Affiliate Marketing

Welcome to Free Guide to Affiliate Marketing Course from Courses Buddy!

In simple words, affiliate marketing is when you promote another company's products. And when someone makes a purchase because of your referral, you're compensated with a commission.

Now, in order for the affiliate company to attribute sales to the right person, the merchant usually uses a unique link, which is called an affiliate link. When a visitor clicks that link from your blog, website, or wherever, a cookie is stored on their device.

And an affiliate cookie does two main things:

It helps the merchant attribute the sale back to the right person. cookies usually hold an expiration date, meaning people don't need to immediately purchase the product after clicking your link.

Let's run through an example, so everything is crystal-clear.

Let's say a visitor comes to your post about gardening hoses and clicks on some of your affiliate links. This leads them to a product on Amazon. But wait... they have to go and pick up their kids from soccer practice. So they do that, have dinner, and then go back to Amazon.com in their web browser.

They find the product again and then purchase it along with a game console controller. Because they clicked on your affiliate link, a cookie was stored on their device. And because Amazon has a 24-hour cookie duration, you would still get compensated a percentage for both the garden hose and the console controller, even though you weren't promoting it.

Now that we've covered the basics of what affiliate marketing is and how it works, let's talk about what you'll need to get started with affiliate marketing which is coming up in the next lesson.

In this topic, we're going to talk about the two things you need to get started with affiliate marketing.

Property or Platform

The first is a property or platform. A platform is simply a place where you can recommend your links. So that might be your own website or YouTube channel. Now, creating either of these is pretty straightforward so we won't go into things like how to make an affiliate website because this course is about the actual marketing of an affiliate site.

Relevant Traffic

The second thing you'll need is relevant and consistent traffic. Relevant traffic means that you're attracting visitors to your website that are interested in a topic and ideally want to make a purchase soon.

And one of the most important parts to getting relevant traffic is by creating content, which will house information as well as your affiliate links.

Content

So that might be reviews of products, best of comparison lists, and how-to articles. We'll talk about how you can come up with these topics in later topics. As for getting consistent traffic, much of that will come down to where you get your traffic from.

Three of the most popular channels are social media, ads, and search engines. Now, social traffic is typically inconsistent because social media networks are designed to surface new content. But many affiliate pages can actually be somewhat evergreen.

So if you don't have a significant following and brand, I wouldn't count on social media as a reliable primary source for traffic to an affiliate site.

Ads

Now, ads can be great because you can get highly relevant traffic fast. But you have to pay for every single person who clicks on your ad. So unless you're a part of a very high-paying affiliate program and you have the expertise with ads and conversion rate optimization, I'd stay away from ads because you'll find yourself underwater fast.

Search Traffic

Now, search traffic is free, consistent and passive. And the way you get search traffic is through a marketing method called search engine optimization (SEO).

It's the primary traffic source I recommend and it's what many multi-million dollar affiliate websites rely on.

We'll go much deeper into the tactical and strategic elements of creating content and getting relevant and consistent traffic in later but first, you need to know whether the reward will be worth the effort.

So in the next topic we're going to talk about how to make money with affiliate marketing and how much you can actually make.

Earning money through affiliate marketing may seem straightforward. You simply join an affiliate program, obtain unique affiliate links, and earn commissions when individuals make purchases through those links within a specified timeframe.

The potential for earnings from affiliate commissions is limitless. However, to establish a sustainable income stream from affiliate marketing, it's crucial to approach your affiliate site as a bona fide business.

Now, as we discussed in the beginning of this course, when you join an affiliate program, you're able to generate unique affiliate links. And when someone clicks on one of your links and makes a purchase within a set period of time, you're paid a commission.

So very generally speaking, the more relevant traffic you get, the more clicks you'll get on your affiliate links. And the more clicks you get, the more conversions, which equals more money in your pocket. And as long as your revenue exceeds your costs, you'll be profitable.

Now, you might be wondering how much money you can make as an affiliate marketer? The simple answer to that is that there is no limit.

Now, if you want to make a sustainable income with affiliate marketing, you need to think of your affiliate site as a business. It will be a grind and there will be some disappointing times.

But that's totally fine because when you adopt this business mindset instead of seeing it as a way to "hopefully" make a few bucks here and there, you'll be setting yourself up for success.

The core of your affiliate website will primarily comprise blog posts where you can incorporate affiliate links. Additionally, search engine optimization serves as the main method for driving traffic to your site.

This lesson will give you a good idea of the skills, techniques and strategies you'll learn throughout this course.

Key Principles

So, at a high level, your affiliate site is going to be made up of primarily blog posts. And the types of content you'll create will mostly be informational pieces. For example, how-to articles and comparisons of different products. And within the content, you'll add your affiliate links to products you recommend.

When someone clicks on one of these links and makes a purchase you're going to be compensated by the affiliate merchant or partner. Now, not only will your content convert visitors into revenue, but it's going to attract visitors to your website, too.

And the marketing method we'll use to get traffic to your affiliate site is search engine optimization because the traffic is free, consistent and passive. Best of all, SEO traffic will help you generate consistent revenue that compounds over time.

Now, there are actually quite a few steps to get to the point of generating consistent traffic and revenue. But to give you a high-level overview, we can break down the process into four macro steps. Finding a niche; planning your website; building your website; and getting traffic to it.

So let's go through these phases at a high level, starting with finding a niche.

Finding a Niche in Affiliate Marketing

When you're starting an affiliate site, especially if you're relatively inexperienced, it's beneficial to start with a heavy focus on a niche. For example, it would probably be better to start a barbeque recipes site rather than a generic one on all types of recipes.

And that's because broader topics tend to have more competition and as a result, it'll be tough for you to get traffic to your site. And without traffic, there is no revenue.

Now, this is just one small example of the things you'll need to consider when choosing a niche. There are other things to evaluate like breadth of the topic, personal interest, commerciality, and more.

Alright, the next stage is planning your affiliate site.

Affiliate Marketing Website

This is where you'll be creating the blueprint for your affiliate website. And there are two things in particular that you'll need to plan.

1. You'll need to plan your content strategy.

And this is a super-important step because it's foundational to both traffic and conversions. Now, the majority of the planning will be done through an SEO technique called keyword research, which is a process to understand the queries people use to search for products, services, and general information in search engines.

2. You'll need to plan your site or content structure.

And by structure, I'm mostly talking about grouping which is done with internal links. We'll cover all of this in great detail in the next lesson.

Now, after you've finished planning your site, you'll need to build it out. This includes making a website and setting up tools for things like tracking.

Now, the most time-consuming and important part of this stage is creating content.

“Content is king.”

Because content is what will help you to rank in search engines and it's what your visitors will use to make buying decisions.

Now, getting traffic through SEO is much more challenging than just writing good stuff. A key ingredient to rank high in Google and attract a ton of visitors to your site will be backlinks.

We'll talk about some basic strategies in this free guide to affiliate marketing course that any beginner can implement which should help power your pages to rank for their target queries and hopefully put some money in your pocket.

So now that you have a high-level overview of what building your affiliate site will look like, let's get our hands dirty and move on to the next topic, where we'll dig deep into finding niches, qualifying them, and choosing one that'll be right for you.

Before we get to the techniques to find and qualify a niche, you need to know what to look for in a niche. And there are four factors we'll focus on.

The first factor is competition.

Now, because we established in the first topic that we'll be creating content and ranking it in search engines like Google, we'll be looking specifically at SEO and keyword competition.

And the main purpose of this is to get an idea if we could somewhat easily rank for keywords that are relevant to an affiliate site.

Now, there are a lot of things that go into assessing keyword competition, but at this stage, we just want to get a high-level overview for a niche.

So we'll use a simple 3-step process to do this.

1. Generate keyword ideas.
2. Filter for low-difficulty keywords using a metric called "keyword difficulty,"
3. Narrow in on affiliate keywords.

To get started, search for a phrase related to your niche in a keyword research tool like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, then go to the Matching terms report. Now, to filter for low-difficulty keywords, just set a keyword difficulty filter to have a max value of something low like 10. Finally, you'll want to filter for affiliate-type keywords.

For example, keywords that include the word "best" tend to surface product roundups like "best golf clubs". Or keywords that include the word "review" will usually surface product reviews like "stix golf clubs review".

To do that, hit the Include filter, choose the Any tab, and in the text field, just add words like "best" and "review". Now, if we hit the Show results button, you'll see there are thousands of relevant, low-difficulty keywords that cumulatively have high search demand.

Again, we've only scratched the surface with keyword competition and we'll go into more detail later. But if you want to learn more now, then I recommend to visit our free SEO course for beginners on how you can assess ranking difficulty for any keyword.

The second factor is commerciality.

Now, not all niches are created equal. Some have wild commercial value which can lead to millions of dollars in monthly revenue, while others might only result in a few hundred dollars – if even.

Ideally, you want to choose a niche that has mid to high commercial value so that you don't reach a point where you'll max out on your profit potential.

A few things you can do include, market research on the niche, look at commissions for relevant affiliate programs, and look at advertising costs to get an idea of how valuable certain queries are to different companies.

The third factor to consider is personal interest.

Plain and simple, you don't have to be passionate about a niche to make a successful affiliate site. But it doesn't mean you should choose a niche just for profit potential.

