Complete Affiliate Marketing Course for Beginners

Hi, I'm Sam Oh and welcome to our

affiliate

marketing

for

beginners

course

. This

course

consists of 16 lessons and will guide you through the process, tactics, and strategies for creating your own income-generating

affiliate

site. There is no nonsense, nonsense, or sales pitch for a premium course. So let's start with the first lesson, where we will talk about what affiliate

marketing

is and how it works. So affiliate marketing is about promoting another company's products. And when someone makes a purchase thanks to your recommendation, you will receive a commission. Now, in order for the affiliate company to attribute sales to the right person, the merchant usually uses a unique link similar to this, which is called an affiliate link.

When a visitor clicks that link from your blog, website, or anywhere, a cookie is stored on their device. And an affiliate cookie does two main things. First, it helps the merchant attribute the sale to the right person. And second, cookies usually have an expiration date, which means people don't need to buy the product immediately after clicking your link. Let's look at an example so that everything is very clear. Let's say a visitor comes to your post about garden hoses and clicks on some of your affiliate links. This takes them to a product on Amazon. But wait...they have to go pick up their kids from soccer practice.

So they do it, have dinner, and then go back to Amazon.com in their web browser. They find the product again and then buy it along with a game console controller. Because they clicked on your affiliate link, a cookie was stored on their device. And since Amazon has a 24-hour cookie duration, you'll still be compensated a percentage for both the garden hose and the console controller, even if you're not promoting them. 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 we'll cover in the next lesson.

In this lesson, we'll talk about the two things you need to get started with affiliate marketing. The first is a property or platform. A platform is simply a place where you can recommend your links. That could be your own website or YouTube channel. Now, creating any of these is pretty simple, so we won't get into things like how to create an affiliate website because this course is about the actual marketing of an affiliate site. The second thing you will need is relevant and consistent traffic. Relevant traffic means that you are attracting visitors to your website who are interested in a topic and ideally want to make a purchase soon.

And one of the most important parts of getting relevant traffic is creating content, which will contain information in addition to your affiliate links. For example, these could be product reviews, best-of comparison lists, and how-to articles. We'll talk about how these themes can be devised in a later module. As far as getting consistent traffic, a lot of it will depend on where you get the traffic. Three of the most popular channels are social media, ads, and search engines. Now, social traffic is often inconsistent because social networks are designed to show new content. But many affiliate pages can be somewhat evergreen.

So, if you don't have a large following or a brand, I wouldn't count on social media as a reliable primary source of traffic to an affiliate site. Now, ads can be great because they allow you to get very relevant traffic quickly. But you have to pay for each person who clicks on your ad. So unless you are part of a high paying affiliate program and have experience with ads and conversion rate optimization, I would stay away from ads because you will find yourself under water quickly. Now, search traffic is free, constant and passive. And the way to get search traffic is through a marketing method called search engine optimization or SEO.

It is the top traffic source that I recommend and is trusted by many multi-million dollar affiliate websites. We'll go into much more depth into the tactical and strategic elements of creating content and getting relevant, consistent traffic in a later module, but first you need to know if the reward will be worth the effort. In the next lesson we will talk about how to make money with affiliate marketing and how much you can actually earn. In this lesson, I'll give you a high-level overview of how to make money with affiliate marketing. Now, as we discussed at the beginning of this module, when you join an affiliate program, you can generate unique affiliate links.

And when someone clicks on one of your links and makes a purchase within a certain time period, you receive a commission. Generally speaking, the more relevant traffic you get, the more clicks you will 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 will be profitable. Now, you might be wondering how much money you can make as an affiliate marketer. The simple answer is that there is no limit. For example, Pat Flynn used to share his income reports and reported over $100,000 in affiliate commissions in December 2017.

Ryan Robinson also shares his income reports. And in October 2019, he reported over $19,000 in affiliate income. Both gentlemen have done an excellent job building their brand and I'm sure it's taken them a lot of work and time to get to where they are. But the reality is, your checks might look more like this, at least when you're just starting out. Now, if you want to make a sustainable income with affiliate marketing, you need to consider your affiliate site as a business. It will be a difficult task and there will be some disappointing moments. But that's totally okay because when you adopt this entrepreneurial mindset instead of seeing it as a way to "hopefully" make a few dollars here and there, you'll be setting yourself up for success.

So, with the basics in the books, let's move on to the next lesson where I'll give you a high-level overview of what it's like to start and grow your first affiliate site. In this lesson, I'll give you a high-level plan for starting your first affiliate website. And this lesson will give you a good idea of ​​the skills, techniques and strategies you will learn throughout this course. But first, let's recap some key principles that we've covered in the previous three lessons that will influence your strategy. So, at a high level, your affiliate site will be primarily made up of blog posts.

And the types of content you will create will mostly be informational pieces. For example, how-to articles and comparisons of different products. And within the content, you will add your affiliate links to the products you recommend. Now, when someone clicks on one of these links and makes a purchase, you will be compensated by the merchant or affiliate partner. Now, your content will not only convert visitors into revenue but will also attract visitors to your website. And the marketing method we will use to drive traffic to your affiliate site is search engine optimization because the traffic is free, constant and passive.

Best of all, SEO traffic will help you generate consistent income that adds up over time. Now, there are actually quite a few steps to get to the point of generating consistent traffic and income. But to give you a high-level overview, we can break the process down into four macro steps. Find a niche; plan your website; build your website; and attract traffic to it. So let's go over these phases at a high level, starting with finding a niche. When you're starting an affiliate site, especially if you're relatively inexperienced, it's beneficial to start with a strong focus on one niche.

For example, it would probably be better to start a barbecue recipe site rather than a generic one about all types of recipes. And that's because broader topics tend to have more competition, and as a result, you'll have a hard time driving traffic to your site. And without traffic there is no income. Now, this is just a small example of the things you'll need to consider when choosing a niche. There are other things to evaluate, such as breadth of topic, personal interest, marketability, and more. We'll look at some techniques in Module 2 for doing this and give you a checklist that will give you the best chance of creating a successful affiliate website.

Alright, the next stage is to plan your affiliate site. This is where you will create the template for your affiliate website. And there are two things in particular that you will need to plan for. #1. You'll want to plan your content strategy. And this is a very important step because it is essential for both traffic and conversions. Now, most of your planning will be done through an SEO technique called keyword research, which is a process of understanding the queries people use to search for products, services, and general information on search engines. And the second thing you'll need to plan is your site or content structure.

And by structure, I mainly mean groupings that are done with internal links. We'll cover all of this in great detail in Module 3. Now, once you've finished planning your site, you'll need to develop it. This includes creating a website and setting up tools for things like tracking. Now, the most important and time-consuming part of this stage is content creation. Because content is what will help you rank in search engines and is what your visitors will use to make purchasing decisions. We have an entire module dedicated to content creation where we will talk about the content creation process, the types of content you should create and I will also give you templates you can follow for various types of affiliate content.

Now, getting traffic through SEO is much more complicated than simply writing good things. A key ingredient to ranking high on Google and attracting a large number of visitors to your site will be backlinks. We'll talk about some basic strategies that any beginner can implement that should help your pages rank for your 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 second module, where we'll delve into finding niches, qualifying them, and choosing one that will be right for you. .

In this module, I will show you how to find, choose and qualify a niche that is right for you. But before we move on to techniques for finding and qualifying a niche, you need to know what to look for in a niche. And there are four factors that we will focus on. The first factor is competition. Now, as we established in the first module that we will create content and rank it in search engines like Google, we will specifically look at SEO and keyword competition. And the main goal of this is to get an idea if we could 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 of a niche. So we will use a simple 3 step process to do this. Step 1: Generate keyword ideas. Step 2 – Filter out low difficulty keywords using a metric called “keyword difficulty” and Step 3 – Limit affiliate keywords. To get started, search for a phrase related to your niche in a keyword research tool like Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, then go to the Matched Terms report. Now, to filter out low difficulty keywords, simply set a keyword difficulty filter to have a maximum value of something low, like 10.

