Welcome to Our Affiliate Marketing Course for Beginners
Hey, it’s Sam Oh here, and I’m over the moon to welcome you to our all-in-one affiliate marketing course for beginners. This course features 16 lessons that will take you through the ins and outs of building your own money-making affiliate site. No fluff, no nonsense, and absolutely no shady sales pitches for another course. Ready to jump in? Let’s kick off with the first lesson, where we’ll uncover what affiliate marketing is and how it works.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
In simple terms, affiliate marketing involves promoting other company’s products. When someone makes a purchase through your referral, you earn a commission. To make sure sales are credited correctly, merchants usually provide a custom link called an affiliate link. When a visitor clicks that link from your blog, website, or anywhere else, a cookie is stored on their device.
How Do Affiliate Cookies Work?
These cookies serve two main purposes: they help the merchant credit the sale back to the right person, and they often have a time limit. This means people don’t have to buy right away after clicking your link. Let’s run through an example to make everything clear.
Imagine a visitor reads your post about gardening hoses and clicks on one of your affiliate links leading to a product on Amazon. But hold up… they need to pick up their kids from soccer practice. So they do that, have dinner, and later return to Amazon.com to find the product again and purchase it, along with a game console controller. Thanks to the cookie stored on their device, and Amazon’s 24-hour cookie duration, you would still earn a commission for both the garden hose and the console controller, even though you weren’t promoting the latter. It’s like magic, only it’s not.
Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing
To kick off your affiliate marketing journey, you’ll need two things: a platform and relevant, consistent traffic. A platform is simply a place where you can recommend your links—this could be your own website or a YouTube channel. Creating either of these is straightforward, so we won’t dive into the technicalities of setting up an affiliate website because this course is about the actual marketing of an affiliate site.
Attracting Relevant Traffic
Relevant traffic means drawing visitors to your site who are interested in your topic and are ideally ready to make a purchase. One of the most important elements to getting relevant traffic is by creating content that includes your affiliate links. This could be product reviews, best-of comparison lists, or how-to articles. We’ll delve into these topics in a later module.
For consistent traffic, you’ll primarily rely on three channels: social media, ads, and search engines. Social media traffic can be inconsistent, and unless you have a significant following and brand, it shouldn’t be your primary traffic source. Ads can deliver highly relevant traffic quickly, but they come at a cost. Unless you’re in a high-paying affiliate program and have expertise in ads and conversion rate optimization, ads might not be your best bet.
The Power of SEO
Search traffic is free, consistent, and passive, and you can obtain it through a method called search engine optimization, or SEO. It’s the primary traffic source I recommend, as it’s what many successful affiliate websites rely on. We’ll delve deeper into SEO’s tactical and strategic elements later, but first, you need to determine whether the reward will be worth the effort.
How Much Can You Make?
Here’s the million-dollar question: how much can you earn as an affiliate marketer? The sky’s the limit! For example, Pat Flynn reported over $100,000 in affiliate commissions in December 2017, while Ryan Robinson reported over $19,000 in affiliate revenue in October 2019. These guys have done an excellent job building their brands, and it’s taken a lot of hard work and time to get where they are. But remember, your initial checks might look more like this – a bit smaller when you’re starting out.
To make a sustainable income, think of your affiliate site as a business. It will be a grind, and there will be some disappointing times, but that’s okay. By adopting a business mindset instead of seeing affiliate marketing as a way to “hopefully” make a few bucks here and there, you’ll be setting yourself up for success.
Starting Your Affiliate Website
In this lesson, I’m going to give you a high-level blueprint to start your first affiliate website. This lesson will provide a good idea of the skills, techniques, and strategies you’ll learn throughout this course. But first, let’s recap some key principles we’ve covered in the previous lessons, which will play into your strategy.
At a high level, your affiliate site will primarily consist of blog posts. The types of content you’ll create will mostly be informational pieces, such as how-to articles and comparisons of different products. 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 will be compensated by the affiliate merchant or partner.
Your content won’t just convert visitors into revenue; it will also attract visitors to your website. The marketing method we’ll use to get traffic to your affiliate site is search engine optimization, as the traffic is free, consistent, and passive. Best of all, SEO traffic will help you generate consistent revenue that compounds over time.
There are quite a few steps to reach 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.
