“is it possible to make a reasonable living from a single site purely with affiliate links” – In a word, yes. It’s possible, but it’s not easy – it’s going to take a LOT of hard work, blood sweat and tears to get there.

In some ways, it’s harder to stop yourself going off on tangents – I started out with one site, and did very well, eventually building that site up to the point I could give up the Day Job. When I started adding sites left right and centre to try and replicate the success of that one site, it didn’t work out, and I had 50 sites earning a fraction more than the one that I was totally focused on.

I’ve still got a lot of sites now, but am scaling back to really focus on 2/3 of them (bearing in mind I outsource a lot of the work and also have a couple of members of staff).

If you’re interested in adding video editorial content to your site, then you should have a look at – it’s proven to increase clickthroughs and conversions, and you can now easily add price comparison/affiliate links to any video.

I have been looking at sites like

thenod.com
stylecaster.com/

they have been investor backed, they mix editorial content, sometimes video, community, social media all leading people to products/store.

I want to do something similar on a smaller scale.. with video editorial content to draw in people (not plain product reviews) but can it be safe to just go for one site hell for leather and risk it failing to take off/convert?

I tend to go down the route of creating everything on Wordpress these days – whack up an ok theme, and start adding content. Once I’ve got a hundred pages or so, I then revisit and tweak the design, maybe adding a custom header/logo to the site to improve the overall feel.

So in my case, a very basic design came first (instantly provided by Wordpress), followed by a load of content, and then finally a lot more design!

Personally I prefer a balance, I want my sites to look “OK” but I am not going to go hire a designer to tart it up to perfection. I prefer simple and clean looking sites which can normally be achieved with templates and your CMS of choice. I have always believed in creating sites with long term value which do need to have a point and serve some purpose, but to use the classic examples of craigs list, beer in the evening or even the big G themselves – flash design doesn’t have to come first if you have site that has something to say. Functional design yes, things need to flow and be accessible, but it doesn’t have to look like you paid a design agency a million quid to come up with a logo etc !