Lastly, you'll want to filter for affiliate type keywords. For example, keywords that include the word "best" tend to appear in product summaries such as "best golf clubs." Or keywords that include the word “review” will typically show product reviews like “stix golf club review.” To do this, hit the Include filter, choose the Any tab, and in the text field simply add words like “best” and “review.” Now, if we press the Show Results button, you will see that there are thousands of relevant, low-difficulty keywords that together 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, I recommend you watch our full tutorial in our free SEO for Beginners course on how to evaluate the ranking difficulty of any keyword. In fact, I highly recommend watching the entire course, as the concepts and techniques will also be fully applicable to sites.affiliates. Very well, the second factor is commerciality. Now, not all niches are the same. Some have incredible business value that can generate millions of dollars in monthly revenue, while others may only generate a few hundred dollars, if anything. Ideally, choose a niche that has a medium to high business value so you don't reach a point where you maximize your earning potential.

Some things you can do include conducting market research on the niche, looking at the commissions of relevant affiliate programs, and looking at advertising costs to get an idea of ​​how valuable certain queries are to different companies. We'll talk more about understanding business value in the next few lessons. The third factor to consider is personal interest. Plain and simple, you don't have to be passionate about a niche to create a successful affiliate site. But that doesn't mean you should choose a niche just for its earning potential. From my experience, choosing a niche that interests you at least a little is the best way to go.

Because people often leave their affiliate sites because they have no interest in the products they recommend or the content they create. Losing momentum can be the number one killer of affiliate sites. The fourth factor to consider is the breadth of the search market. Again, because we are looking for search traffic, you want to understand how much traffic can come to your content from search engines. Fortunately, keyword research tools make it easy for us because they tell us search volumes, which are the number of monthly searches performed for a query. SEO tools can also give you estimates of your competitors' search traffic, which is even more useful than search volumes because what we want is traffic, not searches.

So by understanding the breadth of the search market, you will basically get an estimate of how many people are interested in the topics you will write about, how much traffic you can get from these topics, and in turn, how many clicks you will get. you can access your affiliate links, which should be directly related to your income. As a general rule, you'll want to start with a pretty good niche because the competition will probably be less. But your niche needs to be tied to a larger industry so that you have a chance to differentiate yourself, giving you room to eventually reach more people.

For example, you could start an affiliate site in the bed frame niche. And after doing some quick affiliate keyword research, you'll see that there is a cumulative search volume of over 130,000 monthly searches in the US for "bed frames" alone. It's not small at all, but it's not huge either. But the best thing about bed frames is that it's quite natural to focus on topics like "mattresses," "pillows," "sheets," and even the broader topic of "sleeping." There is a lot of room to grow. Now, what you will find when researching niches is that many of these factors are connected.

For example, niches that are highly commercial will also have high competition and niches with low competition often don't interest you. It's about finding a balance between these criteria and then committing to a niche. In fact, these four things we just talked about will help you qualify any niche so you can qualify one that's right for you. But before we move on to qualification, we need to start thinking about a list of niches and doing our research. And we will talk about that in the next lesson. Now, before we get into the research and qualification methods, let's quickly recap the four things you should look for in a niche market.

And these are: The level of SEO competition, which will tell us who we will face or even if we can compete. Commerciality, which will give us clues about how much money we can earn. Personal interest, which is important for most people because you really want to enjoy what you are doing. And the breadth of the search market, which gives us an idea of ​​the size of our market that we are targeting, at least for the type of traffic we will be looking for. This will help us qualify a niche so that we can make an informed decision when it comes time to choose one.

Now, the process for finding and qualifying niches depends on where you are in your niche selection process. And you'll probably fall into one of two groups. Tip #1: You already have a general idea of ​​the niches you are interested in. And number 2: you don't have a concrete idea yet, but you are open to any and all opportunities if they seem interesting to you. First, let's go over the process for segment #1 and I'll show you how you can find information to check off items on your grading checklist as we go. Alright, assuming you already have a general idea of ​​the niches you're interested in, the first thing you'll want to do is write them down.

So for me, those would be topics like golf, clean energy, and personal finance. Now, since these are all things that interest me, we can add a plus to the "personal interest" rating factor. Now, for each of these topics, you'll want to brainstorm some general topics and products related to that niche. For example, if we were to do this for the golf niche, I would write down ideas like: “golf,” “putter,” “irons,” and “wedge.” Now, with our subtopics in hand, the next thing you'll need to do is about three minutes of preliminary keyword research. And you will need a keyword research tool to do this.

So I'm using Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and all I'm going to do is paste in my list of subtopics and run the search. Next, I'll go to the Matched 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 is easy to recommend different products naturally. Fortunately, so-called “affiliate keywords” are easy to find using keyword modifiers. And these are just plugins of a base keyword. For example, when a query includes the word "best," it usually means that you need to create a product summary.

Queries that contain the word "vs" or "review" usually mean that you will need to write a review or comparison article in order to rank on Google. We'll go into details in a later module as it's more related to SEO, but we're not there yet. But if you can't wait, you can watch our video on search intent in our free SEO for

beginners

course, which I'll link in the description. Now, since we know that we can find “affiliate keywords” by searching for queries that contain the words “best,” “vs,” or “review,” we can take these words and paste them into the “include” box in the Keyword 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 now we have a list of mostly business topics. Valuable for a golf affiliate site. In fact, the fact that there are almost two million monthly searches on Google in the US alone tells us that the breadth of the search market is quite large, so we can add an advantage to that factor. our rating list. Now, some of them will be quite competitive to rank for, but we can actually filter out low difficulty keywords using the keyword difficulty filter.

All you have to do is set the maximum KD value to something low. 20. And you'll immediately see that there are still almost a million monthly searches for these low-competition keywords each month. So both the SEO competence and the breadth of searches seem good to me. Now, to get an idea of ​​business value, you can examine the CPC column to see how much advertisers are willing to pay per click for a specific query. But these values ​​are just for one query, which isn't very useful because you want to get a full picture of how valuable your traffic would be if you ranked for many of these affiliate-type keywords.

And the way to do this is to find a competing affiliate site that is already ranking for the queries you would like to rank for and is not a mega authority in your niche because it will be too difficult to compete with them, at least when we are starting out. first time. So, to find these competing websites, you can use Ahrefs Content Explorer. Simply search for something like "best golf" and then set the search mode to Title Search. And this will show us pages that contain the words "best" and "golf" in the pages title. Basically, it will show us other golf affiliate pages, many of which come from affiliate sites dedicated to golf.

Now, since SEO proficiency is an important part of rating a niche, especially for beginners, I recommend setting a domain rating filter to have a low maximum value of something like 20. And again, the Domain rating is a metric that attempts to measure the performance of a website. authority. Click Show Results and you will now have a list of low authority website pages that are likely to post affiliate content about golf products. But we don't need to view pages right now. We want to know more about the performance of websites as a whole. To see the top websites, simply click on 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, the traffic value tells us how much it would cost to pay for this amount of organic traffic if you bought it from Google Ads. And the reason it's a decent indicator for understanding the business value of a site is that if advertisers are willing to pay this amount of money to get this traffic, then it's probably valuable. Now, it is important to note that when you look at these metrics, you need to make sure that the sites you are analyzing will actually be competitive niche affiliate sites.