Finding Your Niche
When you’re starting an affiliate site, especially if you’re relatively inexperienced, it’s beneficial to focus heavily on a niche. For example, starting a site focused on barbecue recipes might be more successful than a generic one on all types of recipes. Broader topics tend to have more competition, making it challenging to get traffic to your site. And without traffic, there is no revenue.
This is just one small example of the considerations you’ll need to make when choosing a niche. Other factors include the breadth of the topic, personal interest, commerciality, and more. We’ll explore techniques in Module 2 to help you make these decisions, and I’ll provide a checklist to give you the best chance at creating a successful affiliate website.
Alright, the next stage is planning your affiliate site. This is where you’ll create the blueprint for your affiliate website. Two critical elements of your plan include your content strategy and your site or content structure. Your content strategy is foundational to both traffic and conversions. Most of your 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. For the site or content structure, we’re mostly talking about grouping, which is done with internal links. We’ll cover all of this in great detail in Module 3.
Building Your Site
After planning your site, you’ll need to build it out. This includes creating a website and setting up tools for tracking. The most time-consuming and crucial part of this stage is creating content. Content will help you rank in search engines and guide your visitors in making buying decisions. We have an entire module dedicated to content creation, where we’ll discuss the content creation process, the types of content you should create, and provide templates for various affiliate content types.
Getting traffic through SEO is more challenging than just writing good content. A key ingredient to ranking high in Google and attracting visitors to your site is backlinks. We’ll discuss basic strategies that any beginner can implement to help power your pages to rank for their target queries, hopefully putting some money in your pocket.
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 second module, where we’ll dig deep into finding niches, qualifying them, and choosing one that’s right for you.
Finding and Qualifying a Niche
In this module, I’m going to show you how to find, choose, and qualify a niche that’s right for you. But before we get to the techniques for finding and qualifying a niche, you need to know what to look for in a niche. We’ll focus on four factors: competition, commerciality, personal interest, and the breadth of the search market.
The first factor is competition. We’ll create content and rank it in search engines like Google, so we’ll specifically look at SEO and keyword competition. The main purpose is to determine if we can somewhat easily rank for keywords relevant to an affiliate site. Many elements go into assessing keyword competition, but at this stage, we want to get a high-level overview of a niche. We’ll use a simple 3-step process to do this: generate keyword ideas, filter for low-difficulty keywords using a metric called “keyword difficulty,” and 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. To filter for low-difficulty keywords, set a keyword difficulty filter with 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, add words like “best” and “review.” When you hit the Show results button, you’ll see thousands of relevant, low-difficulty keywords with 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, I recommend watching our full tutorial in our free SEO course for beginners, which is fully applicable for affiliate sites too.
Understanding Commerciality
The second factor is commerciality. Not all niches are created equal. Some have insane commercial value, leading 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 with mid to high commercial value, so you don’t reach a point where you’ll max out on your profit potential.
You can conduct market research on the niche, look at commissions for relevant affiliate programs, and examine advertising costs to understand how valuable certain queries are to different companies. We’ll discuss understanding commercial value further in the next lessons.
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. 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 number one killer of affiliate sites.
The fourth factor is the breadth of the search market. Again, because we’re targeting search traffic, you want to understand how much traffic you can get to your content from search engines. Fortunately, keyword research tools make this easy by providing search volumes, which are the number of monthly searches that occur 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. By understanding the breadth of the search market, you’re essentially estimating how many people are interested in topics you’ll be writing about, how much traffic you can get from these topics, and how many clicks you can get to your affiliate links, which should directly correlate with your revenue.
As a general rule of thumb, you’ll want 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 expand, giving you room to eventually reach more people. For example, you might start an affiliate site in the bed frames niche. After doing some quick keyword research for affiliate keywords, you’ll see a cumulative search volume of over 130,000 monthly searches in the US just for “bed frames.” Not small at all, but not huge. The great thing about bed frames is that it’s quite natural to expand to topics like “mattresses,” “pillows,” “sheets,” and even the broader topic of “sleep.” There’s tons of room for growth.
As you research niches, you’ll find that many factors are connected. For example, niches with high commercial value often have high competition, while niches with low competition might be less interesting. It’s all about finding a balance from this criteria and then committing to a niche. In fact, these four considerations will help you rate any niche so you can qualify one that’s right for you.