From my experience, choosing a niche that you're at least somewhat interested in is the best route to go. Because people often quit their affiliate sites because they have zero interest in the products they're recommending and the content they're creating. Losing drive may be the first killer of affiliate sites.

The fourth factor to consider is breadth of the search market.

Again, because we're going after search traffic, you want to get an understanding of how much traffic you can get to your content from search engines. Fortunately, keyword research tools make this easy for us because they tell us search volumes, which are the number of monthly searches that happen for a query.

SEO tools can also give you search traffic estimations for your competitors which is even more helpful than search volumes because what we want is traffic, not searches.

So by understanding the breadth of the search market, you're essentially getting an estimation of how many people are interested in topics you'll be writing about, how much traffic you can get from these topics, and in turn, how many clicks you can get to your affiliate links which should directly be correlated with your revenue.

As a general rule of thumb, you'll need to start off pretty niche because competition will likely be lower. But your niche should be tied to a larger industry so you have the opportunity to niche out, which is going to give you room to eventually reach more people.

For example, you might start an affiliate site in the bed frames niche. And after doing some quick keyword research for affiliate keywords, you'll see that there's a cumulative search volume of over 130,000 monthly searches in the US just for "bed frames." Not small at all, but not huge.

But the great thing about bed frames is that it's quite natural to niche out to topics like "mattresses," "pillows," "sheets," and even to the broader topic of "sleep." There's tons of room for growth.

Now, what you're going to find as you're researching niches is that a lot of these factors are connected. For example, niches that are highly commercial will also have high competition and niches with low competition will often be things you're not interested in.

It's all about finding a balance from this criteria then committing to a niche. In fact, these four things that we just talked about are going to help you rate any niche so you can qualify one that's right for you.

But before we get to qualifying, we need to start brainstorming a list of niches and doing our research.

 

The method of discovering and assessing niches varies depending on the stage of niche selection you find yourself in.

You're likely to fall into one of two categories.

1. You already have a general notion of the niches that pique your interest.

In this scenario, jot down your niche ideas and examine the potential keywords and competing websites.

2. You don’t have a specific idea yet, but you're open to exploring potential opportunities.

Begin by exploring the websites affiliated with popular affiliate programs, such as Amazon, to identify promising niche prospects.

I'm going to tell you how to find and qualify a niche for your affiliate marketing site. Now, before we get into the research and qualification methods, let's quickly recap the four things you should look for in a niche.

And these are:

The level of SEO competition, which will tell us who we'll be up against or even if we can compete.

Commerciality, which will give us hints into how much money we can make. Personal interest, which is important to most people because you want to to actually enjoy what you're doing. And the breadth of the search market, which gives us an idea of the size of our addressable market – at least for the type of traffic we'll be going for.

These will help us qualify a niche so we can make an informed decision when it comes time to choose one.

Now, the process to find and qualify niches depends on where you are in your niche selection process. And you'll probably fall into one of two buckets.

1. You already have a general idea of the niches that interest you.

2. you don't have a concrete idea yet, but you're open to any and all opportunities if they seem interesting.

Let's go through the process for the first and I'll show you how you can find information to check off items on your qualification checklist as we go.

Alright, so assuming you already have a general idea of niches that interest you, the first thing you'll want to do is write them down. So for me that would be topics like golf, clean energy, and personal finance.

Now, because these are all things that I'm interested in, we can add a plus to the "personal interest" qualification factor. For each of these topics, you'll need to brainstorm some broad topics and products related to that niche.

For example, if we were to do this for the golf niche, I'd jot down ideas like: "golf," "putter," "irons," and "wedge."

Now, with our subtopics in hand, the next thing you'll need to do is about 3 minutes of preliminary keyword research. And you'll need a keyword research tool to do this.

So I'm using Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and all I'm going to do is paste my list of subtopics and run the search. Next, I'll go to the Matching terms report to get a list of keyword ideas. Now, not all of these keywords will be relevant to an affiliate niche.

We want to find topics where it's easy to naturally recommend different products. Fortunately, so-called "affiliate keywords" are easy to find using keyword modifiers. And these are just add-ons to a base keyword.

For example, when a query includes the word "best," it usually means you need to create a product roundup. Queries that contain the word "vs" or "review" usually mean you'll need to write a review or comparison article in order to rank in Google.

Now, because we know we can find "affiliate keywords" by looking for queries that contain the words "best," "vs,' or 'review,' we can take these words and paste them into the "include" box in Keywords Explorer.

I'll also hit the Any word tab because we want to see keywords that contain any of these keywords in addition to one of our searched topics. Hit Apply, hit Show keywords and we now have a list of mostly commercial topics that would be valuable to a golf affiliate site.

The fact that there are nearly two million monthly searches in Google from just the US alone tells us that the breadth of the search market is quite large. So we can add a plus to that factor on our qualification list.

Now, some of these are going to be quite competitive to rank for, but we can actually filter for low-difficulty keywords using the Keyword difficulty filter. All you have to do is set the maximum KD value to something low like 20.

And right away, you'll see that there's still nearly a million monthly searches that happen for these low-competition keywords each month. So both SEO competition and search breadth seem good to me.

Now, to get an idea of commercial value, you can scan through the CPC column to see how much advertisers are willing to pay for a click for a specific query. But these values are only for one query which isn't that helpful because you want to get a full picture of how valuable your traffic would be if you were to rank for a lot of these affiliate type keywords.

And the way to do that is to find a competing affiliate site that's already ranking for queries that you'd want to rank for and are not mega authorities in your niche because they'll be too tough to compete with, at least when you're first starting out.

So to find these competing websites, you can use Ahrefs Content Explorer. Just search for something like "best golf" and then set the search mode to a Title search. And this will show us pages that contain the words "best" and "golf" in the title of the pages.

Basically, it's going to show us other golf affiliate pages, many that are from dedicated golf affiliate sites. Now, because SEO competition is a big part of qualifying a niche, especially for beginners, I recommend setting a Domain Rating filter to have a low maximum value of something like 20.

And again, Domain Rating is a metric that tries to measure a website's authority. Hit Show results, and now you have a list of pages from low authority websites that are likely posting affiliate content on golf products. But we don't need to see pages at this point.

We want to know more about how websites are performing as a whole. To view the top websites, just click the Websites tab. And now you can see a list of low-authority websites, the amount of total organic traffic they get, and their traffic values.

Now, traffic value tells us how much it would cost to pay for this amount of organic traffic if you were to buy it from Google ads. And the reason why it's a decent proxy to understanding a site's commercial value is because if advertisers are willing to pay this much money to get this traffic, then it's likely valuable.

Now, it's important to note that when you're looking at these metrics, you need to make sure that the sites you're analyzing are actually going to be competing niche affiliate sites. Just scan the domain names and if it sounds like it might be a niche blog, click it to investigate the types of content they create.

So for this site, it's clear that it's an affiliate website as the content is primarily based around reviews and product round-ups. Now, going back to Content Explorer, you'll see that the site gets a ton of monthly search traffic and it has a traffic value of around $70,000/month, while being a low-authority site.

Now, to be clear, it doesn't mean that this site makes $70,000/month, but it tells us that the topics the site ranks for have clear commercial value. So let's add a plus to that qualification factor.

Now, it's important to note that you shouldn't use traffic value as the only means to understand commercial value. One key component that we didn't talk about here are the affiliate programs that these sites are using.

Alright, now let's talk about finding and qualifying niches if you're not quite sure of the topics you want to cover. There are two effective ways to find niches.

The first is to look at the sites that are linking to a big affiliate program like Amazon. For example, that golf affiliate site we found earlier is an Amazon affiliate. And if we hover over one of the affiliate links, you'll see that the link points to a page on the domain amzn.to. This is Amazon's shortened URL.

So with that domain in hand, let's go to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, type in the URL amzn.to, and run the search.

Next, head on over to the Backlinks report, which is going to show us all pages that link to this website. Now, because SEO competition and breadth of the search market are important considerations when choosing a niche, we can set some filters to narrow down the results, seeing as amzn.to has nearly 50 million links.

First, I'll choose "One page per domain" because we're interested in website data and not so much page-level data at this point. And then I'll set the Domain Rating filter to a maximum of 20 to filter for low-authority websites.

Next, I'll set the Domain Traffic filter to have a minimum value of 10,000, which will help us understand breadth to a certain extent.

Finally, I'll click on More filters and choose Language. And I'll set this to English.

All looks good, so let's hit Show results. Now it's just a matter of skimming through the referring page column and using some common sense to infer what the site may be about.

For example, this one is a stock checker, this one is on headphone reviews, and this one is on knives. The knives one is actually pretty interesting because this website only has a Domain Rating of 6 and gets around 100,000 monthly search visits from Google each month.

So this tells us that SEO competition is likely weak for this niche and the breadth of the search market, even for low-difficulty keywords will be decent. So let's add a plus to those factors.

Now, to get an understanding of commerciality, we can look to the traffic value for this site. To do that, I'll just run a new domain search in Site Explorer for nothingbutknives.com. And as you can see, the site has a monthly traffic value of around $50,000 which is pretty impressive for such a low-authority site.

Now, as for personal interest, that's up to you.

Alright, the second way to find niches is to search for "best of" posts in Content Explorer. To do that, just search for "best" in the search box and set it to a Title search.

Next, we'll set a DR filter to have a maximum value of 20. And just like we did before, I'll set a website traffic filter to have a minimum value of 10,000. We'll set the Language filter to English and then hit Show results.