Simply scan the domain names and if it looks like it might be a niche blog, click on it to investigate the types of content they create. So for this site, it is clear that it is an affiliate website as the content is mainly based on product reviews and summaries. Now, going back to Content Explorer, you will see that the site receives a lot of monthly search traffic and has a traffic value of around $70,000/month, even though it is a low authority site. Now, to be clear, that doesn't mean this site makes $70,000 a month, but it does tell us that the topics the site ranks have clear commercial value.

So let's add a plus to that rating factor. Now, it's important to keep in mind that you shouldn't use traffic value as the only means of understanding business value. A key component we don't talk about here is the affiliate programs these sites use. And in the next video I'll show you how to find affiliate programs for a niche market, so stay tuned. Alright, now let's talk about finding and qualifying niches if you're not quite sure what topics you want to cover. There are two effective ways to find niches. The first is to look at sites that link to a large affiliate program like Amazon.

For example, the golf affiliate site we found earlier is an Amazon affiliate. And if we hover over one of the affiliate links, we will see that the link points to a page on the amzn.to domain. This is the shortened URL for Amazon. So, with that domain in hand, let's go to the Ahrefs Site Explorer, type in the URL amzn.to, and run the search. Next, go to the backlinks report, which will show us all the pages that link to this website. Now, because SEO competition and search market breadth are important considerations when choosing a niche, we can set up some filters to narrow down the results since amzn.to has almost 50 million links.

First, I'll choose "One page per domain" because right now we're interested in website data and not so much page-level data. And then I'll set the domain rating filter to a maximum of 20 to filter out low authority websites. Next, I'll set the domain traffic filter to have a minimum value of 10,000, which will help us understand the breadth to some extent. Finally, I'll click More Filters and choose Language. And I will set it to English. Everything looks good, so let's press Show Results. Now it's just a matter of skimming the referring page column and using some common sense to infer what the site is about.

For example, this is a stock checker, this one is on headphone reviews, and this one is on knives. The one about knives is actually quite interesting because this website only has a domain rating of 6 and receives around 100,000 visits frommonthly Google search every month. This tells us that SEO competition is probably weak for this niche and that the search market breadth, even for low difficulty keywords, will be decent. So let's add a plus to those factors. Now, to understand marketability, we can look at the traffic value of this site. To do that, I'll 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 a site with such low authority. Now, as for personal interests, that's up to you. Alright, the second way to find niches is to search for the “best” posts in Content Explorer. To do this, simply search for “best” in the search box and set it to 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 we will press Show results.

And this basically shows us pages of websites that receive a lot of traffic, have low authority and are in English. Now, if you want the condensed version, you can press the Websites tab to see the top 100 websites in Content Explorer search results based on their organic traffic. Then, simply skim through the domain names to see if there are any obvious niche sites you might be interested in exploring. For example, this site appears to be wearing work boots, which receives a lot of search traffic, has a high traffic value, and a very low website authority. There is a triple advantage to our work boot niche.

And just in case, I'll click on the site and yes, it's an affiliate site that's all about work boots. That's a niche I never would have thought of. Now, if you want to see a larger list, go back to the pages tab and hit the “One page per domain” filter. Finally, hit the “Exclude landing pages” filter and you will have tons of results that you can review along with their SEO metrics to help you qualify niches. Now, the scoring methods we use are just quick checks, especially when it comes to the business factor. The affiliate programs associated with the niche will often determine the potential income you can generate because different programs offer different commissions.

So in the next lesson, I'll show you the best affiliate programs you can join and how you can find niche affiliate programs worth exploring. So let's start with arguably the most popular affiliate program: Amazon Associates. This is the Amazon affiliate program. They have millions of products you can promote and are probably the most trusted eCommerce brand in the world. In my opinion, Amazon Associates is the best affiliate program in the world. Now, your payments differ depending on the product category. And commissions can range from 1 to 20% of the sale price. Now, let's look at the pros and cons of this program, starting with the pros.

We have already mentioned one and it is the fact that you have a huge inventory of products to choose from. Another advantage is that you can monetize international traffic using its OneLink feature. Basically, you create a single affiliate link for a product and depending on that visitor's location, they will be sent to their local Amazon site. For example, let's say a person in the US clicks on your affiliate link. They will be directed to the Amazon.com product page. But if someone from Canada or the United Kingdom clicks on that same link, they will be redirected to the amazon.ca or amazon.co.uk product pages, assuming they exist.

And the final advantage is that Amazon's conversion rate is extremely high. Since it's Amazon and most people, at least in the US, have an Amazon account, there's very little friction from the product page to the checkout process. And remember, as an affiliate, you don't get paid for clicks. They will only pay you when they pay the merchant. Now, the main disadvantage of the Amazon affiliate program is that the commissions are generally quite low. And for many niches, there are other programs that offer better payouts. In a moment we will see how to find these affiliate programs.

The next affiliate program is Target. Target is a large store in the United States and has a huge inventory of products, much like Amazon. Now, their payout is quite low, “up to 8%.” But one difference with Amazon is that Target offers a 7-day cookie duration, while Amazon only has a 24-hour cookie. This means that if someone clicks on your Target affiliate link and makes any purchase within 7 days, you will be paid a commission. While on Amazon, the person who clicks on the link must make the purchase within 24 hours. The next affiliate program is Commission Junction. Actually, CJ is an affiliate network.

Basically, companies that want to start an affiliate program will register with Commission Junction and they will take care of all the tracking and software related things. Now, the advantage of CJ is that you get access to a directory of thousands of affiliate programs. They also share statistics like average earnings per click over 7- and 30-day periods, as well as commission rates. Another advantage is that, unlike Amazon, you are not limited to physical products or Amazon subscriptions. There are companies that offer intangible products such as Booking.com, which manages travel reservations, and software companies such as GetResponse, which offers email marketing services.

Now, one downside to CJ is that you have to apply to each program and be accepted. In my experience, most of these affiliate marketers are much more picky about allowing them to become affiliates compared to Amazon. So, while it doesn't hurt to create a CJ account and apply for these programs, you may initially be rejected until you reach a certain amount of consistent traffic. But there should be nothing to worry about because if you follow the steps in this course, you should be able to do it with SEO, which we will cover in another module. Alright, the next affiliate program is ShareASale.

And in fact, this is also an affiliate network. Now, I won't bother talking much about ShareASale because it's more or less exactly the same as Commission Junction, but there are different merchants that use it. For example, Etsy and Weebly use ShareaSale to run their affiliate programs. Alright, now that we've covered some of the more general affiliate programs and networks, let's talk about how you can find specialized affiliate programs that are likely to be high-performing in your niche. And it's pretty simple. Just look at what affiliate programs your competitors frequently link to. After all, if a specific affiliate program is used by many of your competitors, then it is likely to convert and/or pay well.

And there are two ways to do it: The first is to go to Google and search for something like "best." For example, in the previous lesson we found an affiliate site about knives. So you might search for “best camping knives.” You can then click on some 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 the Ahrefs SEO toolbar. Simply click the icon, choose the Links tab, and select “External” from the drop-down menu to see all external links on that page.

And as you can see, this page only seems to link to the Amazon affiliate program. Now if we look at the ranking page below you will see that they link to Amazon and another one called "Avantlink" which is an affiliate network used by companies like REI and Campsaver. So, to further investigate the programs, you will need to sign up for an account at Avantlink and check the metrics they provide about these programs. Now, the disadvantage of this method is that we are only viewing one page. And it turns out this page is about camping knives. But a site about knives would probably also talk about kitchen knives.