Before we get to qualifying, we need to start brainstorming a list of niches and doing our research. That’s what we’ll be discussing in the next lesson. Before diving into research and qualification methods, let’s quickly recap the four things you should look for in a niche: the level of SEO competition, which tells us who we’ll be up against or even if we can compete; commerciality, which hints at how much money we can make; personal interest, which is important to most people because you want 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.
The process to find and qualify niches depends on where you are in your niche selection process. You’ll probably fall into one of two buckets. Bucket #1: You already have a general idea of the niches that interest you. And bucket #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 bucket #1 first, and I’ll show you how you can find information to check off items on your qualification checklist as we go.
Brainstorming and Researching Niches
Assuming you already have a general idea of niches that interest you, the first thing you’ll want to do is write them down. For me, that would be topics like golf, clean energy, and personal finance. 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 want 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.” With our subtopics in hand, the next thing you’ll need to do is about 3 minutes of preliminary keyword research. You’ll need a keyword research tool to do this, so I’m using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. 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.
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, “affiliate keywords” are easy to find using keyword modifiers. 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 to rank in Google. We’ll get into the details in a later module, as this is more related to SEO, but we’re not quite there yet. If you can’t wait, you can watch our video on search intent in our free SEO course for beginners, which I’ll link up in the description.
Since 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. In fact, 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.
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. Right away, you’ll see that nearly a million monthly searches happen for these low-competition keywords each month. So both SEO competition and search breadth seem good to me.
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. 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 aren’t mega authorities in your niche because they’ll be too tough to compete with, at least when you’re first starting out.
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. 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. Because SEO competition is a big part of qualifying a niche, especially for beginners, I recommend setting a Domain Rating filter to a low maximum value, like 20. 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. Now you can see a list of low-authority websites, the amount of total organic traffic they get, and their traffic values. 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. It’s a decent proxy for understanding a site’s commercial value because if advertisers are willing to pay this much money to get this traffic, then it’s likely valuable.
It’s important to note that when you’re looking at these metrics, you need to ensure 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. For this site, it’s clear that it’s an affiliate website, as the content is primarily based around reviews and product round-ups. Going back to Content Explorer, you’ll see that the site gets a ton of monthly search traffic and has a traffic value of around $70,000/month while being a low-authority site. 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.
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 discuss here is the affiliate programs that these sites are using. I’ll show you how to find affiliate programs for a niche in the next video, so stay tuned for that.
Finding and Qualifying Niches When You’re Open to Opportunities
Now, let’s talk about finding and qualifying niches if you don’t have a clear idea 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. 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.
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 will show us all pages that link to this website. Because SEO competition and the 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. 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, setting 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 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 interesting because this website only has a Domain Rating of 6 and gets around 100,000 monthly search visits from Google each month. This tells us that SEO competition is likely weak for this niche and that the breadth of the search market, even for low-difficulty keywords, will be decent. Let’s add a plus to those factors.
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. 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. As for personal interest, that’s up to you.
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. Just like 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. This is basically showing us pages from websites that get a lot of traffic, are low-authority, and are in English.
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. 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 to look through along with their SEO metrics to help qualify niches.
The qualification methods we went through are just quick checks, especially for the commerciality factor. The affiliate programs associated with the niche will often determine the potential revenue you can generate because different programs offer different commissions. So in the next lesson, I’m going to show you the best affiliate programs to join and how to find niche affiliate programs worth exploring.
Choosing the Right Affiliate Programs
Let’s kick things off with possibly the most popular affiliate program, Amazon Associates. This is Amazon’s affiliate program, and they have millions of products you can promote. It’s probably the most trusted e-commerce brand in the world, making it, in my opinion, the best catch-all affiliate program available. Their payouts differ based on the product category, with commissions ranging from 1% to 20% of the sale price.
Pros and Cons of Amazon Associates
The pros: You have a huge inventory of products to choose from, and you can monetize international traffic using their OneLink feature. This feature allows you to create a single affiliate link for a product that directs visitors to their local Amazon site based on their location. For example, a person from the US clicking your affiliate link would be directed to the Amazon.com product page, while someone from Canada or the UK would be redirected to amazon.ca or amazon.co.uk.
Another pro is Amazon’s high conversion rate. 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. Remember, as an affiliate, you don’t get paid for clicks. You only get paid when the merchant gets paid.