And this is basically showing us pages from websites that get a lot of traffic, are low-authority, and are in English. Now, if you want the summarized version, you can hit the Websites tab to see the top 100 websites in Content Explorer's search results based on their organic traffic. Then, just skim through the domain names to see if there are any obvious niche sites that you might be interested in exploring.

For example, this site looks like it's on work boots, which gets a ton of search traffic, has high traffic value and has very low website authority. There's a triple plus for our work boots niche.

And for good measure, I'll click through to the site and yes, it is an affiliate site all about work boots. Now, that is a niche I would have never thought of. If you want a bigger list to skim through, go back to the pages tab and hit the "One page per domain" filter.

Finally, hit the "Exclude homepages" filter, and you'll have tons of results you can look through along with their SEO metrics to help qualify niches. Now, the qualification methods we went through are just quick checks, especially for the commerciality factor.

The affiliate programs that are associated with the niche will often determine the potential revenue you can generate because different programs offer different commissions.

Next, I'm going to tell you the best affiliate programs to join and how you can find niche affiliate programs that are worth exploring.

Initially, you'll gain insights into the advantages and disadvantages of various prominent affiliate marketing programs, including Amazon Associates, Target, Commission Junction, and others. Also, you'll grasp the distinction between affiliate programs and affiliate networks.

Furthermore, beyond identifying top affiliate niches, you'll discover techniques for selecting those most likely to generate substantial commissions for you. This involves striking a balance between the reputation of the product/brand and its conversion rates.

Amazon Associates

So let's kick things off with possibly the most popular affiliate program, and that's Amazon Associates. Amazon's affiliate program. They have millions of products you can promote and it's probably the most trusted ecommerce brand in the world.

So in my opinion, Amazon Associates is the best catchall affiliate program in the world. Now, their payouts differ based on the category of the product. And commissions can range from 1 to 20% of the sale price.

Let's look through the pros and cons of this program, starting with the pros. We already touched on one and that's the fact that you have a huge inventory of products to choose from. Another pro is that you can monetize international traffic using their OneLink feature.

Basically, you create a single affiliate link for a product and depending on the location of that visitor, they'll be sent to their local Amazon site. For example, let's say a person from the US clicks your affiliate link. They'll be directed to the Amazon.com product page.

But if someone from Canada or the UK clicks that same link, they'll be redirected to the amazon.ca or amazon.co.uk product pages, assuming they exist. And the final pro is that Amazon's conversion rate is extremely high.

Because it's Amazon and most people, at least in the US, have an Amazon account, there's very little friction from product page to checkout. And remember, as an affiliate, you don't get paid for clicks. You only get paid when the merchant gets paid.

Now, the main con with Amazon's affiliate program is that the commissions are generally pretty low. And for many niches, there are other programs that offer better payouts. We'll get into finding these affiliate programs in a bit.

Target

The next affiliate program is Target. Target is a big box store in the United States and has a huge inventory of products – much like Amazon. Now, their payout is pretty low at "up to 8%." But one differentiator from Amazon is that Target offers a 7-day cookie life, while Amazon only has a 24-hour cookie.

This means that if someone clicks your Target affiliate link and makes any purchase within 7-days, you'll be paid a commission. Whereas with Amazon, the person who clicks the link needs to make a purchase within 24 hours.

Commission Junction

The next affiliate program is Commission Junction. Actually, CJ is an affiliate network. Basically, companies who want to start an affiliate program will sign up with Commission Junction and they'll handle all the tracking and software related things.

Now, the pros of CJ is that you get access to a directory of thousands of affiliate programs. They also share stats like the average earnings per click over 7 and 30 day time periods, as well as the commission rates.

Another pro is that unlike Amazon, you're not limited to physical products or Amazon subscriptions. There are companies that offer intangible products like Booking.com, which handles travel bookings and software companies like GetResponse which offers email marketing services.

Now, a downside to CJ is that you have to actually apply for each program and get accepted. Most of these affiliate merchants from my experience are much pickier in who they allow to become an affiliate compared to Amazon.

So while it doesn't hurt to create a CJ account and apply for these programs, you may initially get rejected until you reach a certain amount of consistent traffic. But there shouldn't be anything to worry about because if you follow the steps in this course, you should be able to do that with SEO, which we'll get in another module.

ShareASale

Alright, the next affiliate program is ShareASale. And actually, this is also an affiliate network.

Now, I won't bother talking much about ShareASale because it's pretty much the exact same as Commission Junction, but there are different merchants that use it. For example, Etsy and Weebly both use ShareaSale to run their affiliate programs.

Finding Niche Affiliate Programs

Alright, so now that we've covered some of the more general affiliate programs and networks, let's talk about how you can find niche affiliate programs that are likely high-performers in your niche. And it's quite simple. You just need to look at which affiliate programs your competitors frequently link to.

After all, if a lot of your competitors are using a specific affiliate program, then chances are, it converts and/or pays out well.

And there are two ways to do this: The first is to go to Google and search for something like "best [product name]." For example, in the previous lesson, we found an affiliate site about knives. So I might search for "best knives for camping."

Then you can click on a few of the articles to open them in new tabs. And all you have to do now is hover over their affiliate links to see who they link to. Now, this is functional, but it's not exactly efficient.

A better way is to use a free feature in Ahrefs SEO toolbar. Just click on the icon, choose the Links tab, and select "External" from the dropdown to see all external links on that page. And as you can see, this page only seems to link to Amazon's affiliate program.

Now, if we look at the next ranking page, you'll see that they link to Amazon and another one called "Avantlink" which is an affiliate network that companies like REI and Campsaver use.

So to research the programs further, you'd need to sign up for an account at Avantlink and check out the metrics they provide on these programs. Now, the downside to this method is that we're looking at just one page. And this page happens to be about knives for camping.

But a site about knives would probably talk about kitchen knives too. And you don't buy kitchen knives at a camping store. So a much better way to get a holistic view of all affiliate programs in a niche is to see who your competitors link to most across their entire site.

For example, in the last lesson on finding niches, we found this niche site about knives. And according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, it gets a ton of search traffic which is quite valuable as you can see from their monthly traffic value.

Now, to find the affiliate merchants that this knife site links to, you just have to go to the Linked Domains report in Site Explorer, which shows you all websites that this site links to.

Just sort the table by the "Links to Target" column to see who this site links to most. Now, all you have to do is skim the domain names to see if they look like it would lead to an affiliate program or network. We already know that all of the Amazon links will be affiliate links. Then you'll see this shortened URL shrsl.com which this site links to hundreds of times. This is Shareasale's shortened URL for affiliate links.

Now, if we click on the number for this row, and click one of the affiliate links, you'll see it leads to a knife company called BladeHQ. And if we look up that site in ShareaSale, you can see the commission amount and earnings per click metric.

Scrolling further through the list, you'll see that this affiliate site also links to avantlink.com. And if we expand these links in Ahrefs, and click one of those affiliate links, you'll see it sends us to another site called Buck Knives. Then it's just a matter of researching the details on their affiliate program.

Now, if you rinse and repeat these steps for a few popular niche affiliate sites, you should be able to find some common programs which will be helpful when choosing the best affiliate program for your site. Your competitors have basically done the research and testing for you.

So, when you're choosing an affiliate program, you'll want to consider two additional things. The first is product and brand reputation. Beginners often choose programs that have the biggest payout. But the reason why a lot of affiliate programs offer huge payouts is because their product is inferior to many of their competitors' products.

Remember, after someone clicks your affiliate link, they have to make a purchase in order for you to get compensated. Also, people who purchase poorer quality products are more likely to return them.

And when refunds from your referred sales happen, you lose your commission too. By recommending good quality products from solid and well-known brands, you'll help your visitors and your bank account.

Note: This is actually why we don't recommend using Clickbank as an affiliate program as I've never once seen a quality product or brand run their affiliate program there.

Conversion Rate

The second thing to consider is conversion rate. Now, most affiliate programs won't list conversion rates for their product and landing pages. But if you happen to be working with an affiliate manager in one of your programs, it doesn't hurt to ask.

To illustrate the importance of conversion rate, let's run through an example for the knives niche. So according to Amazon's commission table, sports and outdoor goods pay out 3% of the sale. And most camping knives will fall into this category. But that other affiliate program we found on ShareASale, BladeHQ, pays out 5%.

Well, let's say you get 100 clicks to your affiliate links and the average order value is $100. If 7% of those clicks convert on Amazon and only 3% of clicks convert on BladeHQ, then that means your commissions from Amazon would be $21, while your commissions from BladeHQ would be $15.

So despite the fact that BladeHQ has a bigger payout, Amazon would be the affiliate program to go with in this scenario. Now, this example is a bit oversimplified because you need to consider things like traffic source, your content, and the intent of the visitors.

Well, the next lesson is all about planning your affiliate site's strategy which is going to give you a blueprint to follow for the rest of this course.

Here in this lesson, we're going to do some planning for your affiliate marketing site. Now, before we work on the actual tasks involved in site planning, it's important we get on the same page and go over the affiliate marketing strategy we'll be using for our site.

So as a quick refresher, we want to create an affiliate site that'll generate consistent revenue. In order to do that, we'll need consistent traffic to pages that organically recommend affiliate products.

And the best way to get that traffic is through a marketing technique called SEO or search engine optimization because traffic is free, passive, and consistent.

