There are over 18.5 million eCommerce users in South Africa. This number is expected to grow by 20% by 2021. This means that every year there is more money to be made than the previous year. You can start your own review website as a side business opportunity and make money as an affiliate.

Business Model

Big companies spend billions of Rands every year on advertising a lot of this money goes to Internet advertising.

A review website is a website where you write about different products. You might compare them, share your opinion, shoot videos, upload them to YouTube and embed them in your blog posts.

In other words, visitors reading your blog posts might be interested in making purchases. This is when your affiliate links come into a game. When you refer your visitor to a company’s website, it pays off you 1-10% of a total price if they make a purchase. You also get advertising programs such as Google Adsense where you get paid every time someone clicks on an advert regardless whether they make a purchase or not.

You can make one, two, ten, a hundred websites like this.

Niche

Before you create a website, you have to choose a niche. Here is the list of the most profitable niches:

  • clothing;
  • health;
  • education;
  • relationships;
  • online business.
Affiliate Programs

There are plenty of affiliate programs on the Web. The most popular ones in South Africa are

  • Zando – you can promote anything you could imagine starting from t-shirts and ending with luxury jewelry;
  • Mantality – food and drink, health and fitness, geek and gaming, living and leisure, gadgets and gear, even sex toys – you can find a bunch of products to promote. Referral commissions are set at 10%.
Go International

A great thing about running an online business is that you can apply to any affiliate program. While Amazon is not too popular in our country, you can create review websites and introduce South Africans to online educational platforms like Udemy and make money as an affiliate.

Tips

Writing a review article is about sharing your honest opinion. If you don’t like a particular product, you’d better write so. If you do, just write about that, post your affiliate link and enjoy a commission.

Tools

In order to create a review and any other type of a website you will need:

  • a domain name;
  • a web hosting account;
  • a publishing platform or content management system (CMS) such as WordPress.

In case you decide to hire a copywriter, you can find them on Upwork, Freelancer.com or Fiverr.

More Information

The Complete WordPress Website Course

Beginner’s Guide Building & Monetizing a Website Site 2018