The phrase “content is king” has been kicking around web marketing circles since the old days. More recently affiliate marketers have debated the point to death, some citing sales sites as the sliced bread of affiliate marketing and some tooting the content horn.

My company owns a pile of domains, a pile of sites and a pile of content. We also run a niche specific retail site and a few other sales sites. While the retail site makes more dough than the rest (better margins and more opportunity to build the channel and brand), the content sites do shine from time to time.

A couple recent examples come to mind. One of our sites is wine related. It’s content driven and gets decent traffic. It does okay at being a minor authority in its niche, but makes very little money in terms of commissions. It doesn’t sell at all well, but since launching it I’ve received about 40 bottles of free wine from wineries all over the world (15 in the last few weeks), and not bad juice either. Most of it is good stuff and priced well beyond what I would normally spend on a bottle of wine.

Spending time writing good content made me an authority (if only a minor one) and being an authority means my opinion matters. Having an opinion that matters seems to equate to drinking really good wine. Not cash in my pocket directly, but it does save me money on buying the cheaper swill I might otherwise be drinking (color me frugal to the point of being cheap)…

Another content site of ours, an experiment that worked well, is about a specifc media product (by media, think of a tv show, album, movie, game, etc). We built the site as an experiment in both SEO and affiliate marketing. We had one target in mind. We registered a new domain and spent several days making the site, writing the content, trying out the SEO theory (don’t ask), etc. Within 30 days the site was ranked #1 for its target term on Google, has maintained that spot for several months and is currently converting at 5.95% on its main affiliate program!

I don’t care how much you make on pure PPC and datafeed sites, you have to admit that a content site landing #1 and converting that free traffic at 5.95% is pretty fantastic!

Neither of these examples answer the question posed in the title of the thread, but you can bet your boots we’ll continue the above mentioned experiment with several, several, several more similar sites around new targets, and that I’ll continue drinking good wine and posting my tasting notes. Who cares if content is king or even crown prince of janitors when you’re enjoying 5.95% conversion rates over a big ol’ glass of investment quality wine?