Now, the general process to get SEO traffic will follow three basic steps.

Step 1 is to do affiliate keyword research which is the process of finding topics suitable for an affiliate site that people search for month after month.

Step 2 is to create content that people want to see when searching for these products. And

Step 3 is to get backlinks to these pages, which will help you rank high in Google search and get that consistent traffic to your pages, which again, can allow you to build that consistent revenue.

Now, these are the technical and creative things we'll have to do to get to our end result. But what we haven't really talked about yet is what the overall strategy looks like from a birds-eye view.

The basic idea is to choose a niche that has plenty of things to talk about and then to choose a sub-niche from that niche. For example, you might choose golf as your main niche and then "putting" as your sub-niche. Then you'd cover absolutely everything in the putting category before moving on to the next sub-niche.

Best Strategy for Affiliate Marketing

Let's dive deeper into an example to help you visualize what this strategy looks like. So let's say your niche is fitness equipment and your sub-niche is dumbbells. That means you're going to cover everything under the topic of dumbbells.

As an example, you might create equipment roundups on "the best adjustable dumbbells", "the best dumbbell sets", and "the best dumbbells for home". Now, let's zoom into adjustable dumbbells.

So let's say you cover five different adjustable dumbbells in your post like these ones. Well, to cover this in full, you now have five new reviews to write up. Now, let's say you also want to write up content on dumbbell exercises.

You can now write about dumbbell exercises for chest, biceps, triceps, back, and legs. Let's zoom in on dumbbell exercises for biceps. This would be a listicle that talks about all sorts of great exercises for your biceps. And assuming you cover these bicep exercises, you have a bunch more posts you can create.

Now, assuming your content is great, what you're essentially doing is positioning your site to be the authority of dumbbells in the eyes of visitors which will help with conversions and search engines, which will help with traffic.

Also, assuming you get through the hundreds or maybe even thousands of dumbbell-related content, this is where you'd revisit your main niche, and then choose another sub-niche - let's go with barbells. Then you'd become the authority of barbells and do the exact same thing.

And what you're essentially doing here is creating a massive web of related content that's going to be the foundation to not just an authoritative affiliate site, but a business that has potential to go beyond affiliate marketing.

Now, I need to pump the brakes here because before we can even think of becoming this mega authority site, we need to start from square one and find some topics that would be appropriate for our site.

And in the next topic, we're going to go up here to step 1 which is to do affiliate keyword research for your niche.

The first step in establishing the groundwork for the content you'll create is conducting keyword research. As an affiliate marketer, your objective isn't directly selling products or services to customers. Therefore, it's essential to identify topics that naturally lend themselves to product recommendations. A fundamental aspect of this research is comprehending search intent.

Understanding search intent provides insights into the motivations behind a searcher's query. This understanding enables you to gauge the feasibility of recommending products effectively.

I'm going to show you how to do keyword research for your affiliate marketing site.

Now, keyword research is the first step in our flowchart in our journey to a consistent income through an affiliate site. And it's basically going to set the foundation for the topics you'll create content on.

So simply put, keyword research is the process of finding search queries people use when looking for products, services, or general information. Because we won't be selling products or services directly to consumers with an affiliate site, we ideally want to find topics where it's easy to organically recommend products.

But before we get into the techniques to find topics, it's important we talk about one foundational thing that's massively important in SEO. And that's search intent. Search intent tells us about the purpose of a searcher's query.

And by understanding the intent of a query, you'll be able to determine whether you can easily recommend products or not. For example if someone searches for "best protein powder," chances are, they're in the market to purchase a product but they want to weigh out the pros and cons, look at different brands, and assess variables like price, quality, and so on.

As a result, you actually need to recommend products.

And the people who read this article may very well click affiliate links to the products and make a purchase. Whereas a topic like, "what is protein powder," is more informational in nature.

Based on the keyword alone, we don't know whether the searcher is writing a research paper, exploring the world of supplements, or wants to know which type of protein powder to buy.

Simply put, this topic probably wouldn't generate many clicks to protein powders because the majority of people aren't in the market to buy any. So adding product recommendations would probably be unnatural.

Now, in general, there are four types of so-called affiliate keywords we'll want to go after. And these are: general comparisons, branded comparisons, product reviews, and T&A keywords.

Now, before we get into how you can find these types of keywords, I'm going to choose a niche and do keyword research with you. So to set some context, I'm choosing baby products as my main niche.

And as I discussed in the previous topic, I'm going to choose a sub-niche to start. Let's go with car seats.

Alright, so let's talk about the four different types of affiliate keywords, how they fit into an affiliate marketing site, and how you can find them for your site.

General Comparisons

The first type of keywords are general comparisons.

These are your typical "best [product name]" keywords. For example, "best car seats," "best booster seats," "best strollers," etc. It's super easy to recommend products in posts targeting these keywords because searchers are looking for product comparisons.

After all, the keyword, "best" implies that a comparison needs to be made. On top of that, people searching for these "best product name" keywords are likely in the market to purchase something in the near future. They just don't know which product.

So to find these keywords, you'll need a keyword research tool. And I'll be using Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. Alternatively, you can follow along with this tutorial using Ahrefs' free keyword generator.

To get started, I'll search for a few broad queries related to my sub-niche like "car seat," "car seats," "booster seat," and "booster seats." Let's run the search.

Next, I'll head on over to the Matching terms report to generate keyword ideas. Now, since we're looking for general comparison keywords, I'll click the "include" filter and type in "best." Apply the filter and you'll see over 18,000 keyword ideas that include at least one of our seeds and the word "best."

Now, since there's probably too many keywords to filter through manually, let's narrow this list down to just low-competition topics to get started. And to do that, we'll set a maximum keyword difficulty filter to something low like 20. And there are some great topics here that are worth considering like "best rotating car seat" and "best car seats" for various different ages.

So from here, you can jot down some keyword ideas that interest you or if you have an Ahrefs' account, you can actually add these to a keyword list which is what I'll do.

Now, if you don't have an Ahrefs account, you can still use their free keyword generator and search for something like "best product name." You'll have limited data, but it should be good enough to set you off on the right track.

Note: You shouldn't just go after keywords with low Keyword Difficulty scores.

Higher competition often indicates that there's more popularity and/or commerciality to a topic. For example, the query, "best car seat" is significantly more competitive than the ones we were looking at.

And according to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer, the top-ranking page for this query, gets around 38,000 monthly organic visits from the US alone. So these types of keywords are worth adding to your keyword list too to tackle at a later time when your site is a bit more established.

Branded Comparisons

The next type of keywords are branded comparisons. These are keywords where a searcher wants to compare the differences between two branded products. For example, that might be "chicco car seat vs graco".

These types of keywords usually have lower search demand, but they typically convert better than general comparison keywords because the searcher has likely narrowed down their purchasing decision to a few key products.

The easiest way to find these keywords is to create a list of brands or products in the same category. So assuming I wanted to find branded car seat comparison keywords, I could search for a bunch of car seat brands and run the search.

Next, I'll go to the matching terms report. And again, I'll go to the Include search box, and this time, I'll type in "vs" and I'll also add the phrase "car seat" since these companies make all sorts of baby products. Apply the filter and we now have a list of keywords that would work perfectly for branded comparison blog posts.

Now, if we do the same thing but instead of brands as our seeds we use a list of specific car seat models, you'll find even more great branded comparison keywords to add to your list.

Just type in something like "product name vs" – and run the search. Jot down any keywords that are of interest to you, then rinse and repeat for the next brand.

Detailed Product Reviews

Alright, the next type of keywords are detailed product reviews. These queries will typically follow the format "product name" review. And people who search for queries like this are likely very close to making a purchase.

They've researched multiple products, something caught their attention about a specific model, and now they want a more in-depth review on it. Just like the branded comparison keywords, search volumes will be lackluster to say the least.

So if you're going to buy these products and actually review them, choosing products that people are actually searching for may be a smart way to do it.

A simple way to find brands and models worth reviewing is to go to a popular ecommerce site and look through the different categories and brand names in their navigation.

So right now, I'm on buybuybaby.com and I'm looking at their "shop all car seats" page. Now, if I click on the dropdown for Brand, you'll see a list of brand names that you can jot down. I've already gone ahead and done that and saved a list to my clipboard. So I'll paste a bunch of these into Keywords Explorer and run the search.

Let's head over to the Matching terms report. Again, we'll hit the Include filter but this time, we'll search for the word "review" and add an asterisk at the end, which will act as a wildcard. And just like that we know exactly which brands we'd want to review, and some specific models which we now have keyword metrics for.

T&A Keywords

So take some time to add more keywords to your keyword list and when you're ready, we'll move on to the last type of keyword which are T&A keywords, which stands for "Trust and Authority."

Now, in order to rank your pages, you need to have some kind of page-level and website authority. Meaning, you need backlinks. But since all of the keyword types we've discussed so far are commercial in nature, it'll be tougher to get links to these pages.

I mean, would you rather link to a post about 10 random car seats or one about car seat safety? Probably the latter, right, seeing as it's non-commercial and provides more objective value for your audience.

Now, while these keywords may not directly contribute to your revenue, it'll still serve two important purposes.

