a lazy git?

Best

Max

[aaclapham]

Do an initial small site to see how it ranks, then over time add those reviews to the 50 - 100 products building up the site, even if it is just 5 reviews a week.

The only major problem I see is linking to individual products is over time some of the products disappear leading to links going nowhere. So you could just link to the categories, or check links every so often.

[Keith]

Personally with a site like that I would go midway and link to category eg: mowers, hedgers, strimmers etc.

[maxkay]

Cheers guys, your thoughts are much appreciated... will build up something small initially I reck