The main con with Amazon’s affiliate program is that the commissions are generally pretty low. For many niches, there are other programs offering better payouts. We’ll explore finding these affiliate programs in a bit.
Other Affiliate Programs
Next up is Target. Target is a big box store in the United States with a vast inventory of products, much like Amazon. Their payout is relatively low, at “up to 8%,” but one differentiator from Amazon is that Target offers a 7-day cookie life, while Amazon’s is only 24 hours. This means that if someone clicks your Target affiliate link and makes any purchase within 7 days, you’ll be paid a commission. With Amazon, the person who clicks the link needs to make a purchase within 24 hours.
Another option is Commission Junction, an affiliate network. Companies wanting to start an affiliate program sign up with Commission Junction, which handles all the tracking and software-related tasks. The pros of CJ include access to a directory of thousands of affiliate programs and stats like the average earnings per click over 7 and 30-day periods, as well as the commission rates. Unlike Amazon, you’re not limited to physical products or Amazon subscriptions. There are companies offering intangible products, like Booking.com for travel bookings and software companies like GetResponse, which provides email marketing services.
A downside to CJ is that you must apply for each program and get accepted. Many of these affiliate merchants are pickier about who they allow to become an affiliate compared to Amazon. 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 cover in another module.
ShareASale and Niche Affiliate Programs
Next, let’s talk about ShareASale, another affiliate network similar to Commission Junction but with different merchants. For example, Etsy and Weebly use ShareASale to run their affiliate programs.
Now that we’ve covered some of the more general affiliate programs and networks, let’s discuss how to find niche affiliate programs that are likely high-performers in your niche. It’s quite simple: look at which affiliate programs your competitors frequently link to. After all, if many of your competitors use a specific affiliate program, chances are it converts and/or pays out well.
There are two ways to do this: The first is to search Google 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 articles to open in new tabs. Hover over their affiliate links to see who they link to. While functional, this method isn’t exactly efficient.
A better way is to use a free feature in Ahrefs’ SEO toolbar. Click on the icon, choose the Links tab, and select “External” from the dropdown to see all external links on that page. This page only seems to link to Amazon’s affiliate program. If we look at the next ranking page, we see they link to Amazon and another one called “Avantlink,” an affiliate network used by companies like REI and Campsaver. 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.
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 also discuss kitchen knives, which you don’t buy at a camping store. 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 discovered this niche site about knives. 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. To find the affiliate merchants this knife site links to, go to the Linked Domains report in Site Explorer, which shows you all websites this site links to. Sort the table by the “Links to Target” column to see who this site links to most. Skim the domain names to see if they look like they would lead to an affiliate program or network.
We already know that all 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. 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. 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. 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 of their affiliate program.
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.
Considerations When Choosing Affiliate Programs
When choosing an affiliate program, consider two additional things: product and brand reputation. Beginners often choose programs with the biggest payout, but the reason many affiliate programs offer huge payouts is that their product is inferior to many of their competitors’ products. Remember, after someone clicks your affiliate link, they have to make a purchase 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 occur, 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. Quick sidenote: this is actually why I 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.
The second consideration is conversion rate. 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. 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%.
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% convert on BladeHQ, then your commissions from Amazon would be $21, while your commissions from BladeHQ would be $15. So despite BladeHQ’s bigger payout, Amazon would be the affiliate program to go with in this scenario. This example is a bit oversimplified because you need to consider things like traffic source, your content, and the intent of the visitors. These are all topics we’ll cover over the next three modules.
In fact, the next module is all about planning your affiliate site’s strategy, which will give you a blueprint to follow for the rest of this course.
Planning Your Affiliate Site’s Strategy
In this module, we’re going to do some planning for your affiliate marketing site. 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. We’ll be expanding on the affiliate blueprint covered in lesson 1.4.
So as a quick refresher, we want to create an affiliate site that’ll generate consistent revenue. To do that, we’ll need consistent traffic to pages that organically recommend affiliate products. 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.
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. 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, ultimately allowing you to build consistent revenue.
These are the technical and creative tasks we’ll need to do to achieve our end result. But what we haven’t really discussed 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 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.
Let’s dive deeper into an example to help you visualize what this strategy looks like. 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. Let’s say you cover five different adjustable dumbbells in your post, like these ones. To cover this fully, you now have five new reviews to write up. 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. Assuming you cover these bicep exercises, you have a bunch more posts you can create.