1. You'll build trust with your audience since you're creating helpful content.

2. You'll build authority through links – hence, "trust and authority."

So to find these keywords, let's search for a few seeds that are related to car seats like "car seat," "car seats," and "booster seat." Next, I'll go to the Matching terms report and then I'll hit the Questions tab since we're looking for informational topics.

Let's set a Keyword Difficulty filter to a max value of 20 and we now have a list of relatively easy-to-rank-for keywords. So I'll add some to my list until I'm satisfied and you should too. Just search for a seed keyword and then hit the Questions tab. Then you can rinse and repeat to build out your keyword list.

Alright, so by now, you should have a nice list of keywords from each of the four affiliate keyword categories: general comparisons, branded comparisons, product reviews, and T&A keywords. But all we have at this point is a brainstormed list of topics.

There's no real order or structure to the content which is important in SEO as it helps to build out that huge web of related content that I showed you earlier.

Next, we'll take your list of topics and actually plan out specific content pieces and we'll need to create and start building out what SEOs often call "topical authority."

 

Our content marketing strategy is centered on organizing the topics derived from your keyword research into cohesive structures aimed at enhancing SEO traffic to your affiliate site.

You'll gain insights into creating an extensive repository of interconnected content covering key topics within your niche.

Furthermore, you'll understand the significance of establishing "topical authority" for your site through this approach.

Prior to constructing your network of related content, it's crucial to map out topics accordingly. One efficient method for structuring affiliate topics involves creating product clusters.

These clusters consist of a central comparison post linked to multiple product review posts, forming a streamlined content structure.

I'm going to walk you through a simple affiliate marketing content strategy. More specifically, we'll be taking the list of topics from your keyword research and organizing them into logical structures that'll help grow your SEO traffic to your affiliate site.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, we want to create a massive web of related content, covering all of the important topics in our niche. And the main benefit here is that all of these relevant pages will be connected and essentially work together to build what SEOs loosely call "topical authority."

And if we had to define topical authority, it's when a website becomes an authoritative source on a given topic in the eyes of visitors and search engines.

Topical Authority in Affiliate Marketing

Now, the two parts that make up so-called "topical authority" are topical coverage, meaning content, and backlinks. We'll talk about the latter a bit later because I want to discuss the importance of topical coverage.

Let's say you have a site in the golf niche. If you publish a post on the best golf clubs, no one's going to think: "Oh yeah…they're the authority" in golf or golf clubs or golf equipment. To become the go to place for information on golf, you'd need to cover topics like "best golf balls," "best putters," "best golf shoes," "how to hit a driver 300 yards," "what is a handicap index in golf," and I could go on for hours. Also, the content would actually need to be good.

Now, even this example hardly illustrates becoming an authority in the golf niche because there's just so many things you'd need to cover because golf is a huge topic. This is why focusing on a sub-niche is a much better approach to building topical authority.

Assuming your content is of high quality, over time, people will begin to see you as an expert in your niche and because of that, they'll more likely link to your web pages because it's well-trusted.

Again, scratching the surface, but my point should be clear: building so-called topical authority a) requires extensive topical coverage; b) is much more achievable in a sub niche because of a); and c) building it is a win-win for visitors and website owners.

For visitors, they'll find a plethora of resources to dig through on your site. And for website owners, you'll likely have better potential to rank for topically related keywords, assuming your content gets linked to.

Now, if you've been building your site with me throughout this course, then you should have narrowed in on a sub-niche and done all your keyword research for that sub-niche.

I chose baby products as my main niche and car seats as my sub-niche. And in total, I generated a list of 239 car-seat related keywords that I also categorized into the four different "types" of affiliate keywords.

General comparisons; Branded comparisons; Product reviews; and T&A keywords.

The only major thing that's left to do in this planning stage is to map related topics together so we can start building our web of related content. And we'll be using our keyword lists to do this.

Product Clusters

A product cluster is a simple content structure that connects a general comparison post with multiple product review posts. Let's look at what this might look like for my car seat site.

So first, I'll choose a general comparison topic from my list like "best car seat for 3-year old." This topic will sit at the top of our pyramid. Now, because general comparison topics will require product comparisons and recommendations, we'll need to choose some car seats to compare in our post.

And in my opinion, the best place to start is to draw from real-life experiences. For example, I actually own nine car seats – so it's fair to say that I've done my share of research and real-life testing.

I also have a couple kids that are now older than three and so I know that the types of car seats we'll be covering are "convertible car seats." One of our car seats is the Diono Radian 3RXT which I really like so I'll definitely include it in my round-up.

We would just add a branch under our main topic:

"best car seat for 3-year old" and call it "Diono Radian 3RXT review." Now, another car seat we have is the Britax Marathon which I also like and would recommend. So let's add another branch.

I'm not particularly happy with some of the other convertible car seats I've bought, so let's look at our product review keywords to see which other car seats we could potentially add.

After researching, I've narrowed down our list of "best car seats for 3-year old" to a total of six car seats. The two that I have hands-on experience with, the Britax one4life, Graco Extend2fit, Graco 4ever dlx, and the Safety 1st Go and Grow.

So to review, we know we're going to create a post on the best car seats for 3-year old, and we're going to write six different product reviews for each model in our general comparison post like "Britax one4life review", "Graco extend2fit review" and so on.

From an on-page perspective, we can simply "connect" these pages by using an internal link from our general comparison post to our product reviews. And it would also make sense to link from our product reviews to our general comparison post. We now have a product cluster.

The reason why I call product clusters efficient is because as your library of product reviews gets bigger, creating content for general comparisons gets faster and easier. For example, when we go to create a post on let's say…"the best convertible car seats for small cars," we've already covered the Diono Radian 3RXT review in our best car seat for 3-year old post. And that model just happens to be the go-to car seat for small cars.

Branded comparisons also fit seamlessly into product clusters.

Looking at our list of branded comparison keywords, you'll see that there's this topic "graco extend2fit vs 4ever". Well, we just wrote two product reviews for these so writing a branded comparison post would be super-easy. And of course, we could easily add internal links to the product reviews whether they're one-way or reciprocal in a very organic way.

Alright, the last type of keywords on our list are T&A keywords which again stands for trust and authority. And these are mostly informational topics.

These topics may not directly impact your revenue but they serve important purposes: they can help you earn more backlinks, reach larger audiences, and build trust and authority.

Informational Posts

Unlike product clusters, informational posts on affiliate sites typically have less of a pyramid-type structure to them. For example, if you have four pages on T&A topics, they won't necessarily link together creating a perfect pyramid.

Internal linking on these pages will mostly come down to "do it if and when it makes sense." For example, let's say we're a writing post on car seat safety. It would be perfectly natural to link to another page on "when car seats expire", "when you should turn the car seat around from rear to forward facing" and "requirements to change to a booster seat."

These are all related to car seat safety and they all happen to be topics on our T&A keyword list. It would also make perfect sense to link from our post on "when do car seats expire" to our commercial page on "best car seats" because people reading that post may need to buy a new one and could probably use some help narrowing their search to an appropriate product.

Creating these structures and mapping content isn't so much about strict adherence as it is about creating a strong foundation for your content SEO. When you have a big list of topics and you prioritize based on search volumes or keyword difficulty scores, it's tough to visualize the relationships between your content.

And what happens more often than not, is that you haphazardly do internal linking creating poor structure, which just makes ranking your pages harder than it has to be. But by having a solid internal linking plan, you're going to do yourself a couple favors that should ultimately help you rank higher in Google and get more free traffic to your pages.

1. You'll create a better user experience for your visitors by providing them with relevant resources that may be helpful to them.

2. You'll facilitate the flow of PageRank which will help your pages rank higher in Google.

And without getting too technical, that just means that when one of your pages gets backlinks, the pages that it links to will also benefit from that backlink – although to a lesser degree.

Alright, so now that we've mapped out our content, we'll need to actually build out our site.

In this lesson, we will discuss strategies for optimizing your affiliate marketing site's homepage and navigation menu to increase both organic traffic and affiliate commissions.

So let's talk about homepages first and we'll get to navigation after.

Homepage

So very generally speaking, a homepage serves three main purposes regardless of the type of website.

1. It should communicate what your brand or company does.
2. It should lead people towards a conversion goal.
3. It can be used to help rank important pages higher in Google.

Now, the first purpose is pretty straightforward. But the second and third points may be tougher to understand, especially in the context of an affiliate marketing site.

So let's expand.

A conversion for an affiliate marketing site happens when someone clicks your affiliate link and buys something from the affiliate merchant. The thing is, you don't have any control over the merchant's site. But what is in your control, to a certain extent, is getting people to click your affiliate links in your content.

So therefore, leading people towards a conversion goal for an affiliate site just means getting visitors to engage with your content that naturally recommends affiliate products.

And the actual conversion that happens on your website will be when a visitor clicks one of your affiliate links.

Now as for my third point on using your homepage to rank important pages higher in Google, this comes down to what we discussed in the previous lesson. When you link to pages on your site with internal links, you're facilitating the flow of something called "PageRank."

Basically, when the linking page gets backlinks, it's passing so-called "authority" or "power" over to the pages it links to, helping them rank higher in Google. And it just so happens that homepages are often the most authoritative page on a website.

Navigation Menu

Let's move on to setting up your site's main navigation menu. Now, your navigation menu should serve two main purposes.

1. It should help provide a good user experience for visitors so they can find whatever it is they're looking for on your site quickly.
2. It should make it easy for search engines to access your content.