And you don't buy kitchen knives at a camping store. Therefore, a much better way to get a holistic view of all the affiliate programs in a niche is to see who your competitors link to the most across your site. For example, in the last lesson on finding niches, we found this specialized site about knives. And according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, it receives a lot of search traffic, which is quite valuable, as can be seen from its monthly traffic value. Now, to find the affiliate marketers this knife site links to, simply go to the Linked Domains report in Site Explorer, which shows all the websites this site links to.

Simply sort the table by the “Target Links” column to see who this site links to the most. Now, all you have to do is skim through the domain names to see if they appear to lead to an affiliate program or network. We already know that all Amazon links will be affiliate links. Then you'll see this shortened URL shrsl.com that this site links to hundreds of times. This is Shareasale's shortened URL for affiliate links. Now, if we click on the number in this row and click on one of the affiliate links, you'll see that it leads to a knife company called BladeHQ.

And if we search for that site on ShareaSale, you will be able to see the commission amount and the earnings per click metric. As you scroll further down the list, you will see that this affiliate site also links to avantlink.com. And if we expand these links in Ahrefs and click on one of those affiliate links, you'll see that it sends us to another site called Buck Knives. Then it's just a matter of researching the details of your affiliate program. Now, if you clarify and repeat these steps for some popular niche affiliate sites, you should be able to find some common programs that will be helpful when choosing the best affiliate program for your site.

Basically, your competitors have done the research and testing for you. Now, when you choose an affiliate program, you will need to consider two additional things. The first is the reputation of the product and the brand. Beginners usually choose programs that offer the highest payouts. But the reason many affiliate programs offer large payouts is because their product is inferior to many of their competitors' products. Remember, after someone clicks on your affiliate link, they must make a purchase for you to receive compensation. Additionally, people who buy poorer quality products are more likely to return them. And when refunds are made on your referred sales, you'll also lose your commission.

By recommending good quality products from solid, well-known brands, you will help your visitors and your bank account. Quick note: This is actually why I don't recommend using Clickbank as an affiliate program, as I have never seen a quality product or brand run their affiliate program there. Alright, the second thing to consider is the conversion rate. Now, most affiliate programs do not list conversion rates for their products and landing pages. But if you work with an affiliate manager on one of their programs, it doesn't hurt to ask. To illustrate the importance of conversion rate, let's look at an example from the knives niche.

So, according to Amazon's commission table, sporting and outdoor items pay 3% of the sale. And most camping knives will fall into this category. But that other affiliate program we found on Shareasale, BladeHQ, pays 5%. Well, let's say you get 100 clicks on 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, that means your Amazon commissions would be $21, while your BladeHQ commissions would be $15. So even though BladeHQ has a higher payout, Amazon would be the affiliate program to follow in this scenario. Now, this example is a bit simplified because it is necessary to consider aspects such as the source of the traffic, the content and the intent of the visitors.

These are all things we will cover in the next 3 modules. In fact, the next module is all about planning your affiliate site strategy, which will give you a plan to follow for the rest of this course. In this module, we're going to do a little planning for your affiliate marketing site. Now, before we work on the actual tasks involved in site planning, it is important that we get on the same page and go over the affiliate marketing strategy we will use for our site. And we're basically going to expand on the affiliate plan that was covered in lesson 1.4.

As a quick refresher, we want to create an affiliate site that generates consistent income. To do this, we will need constant traffic to pages that recommend affiliate products organically. And the best way to get that traffic is through a technique ofmarketing called SEO or search engine optimization because traffic is free, passive and constant. Now, the general process to get SEO traffic will follow three basic steps. Step 1 is to conduct affiliate keyword research, which is the process of finding suitable topics for an affiliate site that people search for month after month. Step 2 is to create content that people want to see when they search 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 generate that consistent income. Now, these are the technical and creative things that we will have to do to get to the final result. But what we haven't really talked about yet is what the overall strategy looks like from a bird's eye view. The basic idea is to choose a niche that has a lot to talk about and then choose a sub-niche of that niche. For example, you could choose golf as your primary niche and then putting as your secondary niche.

You would then cover absolutely everything in the putting category before moving on to the next sub-niche. Let's dive 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 it will cover the entire topic of dumbbells. As an example, you could create equipment roundups about "best adjustable dumbbells," "best dumbbell sets," and "best dumbbells for home." Now, let's get to the adjustable dumbbells. So, let's say you cover five different adjustable dumbbells in your post like this. Well, to cover this in full, you now have five new reviews to write.

Now, let's say you also want to write content about dumbbell exercises. Well, now you can write about dumbbell exercises for chest, biceps, triceps, back and legs. Let's focus on dumbbell exercises for biceps. This would be a list that talks about all kinds of great exercises for your biceps. And assuming you cover these biceps exercises, you have many more posts you can create. Now, assuming your content is excellent, what you are essentially doing is positioning your site to be the absolute authority in the eyes of visitors, which will help with conversions, and search engines, which will help with traffic.

Now, assuming you've read the hundreds or even thousands of weight-related content, this is where you'll review your main niche and then choose another sub-niche: Let's go with weights. Then you would become the weight authority and do exactly the same thing. And what you are essentially doing here is creating a massive network of related content that will be the foundation of not only an authorized affiliate site, but also a business that has the potential to go beyond affiliate marketing. Now, I need to hit the brakes here because before we can even think about becoming this mega authority site, we need to start from square one and find some topics that would be appropriate for our site.

So for the rest of this module, I'll do all the work with you to plan this hypothetical affiliate site. And in the next lesson, we'll go to step 1, which is doing affiliate keyword research for your niche. Now, keyword research is the first step in our flowchart on our path to consistent income. We will use our keyword lists to do this. Now, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, I recommend going back to lesson 3.2. where I explained how to do keyword research for affiliate marketing sites. But if you're already up to speed, let's talk about perhaps the most effective way to map affiliate topics.

And that is by creating product groups. A product group is a simple content structure that connects a general comparison post to multiple product review posts. Let's see what this would look like on 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. Now, because general comparison topics will require product comparisons and recommendations, we'll have to pick a few car seats to compare in our post. And in my opinion, the best place to start is to tap into real-life experiences.

For example, I actually have nine car seats, so it's fair to say I've done my research and tested it in real life. Now, I also have a couple of kids who are now over three years old, so I know 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 roundup. Now, visually speaking, we would simply add a branch under our main topic: “best car seat for 3 year olds” 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. Now, I'm not particularly happy with some of the other convertible car seats I've purchased, so let's look at the keywords in our product reviews to see what other car seats we could add. Now, I've gone ahead and looked at product specifications, reviews, and installation videos for 14 different convertible car seats. And after doing some research, I 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 are Britax one4life, Graco Extend2fit, Graco 4ever dlx, and Safety 1st Go and Grow.

So let's add branches to our flowchart for each of these models. So to review, we know we are going to create a post on the best car seats for 3 year olds. Additionally, we will write six different product reviews for each model in our overall comparison post, such as “Britax one4life Review”. , “Graco extend2fit Review”, etc. Now, from an on-page perspective, we can simply “connect” these pages by internally linking from our overall comparison post to our product reviews. And it would also make sense to link our product reviews to our overall comparison post. Now we have a group of products.

Now, the reason I call product groups efficient is because as your product review library grows, creating content for general comparisons becomes faster and easier. For example, when we're going to create a post about, say... "the best convertible car seats for small cars," we've already covered the Diono Radian 3RXT review in our post about the best car seats for 3-year-olds. . And it turns out that this model is the ideal safety seat for small cars. Now, brand comparisons also fit neatly into product groups. If you look at our list of brand comparison keywords, you'll see that there is this topic about "graco extend2fit vs 4ever." Well, we just wrote two product reviews for these, so writing a brand comparison post would be a breeze.