Assuming your content is great, you’re essentially positioning your site to be the authority on dumbbells in the eyes of visitors, which will help with conversions, and in the eyes of search engines, which will help with traffic. 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 on barbells and do the exact same thing. What you’re essentially doing here is creating a massive web of related content that’s going to be the foundation of not just an authoritative affiliate site but a business that has the potential to go beyond affiliate marketing.
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. Throughout the rest of this module, I’m going to do all of the work with you to plan for this hypothetical affiliate site. In the next lesson, we’re going to go up here to step 1, which is to do affiliate keyword research for your niche.
Affiliate Keyword Research
Keyword research is the first step in our flowchart on our journey to a consistent income through an affiliate site. It’s going to set the foundation for the topics you’ll create content on. 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. That’s search intent.
Search intent tells us about the purpose of a searcher’s query. 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. 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. 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 most people aren’t in the market to buy any. Adding product recommendations would probably be unnatural.
In general, there are four types of so-called affiliate keywords we’ll want to go after. These are general comparisons, branded comparisons, product reviews, and T&A keywords. 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. To set some context, I’m choosing baby products as my main niche. And as I taught in the previous lesson, I’m going to choose a sub-niche to start. Let’s go with car seats.
Types of Affiliate Keywords
Let’s discuss the four different types of affiliate keywords, how they fit into an affiliate marketing site, and how you can find them for your site.
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.
To find these keywords, you’ll need a keyword research tool. 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.
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.” 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. To do that, we’ll set a maximum keyword difficulty filter to something low, like 20. There are some great topics here worth considering, like “best rotating car seat” and “best car seats” for various ages. From here, you can jot down some keyword ideas that interest you, or if you have an Ahrefs’ account, you can add these to a keyword list, which is what I’ll do.
If you don’t have an Ahrefs account, you can still use our 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.
A quick but important sidenote: you shouldn’t just go after keywords with low Keyword Difficulty scores. Higher competition often indicates 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. According to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, the top-ranking page for this query gets around 38,000 monthly organic visits from the US alone. These types of keywords are worth adding to your keyword list to tackle at a later time when your site is a bit more established.
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. 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. 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.
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. If you don’t have an Ahrefs account, you can do something similar with our free Keyword generator tool. Just type in something like “product name vs” – and run the search. Jot down any keywords that interest you, then rinse and repeat for the next brand.
The next type of keywords are detailed product reviews. These queries will typically follow the format “product name” review. 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. If you’re going to buy these products and actually review them, choosing products that people are 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 e-commerce site and look through the different categories and brand names in their navigation. Right now, I’m on buybuybaby.com and looking at their “shop all car seats” page. If I click on the dropdown for Brand, you’ll see a list of brand names you can jot down. I’ve already done that and saved a list to my clipboard. 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. Just like that, we know exactly which brands we’d want to review and some specific models for which we now have keyword metrics.
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 keywords, which are T&A keywords, which stands for “Trust and Authority.” 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 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.
While these keywords may not directly contribute to your revenue, they’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.”
To find these keywords, let’s search for a few seeds 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. I’ll add some to my list until I’m satisfied, and you should too. If you don’t have an Ahrefs account, you can use our free Keyword generator. Just search for a seed keyword and then hit the Questions tab. Then you can rinse and repeat to build out your keyword list.
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.
In the next lesson, we’ll take your list of topics and actually plan out specific content pieces we’ll need to create and start building out what SEOs often call “topical authority.”
Creating a Content Strategy
In this lesson, 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.
As I mentioned in lesson 3.1, we want to create a massive web of related content, covering all the important topics in our niche. The main benefit here is that all these relevant pages will be connected and essentially work together to build what SEOs loosely call “topical authority.” 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.
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 illustrate 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 in golf,” and I could go on for hours. Plus, the content would actually need to be good.
Even this example hardly illustrates becoming an authority in the golf niche because there’s just so much you’d need to cover. This is why focusing on a sub-niche is a much better approach to building topical authority. This is the way we chose a niche in module 2. You’d cover topics like: “best golf balls,” “pro v1 golf ball review,” “pro v1x golf ball review,” “taylormade tp5 review,” “how many dimples are on a golf ball,” “how to properly clean golf balls,” “which golf ball generates the most spin,” “best golf balls for high handicappers,” and add another hundred or so topics.