The way Google finds content on your site is by "following" links from one page to another. For example, if Google lands on one of your pages and sees two links in the navigation which points to page A and page B, then they've discovered two new pages. Then they can "follow" those links and discover even more URLs based on the pages that page A and page B link to. And this process can go on for a very long time.

Now, if all links are removed from page B, then the search engine won't be able to discover any of these URLs because the path has effectively been broken. This is an overly simplified explanation of how Google finds content.

But the main point is that we want to make it as easy as possible for search engines to discover our content so they can add it to their search index. And a well thought out navigation menu makes this possible.

Your navigation links will largely depend on the number of pages you have on your site or plan to have, which is typically dictated by the breadth of your niche and sub niches.

For a small site, the solution is easy because you've already created "product clusters," which I taught you how to do over the past couple of lessons. So you can simply link to some of your general comparison posts and your blog archive page. This way, all your pages are accessible within a couple clicks from any page on your site.

Now, for a larger site where you have too many comparison posts for your nav menu, you'll need to create category pages and link to them from your navigation.

For example, if we look at the Wirecutter which is a huge affiliate site, you'll see they have various categories in their navigation menu. Now, if I hover over Tech and click on the "headphones" category, you'll see the majority of posts at the top of this page are for general comparisons. And these pages link out to all sorts of other posts on their website.

There's no exact formula for navigation or internal links.

Ultimately, you want to create a good user experience for visitors and make your content accessible to search engines.

Now it's time to actually create your affiliate content.

Before delving into the tutorials on affiliate content creation, let's address a crucial question that crosses the mind of every affiliate marketer: What is the optimal balance between informational and commercial content for an affiliate site?

We'll explore two contrasting approaches - a website solely focused on providing informational content versus one exclusively dedicated to commercial content.

By examining the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, you'll gain insight into the significance of striking a balance between the two. Additionally, we'll offer recommendations on achieving this equilibrium.

Now, I'm going to show you how to create content for your affiliate site. And there are two main goals for our content.

1. We want it to rank in Google so we can get consistent traffic to our site.
2. We want our information to be helpful to visitors so they can make informed purchasing decisions and we can get compensated with affiliate commissions.

Before we get into actually creating this content, I want to talk about something that's frequently pondered upon and that's "how much informational vs commercial content should I create for an affiliate site?"

We can try and answer this question, I want you to envision two different sites at opposite extremes – one site with just informational content and another with just commercial content.

Let's talk about the completely commercial site first. To help you visualize the types of content on this site, it'll be just best of comparisons, vs. posts, and product reviews.

Now, the problem with this kind of site in my opinion, is that unless your reviews are legit, one of a kind, and demonstrate authority and expertise that's unmatched, it's going to be tough to really stand out.

The only example I can think of that did this well was TheWireCutter before they were acquired by the New York Times. At that time, no one was really doing hands-on reviews of products with well thought-out tests because it required a lot of time, money, and expertise. But the Wirecutter consistently did this really well.

As a result, they earned the trust of people and earned backlinks with ease, making it an overall authority in product reviews.

So to translate, if you're unable to at least get backlinks to your commercial pages, you probably won't be able to rank, therefore, you won't get much traffic to your site, and you won't make much in commissions.

Now, let's look at the other extreme – the completely informational content.

They will have tons of how-tos, tutorials, guides, and basically anything for purely informational purposes. Because informational content typically earns backlinks more easily, you'll have a better chance at ranking and getting traffic to your site.

But the main downside to creating a fully informational affiliate site is that you'll stunt your revenue potential because commercial topics are going to be easier to naturally recommend products. And affiliates get paid when people click those affiliate links and make a purchase.

So back to the question: what is the ideal ratio of commercial to informational content for an affiliate site? Well, as I just explained, there's positives and negatives to both types of content. And because both are important, it's my opinion that any ratio that's roughly equal is completely fine. That might be a 40/60, 50/50, 60/40, or whatever.

If you remember, one of the core content structures we discussed was called a product cluster. And again, these are groups of commercial content pages that connect general comparison posts with multiple product reviews as well as branded comparison posts.

Creating content is what we're going to go deep into in the next lesson, where I'll talk about how to write commercial blog posts that get traffic from Google and convert into affiliate commissions.

In this topic, we'll explore the process of crafting blog posts tailored for general comparison keywords like "best [product name]." You'll gain insights into crafting product reviews that effectively drive conversions and generate commissions. These reviews are an integral part of our overarching strategy, as we aim to construct "product clusters."

Also, we'll get into "branded comparisons," a type of commercial blog post that compares specific brands or products. These posts, often structured as "vs." comparisons, cater to visitors who have narrowed down their product options and seek guidance to make informed purchasing decisions.

When I say "money-making," I'm referring to the three types of commercial posts we covered in the previous lessons. And these are general comparisons like "best golf balls", product reviews like "Titleist Pro V1 Golf Ball Review," and branded comparisons like "Titleist Pro V1 vs. Taylormade TP5 Golf Balls."

When you're writing these kinds of posts for your affiliate site, you should have one primary goal in mind for your content. And that's to serve the intent of a visitor, meaning you want visitors to be happy with the information they find on your page.

The reason this is important is because when content satisfies the intent of visitors, you increase your chances of ranking higher in Google because Google wants to show the most relevant pages for any given query. And because these queries have commercial intent, when visitors are satisfied with the content, they're more likely to buy something from your affiliate merchant, leading to an affiliate commission.

Fortunately, creating content for these three types of keywords is quite similar.

I'm going to give you some flexible templates you can use to give yourself the best chance at ranking high and earning more commissions.

Let's talk about the first type of commercial post which is for general comparison keywords. Again, these posts are going to be what you use when you're targeting keywords like "best [product name]."

So, "best garden hose," "best booster seat," "best golf balls," etc. Now, because the word "best" implies that a comparison needs to be made, the format you'll use for these general comparisons will most likely be a listicle, which is just an article in list-format.

And these general comparison posts will typically have four main parts:

The introduction, the summary, the list points, and the conclusion.

Let's start with the intro.

Plain and simple, a listicle is not meant to be read from start to finish. Nearly all readers will go in with the mentality to skim. With our intro, we want to keep it short and sweet, while building credibility so they'll actually trust what you have to say about these products.

For example, if we're writing a post on the best car seats for 3-year old, in the intro, I might say something as simple as: "We tested 10 car seats and rated them by comfort, price, and safety. In this post, we'll share our research to help you find the best convertible car seat for your 3-year-old." It's short and sweet, instantly builds credibility, and also tells the reader that they're in the right place.

Alright, next up is the summary.

As I mentioned before, listicles won't be read in full. And that's because some, if not most people just want the answer to what the best product is. That's why I suggest having a section like "Best [product] at a Glance."

Here, you can simply add bullet points for different categories like "best overall car seat," "best car seat money can buy," "best car seat for travel," and "best budget car seat" to name a few. Not only can this help improve clicks on your affiliate links, but it provides good user experience for those no-nonsense skimmers.

Alright, now we're on to the list points, which is going to be the meat of your post. A list point is made up of a heading and description. The heading will usually be the name of the product you're recommending.

For example, my post on "best car seats for 3-year-olds" might have headings like "Diono Radian 3RXT," "Britax Marathon," "Britax one4life," and so on.

As for the description, you're just describing the heading in more detail. You want to give only necessary information to help the buyer make an informed purchasing decision.

When it comes to writing descriptions, it's best to keep the format consistent throughout the post. For example, if we're reviewing car seats for 3-year old, then we might have one sentence to describe the car seat, a few sentences about how that specific car seat scored on our test categories like build quality, safety, and performance – a supporting image of our analysis, and then perhaps an overall score with a concluding statement.

Predictable formats help people absorb information more efficiently and that's what we want for our readers.

Last but certainly not least, we want to include links to the affiliate products and your product review page in the description. We'll get into writing product review pages in a bit because first we need to write a conclusion.

Here, you'll need to wrap up the post.

You can do this by summarizing your top picks and recommending other posts on your site that might be interesting to that reader. For example, it might make sense to link to a post on the best car seat accessories at the end of our best car seats post.

These general comparison pages tie in directly with product reviews because if you remember from module 3, a part of our overall strategy is to build "product clusters." And product clusters are simply content structures that connect a general comparison post with multiple product review posts.

When you're writing product reviews, the intent of most visitors will likely be different than the intent of those visiting a general comparison post. People who visit a "best of" post most likely don't know which products they're interested in. Whereas someone who visits a product review page titled something like "Diono Radian 3RXT review" has likely narrowed down their search to a few products that interest them most.

They're likely closer to making a purchase, and want to dive deep before they spend money.

So your goal for product reviews should be to outline the positives and negatives to help visitors decide if that specific product is right for their needs. So with that said, here's how I think a product review should be written.

First will be the introduction. And much like the "best of" post, you'll want to keep it short, sweet and on point. And the two things that I think are important for product reviews is to

a) show the reader they're in the right place, and

b) to internally link back to the general comparison post to complete the product cluster structure.

For example, if I was writing a post titled "Diono Radian 3RXT Review" I might say: "With its slim size and high safety ratings, the Diono Radian 3RXT has become one of the most popular car seats for kids.

In fact, we classified it as one of our best car seats for 3-year-olds. But it's not all glitz and glam. The Radian 3RXT is one of the heaviest car seats and scored surprisingly low on some of our hands-on tests.