And of course, we could easily add internal links to product reviews, whether one-way or reciprocal in a very organic way. Alright, the last type of keywords on our list are T&A keywords, which again represent trust and authority. And these are mostly informational topics. Now, these topics may not directly affect your income, but they serve important purposes: they can help you get more backlinks, reach larger audiences, and build trust and authority. Now, unlike product groups, informational posts on affiliate sites tend to have a less pyramidal structure. For example, if you have four pages on time and attendance topics, they won't necessarily link together creating a perfect pyramid.

Internal linking on these pages will mostly boil down to "do it when it makes sense." For example, let's say we wrote a post about car seat safety. It would be perfectly natural to link to another page about "when car seats expire," "when to turn the car seat from rear to front," and "requirements for switching to a booster seat." These are all related to car seat safety and happen to be topics on our T&A keyword list. Now, it would also make a lot of sense to link our post on "when do car seats expire" to our business page on "best car seats" because people reading that post may need to buy a new one and could probably use a little help in narrowing down your search to a suitable product.

As you can see, creating these structures and mapping content is less about strict compliance and more about creating a solid foundation for the SEO of your content. When you have a large list of topics and prioritize based on search volumes or keyword difficulty scores, it's difficult to visualize the relationships between your content. And what happens most often is that you create random internal links, which creates poor structure, which makes ranking your pages more difficult than necessary. But by having a solid internal linking plan, you'll be doing yourself a couple of favors that should ultimately help you rank higher on Google and get more free traffic to your pages. #1.

You will create a better user experience for your visitors by providing them with relevant resources that they may find useful. And 2. You will facilitate the PageRank flow, which will help your pages rank higher on Google. And 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. Alright, now that we've planned our content, we'll need to create our site. And I won't go into how to create a WordPress blog or suggest specific topics because a lot of that depends entirely on your preferences.

But I do want to talk about two very important things related to site creation. And these are the content of your home page and the navigation menu of your website. And that will be covered in the next lesson. Alright, let's talk about the home pages first and then we'll move on to the navigation. Generally speaking, a homepage serves three main purposes, regardless of the type of website. #1. You must communicate what your brand or company does. #2. It should drive people toward a conversion goal. And #3. It can be used to help rank important pages higher on Google. Now, the first purpose is quite simple.

But the second and third points may be more difficult to understand, especially in the context of an affiliate marketing site. So let's expand. A conversion for an affiliate marketing site occurs when someone clicks on your affiliate link and purchases something from the affiliate merchant. Now the thing is, you don't have any control over the merchant site. But what is within your control, to some extent, is getting people to click on your affiliate links in your content. Therefore, driving people towards a conversion goal for an affiliate site just means getting visitors to interact with your content that naturally recommends affiliate products.

And the actual conversion that occurs on your website will occur when a visitor clicks on one of your affiliate links. Now, as to my third point about using your homepage to rank important pages higher on Google, this boils down to what we discussed in the previous lesson. When you link pages on your site with internal links, you are facilitating the flow of something called "PageRank." Basically, when the linked page gets backlinks, it transfers so-called "authority" or "power" to the pages it links to, helping them rank higher on Google. And it just so happens that home pages are often the most authoritative pages on a website.

Alright, let's look at a couple of examples of affiliate websites that do these three things on their home page. The first is Garage Gym Reviews. They claim their brand is about “connecting the garage gym community.” And on their site, they "offer honest and in-depth reviews on all things fitness." If you scroll down, you'll see some of their "best in class" reviews. They all clearly point to "general comparison keywords." Now, according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, all of these "best-in-class reviews" pages that are linked from your home page get a good amount of search traffic because they actually rank high for your keywords.aim.

In fact, all four posts occupy the top position based on their target keywords. Here is another example from Dog Food Advisors. They clearly state that their site is about dog food reviews and ratings. They are directing people to their “best dog foods” post, which is obviously an important post for this site. They are also linking to an "A to Z dog food reviews" page, which is a page that links to tons of different dog food reviews, all of which would naturally recommend products to purchase. Now, their “best dog food” page receives around 60,000 search visits monthly. And yes, they take the top spot for “best dog food.” Their dog food review page also gets a lot of search traffic and ranks for the query “dog food review.” So when you're creating your homepage, consider including these three things because it works.

And remember that it doesn't have to be perfect because you can update or change the home page at any time. Alright, let's move on to setting up the main navigation menu of your site. Now, your navigation menu should serve two main purposes. #1. It should help provide a good user experience to visitors so they can quickly find what they are looking for on your site. And 2. You should make it easier for search engines to access your content. This is what I mean. The way Google finds content on your site is by "following" links from one page to another.

For example, if Google comes to one of your pages and sees two links in the navigation pointing to page A and page B, then it has discovered two new pages. They will then be able to "follow" those links and discover even more URLs based on the pages that pages A and B link to. And this process can take a long time. Now, if all links are removed from page B, the search engine will not be able to discover any of these URLs because the path has effectively been broken. This is an oversimplified 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 it possible. Now, your navigation links will largely depend on the number of pages you have on your site or plan to have, which is usually dictated by the breadth of your niche and sub-niches. For a small site, the solution is easy because you have already created "product groups", something I taught you to do in the last few lessons. So you can just link to some of your general comparison posts and your blog archive page.

This way, all of your pages can be accessed with a couple of clicks from any page on your site. Now, for a larger site where you have too many comparison posts for your navigation menu, you'll want to create category pages and link to them from your navigation. For example, if we look at Wirecutter, which is a great affiliate site, you will see that they have several categories in their navigation menu. Now, if I hover over Technology and click on the "headphones" category, you'll see that most of the posts at the top of this page are for general comparisons.

And these pages link to all kinds of posts on your website. Again, there is no exact formula for navigation or internal linking. Ultimately, you want to create a good user experience for visitors and make your content accessible to search engines. Very good, if you followed lesson 3.1. So far 3.4, then you should have

complete

d your keyword research, your content mapping strategy, and now your homepage and navigation architecture. Now it's time to create your affiliate content. And that's what we'll delve into in the next module. In this module, I'll show you how to create content for your affiliate site.

And there are two main goals for our content. #1. We want you to rank on Google so we can drive consistent traffic to our site. And 2. We want our information to be useful to visitors so they can make informed purchasing decisions and we may be compensated with affiliate commissions. Now before I start creating this content, I want to talk about something that is often thought about and that is “how much informational versus commercial content should I create for an affiliate site?” Before we can try to answer this question, I want you to imagine two different sites at opposite ends: one site with information-only content and one with business-only content.

Let's talk about the fully commercial site first. To help you visualize the types of content on this site, you will find the best product comparisons, posts and reviews. Now, in my opinion, the problem with this type of site is that unless your reviews are legitimate, unique, and demonstrate unmatched authority and expertise, it will be difficult to truly stand out. The only example I can think of that worked this well was TheWireCutter before it was acquired by the New York Times. At the time, no one really did hands-on product reviews with thoughtful testing because it required a lot of time, money, and expertise.

But Wirecutter always did it very well. As a result, they gained people's trust and earned backlinks easily, making them a general authority on product reviews. The bar is much higher now. So to translate, if you can't at least get backlinks to your business pages, you probably won't be able to rank and therefore you won't get much traffic to your site and you won't earn much. commissions. Now let's look at the other extreme:

complete

ly informative content. This site will have tons of how-tos, tutorials, guides, and basically anything for purely informational purposes. Now, because informative content generally generates backlinks more easily, you will have a better chance of ranking and driving traffic to your site.