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, I’m barely 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. For website owners, you’ll likely have better potential to rank for topically related keywords, assuming your content gets linked to. I’ll expand on why topical authority may help your rankings later in this lesson.
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. 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 left to do in this planning stage is to map related topics together so we can start building our web of related content. We’ll be using our keyword lists to do this. If you have no clue what I’m talking about, I highly recommend going back to lesson 3.2, where I walked you through how to do keyword research for affiliate marketing sites. But if you’re all caught up, let’s talk about perhaps the most efficient way to map affiliate topics. That’s by creating product clusters.
Creating 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. First, I’ll choose a general comparison topic from my list, like “best car seat for 3-year-olds.” This topic will sit at the top of our pyramid.
Because general comparison topics will require product comparisons and recommendations, we’ll need to choose some car seats to compare in our post. 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 of kids older than three, 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.
Visually speaking, we would just add a branch under our main topic: “best car seat for 3-year-olds” and call it “Diono Radian 3RXT review.” 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.
I’ve already looked at product specs, reviews, and installation videos for 14 different convertible car seats. After researching, I’ve narrowed down our list of “best car seats for 3-year-olds” to a total of six car seats: the two I have hands-on experience with, the Britax one4life, Graco Extend2fit, Graco 4ever dlx, and the Safety 1st Go and Grow. Let’s add branches to our flow chart for each of these models.
To review, we know we’re going to create a post on the best car seats for 3-year-olds, plus 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. It would also make sense to link from our product reviews to our general comparison post. We now have a product cluster.
The reason 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 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-olds post. 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 a topic on “Graco Extend2fit vs 4ever.” Well, we just wrote two product reviews for these, so writing a branded comparison post would be super-easy. We could easily add internal links to the product reviews, whether they’re one-way or reciprocal, in a very organic way.
Informational Posts and T&A Keywords
The last type of keywords on our list are T&A keywords, which again stands for trust and authority. These are mostly informational topics. While these topics may not directly impact your revenue, they serve important purposes: they can help you earn more backlinks, reach larger audiences, and build trust and authority.
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 writing a 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.
As you can see, 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 prioritize based on search volumes or keyword difficulty scores, it’s tough to visualize the relationships between your content. 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.
By having a solid internal linking plan, you’re going to do yourself a couple of 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. Without getting too technical, that just means that when one of your pages gets backlinks, the pages it links to will also benefit from that backlink – although to a lesser degree.
Now that we’ve mapped out our content, we’ll need to actually build out our site. I won’t go into how to create a WordPress blog or suggest specific themes because a lot of that is entirely up to your preferences. But I do want to discuss two super-important things related to site creation. These are your homepage’s content and your website’s navigation menu. That’s coming up in the next lesson.
Creating an SEO-Friendly Homepage and Navigation
Let’s talk about homepages first, and we’ll get to navigation afterward. 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.
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. Let’s expand.
Leading Visitors to Conversion Goals
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. 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. The actual conversion that happens on your website will be when a visitor clicks one of your affiliate links.
Using Your Homepage to Rank Important Pages
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. It just so happens that homepages are often the most authoritative page on a website.
Let’s look at a couple of examples of affiliate websites that do all three of these things on their homepage. The first is Garage Gym Reviews. They state that their brand is about “connecting the garage gym community.” On their site, they “provide in-depth and honest reviews on everything fitness-related.” Scrolling down, you’ll see some of their “best in-class reviews.” These are all clearly targeting “general comparison keywords.”
According to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, all these “best in class review” pages linked from their home page get a good amount of search traffic because they’re actually ranking high for their target keywords. In fact, all four posts are ranking in the top position for their target keywords.
Here’s another example from Dog Food Advisors. They clearly state that their site is about dog food reviews and ratings. They’re leading people towards their post on the “best dog foods,” which is obviously an important post for this site. They’re also linking to a “dog food reviews A to Z” page, which is a page that links to tons of different dog food reviews – all of which would naturally recommend products to purchase. Their “best dog food” page gets around 60,000 monthly search visits. Yes, they rank in the top position for “best dog food.” Their dog food reviews page also gets a lot of search traffic and ranks for the query “dog food review.”
When you’re creating your homepage, consider including these three things because it works. Remember that it doesn’t have to be perfect because you can update or change the homepage at any time.