In this review, we'll share the results of our research to help you decide if this car seat is the right one for your toddler."

Alright, now we're on to the body of the content.

What you decide to cover here will vary based on your niche. Basically, you want to cover the most important categories that shoppers in your niche care about.

For example, with car seats, that might be safety, size, comfort, ease of installation, portability and specs. For golf balls, that might be distance, spin control, materials, feel, and price. These are the things you should cover in your product reviews where each category will be your heading. And these categories are essentially what will create your product review template.

Now, with the conclusion, you'll just want to wrap things up and perhaps suggest who the product is best for.

For example, for our Diono Radian 3RXT post, I might say: "The Diono Radian 3RXT is a solid choice for children ages 2 - 6. In fact, it scored extremely high in all of our tests. On top of that, it's the only car seat we tested where we could easily fit 3 of them in the back of a small sedan. If budget is not an issue for you, then you won't be disappointed with the Diono Radian 3RXT."

And we're done.

Alright, the final commercial blog post type I want to talk about are "branded comparisons." And these are your typical "vs posts''. For example, Diono Radian 3RXT vs. Britax Marathon.

Now, when we think about someone who's coming to a page like this, we know that the visitor has likely narrowed their product research down to two or more products. But, they can't really decide on which one is right for them so they want to do a side-by-side comparison.

Basically, they're coming to your page to weigh out the differences. So just like with the product review posts, we want to address that in the introduction and again, help them make an informed purchasing decision throughout the body.

So here's what the intro might look like: "The Diono Radian 3RXT and Britax Marathon are the heavy-weight champions of convertible car seats. They both have all the bells and whistles, yet, they're completely different in just about every way. We'll compare the main features of both models to help you decide which car seat is best for your little one."

Now, as for the body, we want to take a similar approach to product reviews and cover important topics that someone looking to buy a car seat would want to know.

So again for a car seat shopper, that might be safety, size, comfort, ease of installation, portability and specs. But a key difference here is that instead of highlighting these things for one product, we want to compare the differences between the different models. Think of comparison tables that I'm sure you've seen on sites like Apple or your favorite ecommerce store.

Now, for the conclusion, it would be much the same. Just wrap things up.

Here, two important things to note from an SEO perspective in these branded comparison posts, is to internally link to the individual product reviews as well as the general comparison guide.

Now, writing money-making or commercial posts is pretty straightforward for an affiliate site. Creating informational content on the other hand is a bit more nuanced.

Next, I'll show you how to write informational blog posts that are likely to rank and show you how you can turn informational pieces into silent profit generators.

When we refer to informational blog posts, we're talking about content such as how-tos, step-by-step tutorials, and definition posts—essentially, any content intended primarily for educational purposes. While they may not initially appear to offer commercial value, these posts are still crucial for revenue generation.

In addition to learning how to craft blog posts for an affiliate marketing website, you'll discover strategies to enhance the likelihood of your pages ranking higher in Google search results. This will ultimately drive free organic traffic to your pages.

Hey, I'm going to show you how to write informational blog posts for an affiliate marketing site. And by informational blog posts, I'm talking about how-tos, step-by-step tutorials, definition posts, and basically any type of content where the primary intent is to learn.

On top of that, I want to tell you how to generate affiliate commissions from informational blog posts that may not seem to have commercial value at first glance. Let's call these silent profit generators.

Now, before I walk you through some blog post templates, it's important we discuss the first and most important step to creating content for search – and that's search intent.

Search Intent in Affiliate Marketing

Search intent represents the reason behind a searcher's query. And the reason why it's important is because you need to match intent in order to rank high in Google.

For example, if we were creating a post about how to clean car seats for a hypothetical kids' car seats site, what do you think our content should look like?

Should it be a step by step tutorial where you walk them through cleaning your kids' convertible car seats? Or should it have a different format? Or wait… is this for convertible car seats, infant car seats, or booster seats?

Well, this was kind of a trick question because the intent for the query "how to clean car seats" is actually about cleaning the seats in your car – not cleaning a kids installable car seat. How do I know this?

Well, the way we identify search intent is by entering the query in Google and looking at the top-ranking pages.

After all, search engines want to show you the most relevant result for a query so the top-ranking pages are essentially a guide to what Google thinks best serves the intent of a searcher.

So if you want to compete, you should follow suit and create a post with a similar format to improve your chances of ranking high.

Let's move on to a few blog post templates you can use for different types of informational content. And all of these content pieces will contain a title, introduction, body and conclusion.

Blog Post Templates

Let's kick things off with the first post type and that's listicles. Listicles are blog posts that contain non-chronological lists such as tips, product recommendations, tools, techniques, myths, mistakes, or whatever.

For the title you can use any of these templates. Let's turn them into working titles: "11 Ways to Sneak Snacks onto a Plane" "7 SEO Tips that Actually Work" "4 Blogging Techniques to Grow Your Audience"

Titles for listicles are about as easy as they come.

Now, as for the introduction, your goal should be to build trust and excitement in as few words as possible because most people are coming for the list points. For example, if you're writing a post on 7 SEO tips that actually work, you might say: "Ranking high in Google is more challenging than ever before. But that doesn't make it impossible.

The intro is short and helps build trust because we have proof that we've already achieved what the reader is hoping to achieve – higher Google rankings. The last thing I recommend including in the intro is a table of contents with jump links.

This makes it much easier for visitors to navigate throughout your post, especially since listicles need to be skimmable. If you're using WordPress, there are plenty of free plugins to choose from, just search for, "table of contents'' in WordPress's plugins repository and you'll find plenty of free options to try.

In the most basic form, your main content will have a series of H2s or heading tags, and content that complements the headings. Now, depending on the type of listicle you're creating, your H2s will vary.

If you're doing a series of tips to achieve a goal, you'd want to use short and descriptive headings that would make the reader want to read your content.

For example, if your post was on 17 Weight Loss Tips, rather than having point 5 as "Eat Spicy Foods," you might put "#5. Eat Spicy Foods to Burn More Calories."

Now, as for the content that goes under these headings, you may want to consider creating your own mini-template. For example, if your post is on weight loss tips, you might explain why your tip helps with weight loss in one sentence.

You might explain how it works and cite some research studies. Then you can end off the list point with two sentences that will help the reader put that tip into action. Consistency creates a predictable reading experience for your visitors and it also helps you as a writer to avoid tangents which break flow.

So with a mini template in hand, it'll just be a matter of filling in the blanks for each subheading and before you know it, you'll be onto your conclusion. For list posts, I wouldn't overthink the conclusion.

The majority of people aren't even going to get here but it's still important to create closure for people who do. My recommendation is to briefly summarize a key takeaway and then recommend additional content that's related to your post.

And internal links are good to use because they pass link authority and overall, create a better user experience for your readers. So here's a sample of what this template looks like.

Step-by-Step Tutorials

Step-by-step guides are your typical "how-to" posts where you run through a series of chronological steps to teach how to accomplish something. Now, for the title, you can use one of these formats to get started. So if we turn these into real titles, they might be:

"How to Build a Deck (7 Steps)"

"How to Start a Business (Even if You Don't have Money)"

"How to Find Email Addresses for Link Building (Fully Automated)"

Now, for the intro, write a short one using the PSP method, which stands for problem, solution, and proof.

For example, let's say you have a step-by-step guide on how to do YouTube keyword research.

Your intro might read:

"Looking to grow your YouTube channel and attract more views?

The "trick" is to target topics with search demand.

This is the approach that helped us grow our YouTube channel from ~10,000 to over 200,000 monthly views in one year."

Now, the reason why the PSP method is effective is because people who are reading a step-by-step guide usually come with a problem. They're looking for a solution. And if you have proof of that solution, you'll get their attention.

Alright, we need to write the main content which will be your step-by-step instructions. And because step-by-step guides have a logical sequence of instructions, you can use your H2s as the main steps.

For example, our post on YouTube keyword research might have H2s like:

"Step 1: Map out a hierarchy of topics."

"Step 2: Generate keyword ideas"

"Step 3: Check search intent"

…and so on and so forth.

As for the conclusion, just keep it short and sweet because step-by-step guides tend to be quite long.

Again, I recommend adding internal links to other relevant posts so you don't leave readers to want more at a dead end. So from our hypothetical YouTube keyword research post, we might link to our guides on YouTube SEO and getting more subscribers on YouTube – both are relevant to YouTube keyword research and serve what a reader might want to learn next.

Here's a sample of what this template looks like.

Expanded Definition Posts

Expanded definition posts are somewhat similar to how-to guides. But rather than being written as a logical sequence of steps, it's meant to give a high-level overview of a topic.

Now, because these posts are expanded definitions, you'll want to make your title something like: "What is or what are [concept or acronym]" and then any additional details about your piece. For example, "What is an Oligarch: Everything you need to know." "What are SERPs: Search Engine Results Pages Explained." "What are NFTs? A Detailed Introduction to "Expensive JPEGs."

The great thing about expanded definition posts is that there's a clear format you can follow for the intro, main content, and conclusion.

In short, you want people to come for the definition and stay for the details. So for the introduction, you'll want to keep it short and sweet by defining your concept or acronyms.

For example, our page on "What are SERPs" immediately gives the definition, shows a supporting image, and then tells you what you'll learn in the rest of the post with jump links to each section.