But the main disadvantage of creating a completely informational affiliate site is that it will limit your earning potential because commercial topics will be easier to recommend products naturally. And affiliates get paid when people click on those affiliate links and make a purchase. So, let's get back to the question: what is the ideal ratio of commercial and informational content for an affiliate site? Well, as I just explained, both types of content have positive and negative aspects. And since both are important, any ratio that is roughly equal is completely fine in my opinion. It could be 40/60, 50/50, 60/40 or whatever.

Now, the good news is that if you followed the steps I taught you in Module 3, you will already be set up for success. If you remember, one of the main content structures I taught was called a product group. And again, these are groups of business content pages that connect general comparison posts with multiple product reviews, as well as brand comparison posts. So if we were to transform this map into topics for our hypothetical car seat affiliate site, we could have "best car seats" as our overall comparison, these topics as our product reviews, and maybe a brand comparison post like Diono Radian vs.

Britax. Marathon. Boom. Our product cluster is completed with a total of 6 commercial pages. Now, if we were to go with a 1:1 ratio, we would want to choose about six informative articles about car seats. To do this, I'll build on my keyword research list that I created with you in Module 3. Now, all we have left to do is create content around these topics. And content creation is what we'll delve into in the next lesson, where I'll show you how to write business blog posts that get traffic from Google and convert into affiliate commissions. Hi, I'm Sam Oh and in this lesson I'll show you how to write profitable blog posts for an affiliate site.

And when I say “make money,” I mean the three types of trade publications we covered in Module 3. And these are general comparisons like “best golf balls,” product reviews like “Titleist Pro Golf Ball Review V1," and brand comparisons like "Titleist Pro V1 vs Taylormade TP5 golf balls." Now, when you write these types of posts for your affiliate site, you should have one main goal in mind for your content. And that's to satisfy visitor intent, meaning you want visitors to be happy with the information they find on your page. Now, the reason this is important is because when content satisfies the visitors' intent, your chances of ranking higher on Google increase because Google wants to show the most relevant pages for any given query.

And because these queries have a commercial intent, when visitors are happy with the content, they are more likely to purchase something from your affiliate marketer, resulting in an affiliate commission. Fortunately, creating content for these three types of keywords is quite similar. So I'll give you some flexible templates you can use to give yourself the best chance of ranking high and earning more commissions. So let's talk about the first type of business post which is for general comparison keywords. Again, these posts will be the ones you use when targeting keywords like “best.” For example, "best garden hose", "best booster seat", "best golf balls", etc.

Now, since the word "best" implies that a comparison needs to be made, the format you will use for these general comparisons will most likely be a list, 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 of points, and the conclusion. So let's start with the introduction. Plain and simple, a list should not be read from beginning to end. Almost all readers will come in with the mentality of skimming. That's why we want to keep our introduction short and concise, while building credibility so they really trust what you have to say about these products.

For example, if we wrote a post about the best car seats for 3-year-olds, in the introduction we might say something as simple as: "We tested 10 car seats and rated them for 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 concise, instantly builds credibility, and also tells the reader they're in the right place. Very good, the following is the summary. As I mentioned before, the lists will not be read in their entirety. And that's because some people, if not most, simply want to know what the best product is.

That's why I suggest having a section like "Best at a Glance." Here, you can simply add bullet points for different categories, such as “best car seat overall,” “best car seat money can buy,” “best car seat for traveling,” and “best budget car seat,” for example. name a few. Not only can this help improve clicks on your affiliate links, but it also provides a good user experience for those thoughtful readers. Alright, now we move on to the list points, which will be the meat of your post. Now, a list item is made up of a title and a description.

The title is usually the name of the product you recommend. For example, my post on "best car seats for 3 year olds" could have titles like "Diono Radian 3RXT", "Britax Marathon", "Britax one4life", etc. As for the description, you are just describing the title in more detail. You want to provide only the information necessary to help the buyer make an informed purchasing decision. Now, when it comes to writing descriptions, it's best to keep the formatting consistent throughout the post. For example, if we are reviewing car seats for 3-year-olds, then we might have one sentence to describe the car seat, a few sentences about how that specific car seat scores in our test categories, such as build quality, safety and performance: a supporting image of our analysis and then perhaps an overall score with a final statement.

Predictable formats help people absorb information more efficiently, and that's what we want for our readers. Now, last but not least, we want to include links to the affiliate products and your product review page in the description. We'll start writing product review pages in a moment because we need to write a conclusion first. Here you will want to conclude 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, you could haveIt makes sense to link to a post on the best car seat accessories at the end of our post on the best car seats.

Now, these general comparison pages relate directly to product reviews because, if you remember from module 3, part of our overall strategy is to create "product groups." And product groups are simply content structures that connect a general comparison post to multiple product review posts. Now, when you write product reviews, the intent of most visitors will likely be different than the intent of those who visit a general comparison post. People who visit a “best of” post probably don't know what products they're interested in. Whereas someone visiting a product review page titled something like “Diono Radian 3RXT Review” has probably narrowed their search down to a few products. that interest them most.

They are likely closer to making a purchase and want to dig deeper before spending money. Therefore, the goal of product reviews should be to describe the positive and negative aspects to help visitors decide if that specific product is right for their needs. That being said, this is how I think a product review should be written. First will be the introduction. And, like the “Best of” post, you’ll want to keep it short, concise, and to the point. And the two things I think are important for product reviews are a) showing the reader they're in the right place and b) linking internally to the overall comparison post to complete the product group structure.

For example, if you were writing a post titled “Diono Radian 3RXT Review,” you could say: “With its slim size and high safety ratings, the Diono Radian 3RXT has become one of the most popular child safety seats. In fact, it ranked as one of our best car seats for 3-year-olds, but it's not all glitz and glamor. The Radian 3RXT is one of the heaviest car seats and scored surprisingly low in some. "After our hands-on testing, we'll share the results of our research to help you decide if this car seat is right for your toddler." Okay, now we move on to the body of the content.

What you decide to cover here will vary depending on your niche. Basically, you want to cover the most important categories that buyers in your niche are interested in. For example, with car seats, that could be safety, size, comfort, ease of installation, portability, and specifications. For golf balls, that could 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 title. And these categories are essentially what will create your product review template. Now with the conclusion, you'll just want to summarize and perhaps suggest who the product is best for.

For example, for our Diono Radian 3RXT post, you could say: "The Diono Radian 3RXT is a solid choice for kids ages 2 to 6. In fact, it scored extremely high in all of our tests. On top of that, it's the " 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 will not be disappointed with the Diono Radian 3RXT." And we're done. Alright, the last type of business blog post I want to talk about is "brand comparisons." And these are the typical "vs" posts.

For example, Diono Radian 3RXT vs Britax Marathon Now, when we think about someone landing on a page like this, we know that the visitor has probably narrowed down their product research to two or more products. But they can't really decide which one is right for them, so they want to do a side-by-side comparison. Basically, they visit your page to weigh the differences. So, just like with product review posts, we want to address. that in the introduction and again, help them make an informed purchasing decision throughout. Here's what the introduction might look like: "The Diono Radian 3RXT and the Britax Marathon are the heavyweight champions in car seats. convertibles.

Both have all the amenities, but are completely different in almost every way. In this post, we'll compare the key 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 who want to buy a car seat would want to know. Again, for a car seat buyer, that could be safety, size, comfort, ease of installation, portability and specifications But one key difference here. is that instead of highlighting these things for a product, we want to compare the differences between the different models.