Setting Up Your Site’s Navigation Menu
Let’s move on to setting up your site’s main navigation menu. Your navigation menu should serve two main purposes. #1: It should help provide a good user experience for visitors so they can find whatever they’re looking for on your site quickly. #2: It should make it easy for search engines to access your content.
Here’s what I mean. 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 pointing to page A and page B, then they’ve discovered two new pages. They can “follow” those links and discover even more URLs based on the pages that page A and page B link to. This process can go on for a very long time.
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. 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. 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. 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 of clicks from any page on your site.
For a larger site where you have too many comparison posts for your nav menu, you’ll want 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. 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. These pages link out to all sorts of other posts on their website.
Again, 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.
If you followed along from lesson 3.1 to now 3.4, then you should have completed your keyword research, your content mapping strategy, and now your homepage and navigation architecture. It’s time to actually create your affiliate content. That’s what we’ll be diving deep into in the next module.
Creating Content for Your Affiliate Site
In this module, I’m going to show you how to create content for your affiliate site. 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 discuss something often pondered upon: “How much informational vs. commercial content should I create for an affiliate site?”
Balancing Informational and Commercial Content
Before we try to answer this question, 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.
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 stand out. The only example I can think of that did this well was The Wirecutter 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. The bar is much higher now.
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. This site 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 of ranking and getting traffic to your site.
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. 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 are positives and negatives to both types of content. 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.
The good news is that if you followed the steps I taught in module 3, then you’ve already set yourself up for success. If you remember, one of the core content structures I taught was called a product cluster. Again, these are groups of commercial content pages that connect general comparison posts with multiple product reviews as well as branded comparison posts.
If we were to transform this map into topics for our hypothetical car seats affiliate site, we might have “best car seats” as our general comparison, these topics as our product reviews, and maybe one branded comparison post like Diono Radian vs. Britax Marathon. Boom. Our product cluster is complete with a total of 6 commercial pages.
If we were going for a 1:1 ratio, we’d want to choose around six informational pieces about car seats. To do that, I’ll draw from my keyword research list, which I created with you in module 3.
All we have left to do is create content on these topics. Creating content is what we’re going to go deep into in the next lesson, where I’ll show you how to write commercial blog posts that get traffic from Google and convert into affiliate commissions.
Writing Money-Making Blog Posts
Hey, it’s Sam Oh, and in this lesson, I’m going to show you how to write money-making blog posts for an affiliate site. When I say “money-making,” I’m referring to the three types of commercial posts we covered in module 3. 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: serve the intent of a visitor. You want visitors to be happy with the information they find on your page.
The reason this is important is that 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. 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.
General Comparison Keywords
Let’s talk about the first type of commercial post, which is for general comparison keywords. Again, these posts are what you use when targeting keywords like “best [product name].” So, “best garden hose,” “best booster seat,” “best golf balls,” etc. 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. 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-olds, 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.
Next up is the summary. As I mentioned before, listicles won’t be read in full. 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 a good user experience for those no-nonsense skimmers.
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.
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 writing descriptions, it’s best to keep the format consistent throughout the post. For example, if we’re reviewing car seats for 3-year-olds, 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 want 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 directly with product reviews because if you remember from module 3, a part of our overall strategy is to build “product clusters.” Product clusters are simply content structures that connect a general comparison post with multiple product review posts.
Writing Product Reviews
When you’re writing product reviews, the intent of most visitors will likely be different from 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.
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.
Here’s how I think a product review should be written. First will be the introduction. Much like the “best of” post, you’ll want to keep it short, sweet, and on point. The two things I think are important for product reviews are 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.”
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. These categories are essentially what will create your product review template.
With the conclusion, you’ll 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.
Branded Comparison Posts
The final commercial blog post type I want to talk about is “branded comparisons.” These are your typical “vs posts.” For example, Diono Radian 3RXT vs. Britax Marathon.
When we think about someone 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.
Just like with the product review posts, we want to address that in the introduction and help them make an informed purchasing decision throughout the body. 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. In this post, we’ll compare the main features of both models to help you decide which car seat is best for your little one.”
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. Again, for a car seat shopper, that might be safety, size, comfort, ease of installation, portability, and specs. 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 e-commerce store.
For the conclusion, it would be much the…
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