Now, for the main content, I highly recommend spending some time on your outline because you only want to include the most important points that a person searching for "what is [something]" would want to know.

Now, for the conclusion, you just need to summarize the key learnings. And again, I highly recommend adding internal links to other articles that a beginner would want to learn more about. Because if they've made it to the bottom of your expanded definition post, they'll likely want to learn more since the content will typically be high-level.

The bottom line with all of these templates is that they need to match the intent of the searcher. And the better you match it, the better your chances of ranking higher in Google.

Now, I've previously talked about how informational blog posts can be silent profit generators. The way you do that is by creating product-led content.

Silent Profit Generators

Product-led content is simply content that helps people solve a problem with

the help of your product. Now, since you, as an affiliate, won't own the products you recommend, you can think of it as creating product-led content for other companies but posted on your own site.

For example, let's say you have a DIY home improvement site where you recommend various tools like drills, drivers and other tools. You might want to create a post on how to winterize your sprinkler system which gets an estimated 2,700 monthly searches in Google.

Now, as far as I'm aware, you need an air compressor to winterize your sprinkler system. So it would be super-natural to organically plug this product into your post. And because air compressors aren't exactly a common household item like a hammer, some of these people will likely take your advice and buy one through your link, leading to a commission.

And that’s it.

Well, we're going to talk about affiliate link building tactics and a simple macro strategy that'll help you get higher Google rankings, more search traffic, and more affiliate commissions.

Now, backlinks are basically the fuel to higher Google rankings. And while you may want to jump straight into link building tactics, it's important that you first understand how you can best harness the power of backlinks and also understand the realities of link building for affiliate sites.

So, link building, whether it's for an affiliate site, blog, or ecommerce store is most commonly done through email outreach.

Email Outreach

And this is where you contact people who might be interested in linking to your web pages. Now, reaching out to some random stranger and saying:

"Hey, you like gardening? I sell garden tools. You should recommend my product pages by linking to them everywhere." … is kind of awkward. And beyond being awkward, it's selfish in a weird way.

There's no benefit for the recipient of these emails and that means you won't be getting any or many backlinks at all.

Now, let's flip the script a bit and let's say we email someone saying:

"Hey, Sam here from thegardenseo.com. Just wanted to say thanks for sharing your tutorial and detailed experiences with [Company A's] garden box kit. I bought the same model and had the exact same problem with the pieces not lining up properly.

After some tinkering, I found a cool way to seal the gap seamlessly for under $5. I wrote about it in this post and thought you'd like to check it out. If you find it helpful, perhaps your readers would find it helpful too? Cheers, Sam"

This is a bit less awkward because there's inherent value for the recipient to actually want to share and link to your content. It's genuinely helpful and people want to share helpful information.

Current State of Link Building

Now, that brings us to the realities of the current state of link building. Yes, helpful content is going to be easier to get backlinks to. Now, as for commercial content like your general comparisons, branded comparisons and product reviews, these are a bit trickier to get links to because the only real value goes to you. And people receiving these link pitches know that too.

But that doesn't change the fact that you need to get backlinks to these commercial pages too.

So I have two suggestions for you.

1. is to use the middleman method.

The Middleman Method

This is when you build backlinks to the more helpful pieces of content on your site because it'll be easier to get links. And as the links pile in, that page's so-called ‘link authority' will increase.

Now, since you control this authoritative page, you can actually add internal links from here to your money pages. And what ends up happening is that some of that link authority will get passed over to your commercial page that will hopefully give you a boost in rankings.

The informational post is essentially acting as a "hub" to power pages that would typically be hard to get backlinks to and will help you generate affiliate commissions.

Now, for more competitive topics, you're going to have to get backlinks directly to the commercial content. The best way you can do that is to just make your content really really really really good. And when you actually have content that's hit a level way beyond your competitors, you're going to want to promote it because the reviews and roundups will be so good that it'll feel like a crime not to share it.

How to Improve Your Content?

A few things you can do to improve your content is to actually do hands-on reviews with videos, add custom photography or graphics, or get unique insights from experts in the industry. Making your content better than your competitors will be pretty custom to your niche and personal taste.

Now, this is just the general backlink strategy I recommend using for new affiliate sites.

In the last lesson of the Free Affiliate Marketing Course for Beginners from Courses Buddy, I'm going to share some proven link building techniques you can use to start putting this strategy into action.

We appreciate your journey as this is the last lesson of the Affiliate Marketing Course with us.

Hey, I'm going to show you how to execute a few effective link building tactics for your affiliate site. Now, link building is largely a numbers game – meaning, you need to send a lot of emails to get backlinks.

But there's one thing that can significantly increase your chances of getting links using the techniques that I'm about to share with you. And that's expertise.

When you're an expert in something, that usually means you have unique and interesting insights to share. And as a result, people will take your word more seriously.

For example, let's say you have a beauty blog and in one of your posts, you mention that getting regular teeth whitening is good for your overall oral hygiene.

Now, if some random person emails you saying that you're wrong and they wrote a post explaining why you're wrong called "best teeth whitening", you'll probably ignore them. But if a dentist emails you and tells you that only certain types of teeth whitening products are good for you and the ones mentioned in your post are downright dangerous, because of x, y, and z, you might be inclined to make changes to your content and link to their content.

They clearly have expertise.

Now, being an expert, in the context of link building, doesn't mean you need to be in the top 1% of your field. The majority of people writing content probably aren't even interested in the topics they write about.

So even being a passionate hobbyist can go a long way as you have interesting insights to share from your own personal experiences.

I know absolutely nothing about teeth whitening, so don't pass around this misinformation. But the point is that if you're positioning yourself as someone who's knowledgeable in your niche, link building will be much easier - especially for the tactics I'm about to share with you today.

HARO Technique for Affiliate Link Building

The first link building tactic is to get free press from HARO. HARO stands for help a reporter out. It's a service that connects journalists with sources. Just sign up for an account as a "source" and you'll start getting emails with a list of queries from journalists at various publications. And these include Business Insider, The New York Times, and USA Today to name a few.

Now, HARO is a super-easy way to get high- quality backlinks because the journalists are the ones that are soliciting sources -- not the other way around. There are tons of requests that come in on a daily basis and the majority won't be relevant to your niche.

So you can set up a simple Gmail filter to sort through the noise. Just go to your Inbox and click on the caret to bring down Gmail's search options.

Next, set the "From" field to haro@helpareporter.com. Then, you'll need to set the subject to "HARO" within square brackets since all of their emails include that in the subject line.

Finally, set the "Has the words" field to any keywords you want to monitor. And also use the OR search operator to include multiple keywords or phrases. Click "Search" to see the results your search filters would include and check out some of the emails to ensure you're getting relevant results.

If everything looks good, click on the caret again and then click "Create filter." Now, even though we've filtered down the results to relevant ones, it doesn't mean journalists are going to cite you just because you responded.

And while you should go the extra mile to provide unique and insightful information, half the battle is in responding to the right questions. So to increase your chances of getting mentioned, prioritize queries where journalists are likely looking for multiple experts on the topic.

Now, if you're an expert in the field, then make sure to state your credentials in the beginning of their email to set a tone and then earn your trust through your knowledge and experience. I'd recommend using HARO without an end date in mind. The quality of links are just that good for the amount of effort it takes to respond.

Guest Posting for Affiliate Link Building

Alright, the second tactic I recommend is guest posting. Guest posting is when you create content to be posted on another website. And generally speaking, that post comes with attribution and a link back to your site.

Now, while some sites won't allow you to link to yourself within the content, most will, as long as it makes sense and adds value to your guest article. So the first thing you need to do is find websites that are likely to accept guest posts.

Well, you can use Ahrefs Content Explorer, which lets you search through billions of pages and get SEO metrics for all of them. Just search for a topic related to your niche and run the search.

Next, let's set a Domain Rating filter to weed out both very low and very high authority websites. So I'll choose a range like 30 to 60. I'll also choose the "One page per domain" filter since we don't need to pitch the same website multiple times.

Finally, I'll set the "Published" filter to the past 90 days, which will help us narrow in on websites that have published or republished content in the last 3 months.

Moreover, it's just a matter of looking at the domain names, visiting ones that look relevant, and pitching your guest posts where appropriate.

Podcast Interview for Link Building

Alright, the next link building tactic I highly recommend is to do podcast interviews. Much like guest-posting, being interviewed on a podcast puts you in the spotlight as an expert in front of someone else's audience.

So if you actually have expertise in your niche, this is going to be an easy one for you that’ll a) help you build a reputation as an authority in your niche; and b) get backlinks while you're at it.

The thing I love about podcasts as a link building strategy is that it only takes around an hour of your time and links are almost a given if you choose your podcasts appropriately.

So to find podcast prospects that are likely to link to your site, you can simply reverse-engineer a podcast interviewee’s homepage backlinks or social profile backlinks.

The benefit to being on podcasts goes way beyond links. You get the chance to meet like-minded people in your industry and building your network can go a long way even from an SEO perspective.

Now, if you follow the course and rinse and repeat these 3 tactics, you should have no problems getting some traction to your affiliate site.

Remember: Dare to dream big!

https://www.udemy.com/course/free-affiliate-marketing-course-for-beginners/

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https://alison.com/course/master-affiliate-marketing-with-this-step-by-step-guide

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https://ahrefs.com/blog/affiliate-marketing/

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