Think about comparison tables that you have surely seen on sites like Apple or your favorite e-commerce store. Now, as for the conclusion, would be pretty much the same. Just wrap things up. Now, two important things to keep in mind from an SEO perspective in these brand comparison posts is to internally link to the individual product reviews as well as the overall comparison guide. And this will help you fill out your product group and create that beautiful structure that we talked about in module 3. Now, writing business or money-making posts is pretty easy for an affiliate site. On the other hand, creating informative content is a little more nuanced.

So in the next lesson, I'll show you how to write informative blog posts that are likely to rank and show you how you can turn informative pieces into silent profit generators. Hi, I'm Sam Oh and in this lesson I'll show you how to write informative blog posts for an affiliate marketing site. And by informative blog posts, I mean how-tos, step-by-step tutorials, definition posts, and basically any type of content where the primary intention is to learn. On top of that, I want to show you how to generate affiliate commissions from informative blog posts that at first glance may not seem to have any commercial value.

Let's call these silent profit generators. Then let's get started. Now, before explaining some blog post templates, it is important that we discuss the first and most important step in creating content for search, and that is search intent. Search intent represents the reason behind a searcher's query. And the reason why it's important is because you have to match the intent in order to rank high on Google. For example, if we were creating a post about cleaning car seats for a hypothetical children's car seat site, what do you think our content should look like? Should it be a step-by-step tutorial where you guide them through cleaning your kids' convertible car seats?

Or should it be in a different format? Or wait...is this for convertible car seats, infant car seats, or booster seats? Well, this was a trick question because the intent of the query "how to clean car seats" is actually about cleaning your car seats, not cleaning an installable child safety seat. How do I know this? Well, the way we identify search intent is by entering the query into Google and looking at the top-ranking pages. After all, search engines want to show you the most relevant result for a query, so top-ranked pages are essentially a guide to what Google believes best meets the searcher's intent.

As you can see, the main "how to clean car seats" pages are about cleaning regular car seats, so creating a post about cleaning children's car seats would probably not rank for this query because it doesn't match with the intention. Now, for the sake of argument, let's say that the intention was to clean children's car seats. Because the keyword contains the word “how,” you might automatically think that you need to create a step-by-step guide. But the interesting thing is that the first two rating pages are actually lists with a series of tips, that is, an unordered list of methods for cleaning a car seat.

So if you want to compete, you should do the same and create a post with a similar format to improve your chances of ranking high. We have a complete SEO course for beginners where we go much deeper into matching search intent and creating search-optimized content, so I recommend checking it out. I'll link to some SEO content writing tutorials in the description. Alright, let's move on to some blog post templates that you can use for different types of informative content. And all of these pieces of content will contain a title, an introduction, a body, and a conclusion.

Let's start with the first type of publication and that is lists. Lists 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 on a Plane" "7 SEO Tips That Really Work" "4 Blogging Techniques to Grow Your Audience" List titles are as easy as they come. Now, as for the introduction, your goal should be to build trust and enthusiasm in as few words as possible because most people are coming for the bullet points on the list.

For example, if you're writing a post about 7 SEO tips that really work, you could say: "Getting a high ranking on Google is harder than ever. But that doesn't make it impossible. As you can see, our blog occupies over 11,600 keywords in Google's top 10. Today I want to share some simple SEO tips that helped us get there." The introduction is brief and helps build trust because we have proof that we have already achieved what the reader hopes to achieve: higher rankings on Google. The last thing I recommend including in your introduction is a table of contents with jump links.

This makes it much easier for visitors to navigate your post, especially since the lists need to be able to be read quickly. If you are using WordPress there are many free plugins to choose from, simply search for “table of contents” in the WordPress plugin repository and you will find plenty of free options to try. Alright, let's move on to the main content. In the most basic form, your main content will have a series of H2 or heading tags, and content that complements the headings. Now, depending on the type of list you are creating, your H2s will vary.

For example, if you are giving a series of tips to achieve a goal, you will want to use short, descriptive titles that make the reader want to read your content. For example, if your post was about 17 Weight Loss Tips, instead of having point 5 as "Eat Spicy Foods," you could write "#5. Eat Spicy Foods to Burn More Calories." Now, as for the content that goes into these titles, you may want to consider creating your own mini template. For example, if your post is about weight loss tips, you can explain why your tip helps you lose weight in one sentence.

Then you could explain how it works and cite some research studies. Then, you can end the list point with two sentences that will help the reader put that advice into practice. Consistency creates a predictable reading experience for your visitors and also helps you, as a writer, avoid tangents that interrupt the 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 at your conclusion. For list posts, I wouldn't think too much about the conclusion. Most people won't even make it this far, but it's still important to create closure for the people who do.

My recommendation is to briefly summarize a key takeaway and then recommend additional content related to your post. And internal links are good to use because they convey link authority and generally create a better user experience for your readers. Here is a sample of what this template looks like. Feel free to pause or rewind to make sure we're on the same page and then let's move on to the next blog post template, which are step-by-step tutorials. Step-by-step guides are typical "how-to" posts where you follow 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 them into actual titles, they could be: “How to Build a Platform (7 Steps)” “How to Start a Business (Even if You Have No Money)” “How to Find Email Addresses to Build Links (Fully Automated)” Now for the introduction write a brief using the PSP method which stands for problem, solution and test. For example, let's say you have a step-by-step guide on how to do keyword research on YouTube. Your intro could say: "Do you want to grow your YouTube channel and attract more views? The "trick" is to focus on topics with search demand. This is the approach that helped us grow our YouTube channel from ~10,000 to more than 200,000 monthly views in a single year." Now, the reason why the PSP method is effective is because people who read a step-by-step guide often have a problem.

They are looking for a solution. And if you have proof of that solution, it will get their attention. Alright, with the introduction of the books, we need to write the main content, which will be your step-by-step instructions. And since step-by-step guides have a logical sequence of instructions, you can use your H2s as main steps. For example, our post on YouTube keyword research might have H2 like: “Step 1: Map out a topic hierarchy.” “Step 2: Generate keyword ideas” “Step 3: Check search intent”… and so on. As for the conclusion, keep it short and concise because step-by-step guides tend to be quite long.

Again, I recommend adding internal links to other relevant posts so as not to leave readers wanting more at a dead end. So from our hypothetical YouTube keyword research post, we could link to our guides on YouTube SEO and how to get more subscribers on YouTube; both are relevant to YouTube keyword research and serve what a reader might want to learn next. Below is a sample of what this template looks like. Feel free to pause or rewind to make sure we're on the same page and then let's move on to the next blog post template, which is for the expanded definition post.

Publications with expanded definitions are somewhat similar to practical guides. But rather than being written as a logical sequence of steps, its goal is to provide a high-level overview of a topic. Now, because these posts are expanded definitions, you'll want your title to be something like: "What is or what are" and then any additional details about your article. 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". Now, the good thing about expanded definition posts is that there is a clear format you can follow for the introduction, main content and conclusion.

In summary , 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 concise by defining your concept or acronym. For example, our page on "What are SERPs?" the definition and shows a supporting image and then tells you what you will learn in the rest of the post with links to each section Now, for the main content, I recommend spending some time on your outline because you only want to include the points. more important than a person searching for “what is” would want to know.

For example, if we create a post aimed at “what are NFTs”, you can start by searching for ideas in Google's People Also Ask box could potentially act as subtopics. good. You can also search the related terms report in Ahrefs Keyword Explorer. So based on these keywords, I would probably like to talk about the meaning of fungible, which is the F in NFT, I would like to talk about how you can buy an NFT and how to invest in NFTs. Finally, look at the subheadings of the top-ranking pages for your target query. So this page talks about what they are, how they are different from cryptocurrencies, how they work, what they are used for, etc., etc.

So, assuming we were creating a post titled "What Are NFTs? A Detailed Introduction to "Expensive JPEGs", we might have a main content outline similar to this, where our introduction solves the "what" and the rest of the article will provide a decent introduction to the NFT space. Now, to conclude, you just need to summarize the key learnings. And again, I recommend adding internal links to other articles that a beginner would want to learn more about at the end of your expanded definition post. , they will likely want to learn more, as the content will generally be high-level. The bottom line with all of these templates is that they should match the searcher's intent, the better your chances of ranking higher. on Google Now, I previously talked about how informative blog posts can generate silent profits.

The way to do this is by creating product-based content. Targeted content is simply content that helps people solve a problem with the help of your product. Now, since you as an affiliate will not own the products you recommend, you can think of it as creating content based on products for other companies, but published on your own site. For example, let's say you have a DIY home improvement site where you recommend various tools like drills, screwdrivers, and other tools. You may want to create a post on how to winterize your sprinkler system, which receives approximately 2,700 monthly searches on Google.

Now, as far as I know, you need an air compressor to winterize your sprinkler system. Therefore, it would be supernatural to organically include this product in your post. And because air compressors aren't exactly a common household item like a hammer, some of these people will probably take your advice and purchase one through your link, resulting in a commission. We have a complete tutorial on product-based content that I highly recommend checking out if you want to learn how to master silent profit generators for your affiliate site. And that concludes this module. In module 5, we will talk about link building for affiliate sites.

Get good at this and you will have no problem generating consistent traffic from search engines. In this module, we will talk about affiliate link building tactics and a simple macro strategy that will help you get higher Google rankings, more search traffic, and more affiliate commissions. Now, backlinks are basically the fuel for improving rankings on Google. And while you may want to jump right into link building tactics, it's important to first understand how you can best leverage the power of backlinks and also understand the realities of link building for affiliate sites. Therefore, link building, whether for an affiliate site, blog, or eCommerce store, is most commonly done via email.

And this is where you contact people who might be interested in linking to your web pages. Now, walking up to some random stranger and saying, "Hey, do you like gardening? I sell garden tools. You should recommend my product pages by linking to them everywhere." ... it is a bit akward. And beyond being awkward, it's selfish in a weird way. There is no benefit to the recipient of these emails and that means you will not receive any or many backlinks. Now, let's flip the script a little and say we sent an email to someone saying, "Hi Sam, here from thegardenseo.com.

I just wanted to thank you for sharing your tutorial and your detailed experiences with the garden box kit. I purchased the Same model and I had the exact same problem with the pieces not lining up correctly. After some tinkering, I found a great way to seal the gap smoothly for under $5. I wrote about it in this post and thought you might like to give it a try. look. You find it useful, maybe your readers will find it useful too? Regards, Sam This is a little less awkward because there is inherent value for the recipient to actually want to share and link to your content.

It's really useful and people. want to share it.useful information. Now that brings us to the reality of the current state of link building Yes, it will be easier to get backlinks to useful content. So these will be mainly informational posts that we call keywords. from T&A in Module 3. Now, when it comes to business content, like general comparisons, brand comparisons, and product reviews, it's a little trickier to get links because the only real value is to you. And the people who receive these link proposals know this too. But that doesn't change the fact that you also need to get backlinks to these business pages.

Then I have two suggestions for you. Tip #1 is to use the middleman method. This is when you create backlinks to the most useful pieces of content on your site because it will be easier to get links. And as the links accumulate, the so-called "link authority" of that page will increase. Now, since you control this authoritative page, you can add internal links from here to your money pages. And what ends up happening is that some of the authority of that link will be transferred to your business page, which will hopefully give you a boost in your rankings.

The informative post essentially acts as a “hub” to boost pages that would normally be difficult to get backlinks to and will help you generate affiliate commissions. We have a complete tutorial on this SEO strategy that I will link in the description. Now, for more competitive topics, you'll need to get backlinks directly to commercial content. And the best way to do that is to simply make your content really good. And when you actually have content that reaches a level far above that of your competitors, you will want to promote it because the reviews and summaries will be so good that it will feel like a crime not to share it.

Some things you can do to improve your content are conduct hands-on reviews with videos, add custom photos or graphics, or get unique insights from industry experts. Making your content better than your competitors will be something quite personalized to your niche and personal taste. Therefore, I highly recommend watching our video on how to create content better than your competitors, which has plenty of examples to get your creative juices flowing. Now, this is just the general backlink strategy I recommend using for new affiliate sites. And in the next lesson, I'll share some proven link building techniques you can use to start putting this strategy into action.

Hi, I'm Sam Oh and in this lesson I'll show you how to execute some proven link building tactics for your affiliate site. Now, link building is largely a numbers game, i.e. you need to send a lot of emails to get backlinks. But there is one thing that can significantly increase your chances of getting links using the techniques I'm about to share with you. And that is experience. When you're an expert at something, that usually means you have unique and interesting ideas to share. And as a result, people will take your word more seriously. For example, let's say you run a beauty blog and in one of your posts you mention that getting your teeth whitened regularly is good for your overall oral hygiene.

Now, if some random person emails you saying you're wrong and 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 that the ones mentioned in their post are downright dangerous, because of x, y, and z, you might be inclined to make changes to your content and link to your content. They clearly have experience. Now, being an expert, in the context of link building, doesn't mean you have to be in the top 1% of your field.

Most people who write content probably aren't even interested in the topics they write about. Therefore, even being a passionate hobbyist can be of great help, as you have interesting ideas to share from your own personal experiences. Now, I know absolutely nothing about teeth whitening, so please don't pass along this misinformation. But the point is that if you are positioning yourselfAs someone knowledgeable in your niche, link building will be much easier, especially because of the tactics I'm going to share with you today. And that brings us nicely to the first link building tactic, which is getting free press from HARO.

HARO means helping a journalist. It is a service that connects journalists with sources. Simply sign up for an account as a "source" and you'll start receiving 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 journalists are the ones soliciting sources, not the other way around. Now, there are tons of requests coming in daily and most of them won't be relevant to your niche. So you can set up a simple Gmail filter to filter out the noise.

Simply go to your inbox and click the cursor to open Gmail search options. Next, set the "From" field to [email protected]. Next, you'll want to set the subject to "HARO" in square brackets, since all of your emails include it in the subject line. Finally, set the “You have the words” field to any keywords you want to track. And also use the OR search operator to include multiple keywords or phrases. Click "Search" to see the results that your search filters would include, and check some of the emails to make sure you get relevant results. If everything looks good, click the cursor again and then click "Create Filter." Now, even though we've filtered the results to the relevant ones, that doesn't mean journalists will quote you just because you responded.

And while you should go the extra mile to provide unique and insightful information, half the battle is answering the right questions. Therefore, to increase your chances of being mentioned, prioritize queries where journalists are likely to seek out multiple experts on the topic. For example, in this query, Bustle searches for relationship therapists as plural of therapist. And they want to know more about boredom in relationships. Now, the description is even clearer: they want several experts. She says, "I'm working on an article called "13 Common Mistakes That Lead to Boredom in a Relationship." So chances are you're looking for several experts who can fill in the blanks in your outline.

So if that niche makes sense to you, then give your best answer in the shortest response possible, and then move on to the next query. Now, if you're an expert in the field, be sure to state your credentials at the beginning of your email to set a tone. and then gain their trust through your knowledge and experience. I would recommend using HARO without an end date in mind. The quality of the links is very good for the amount of effort it takes to answer. affiliate landing page that I taught in lesson 3.4, you will maximize the benefit of these highly authoritative backlinks Alright, the second tactic I recommend is guest posting when you create content. posted on another website and, generally speaking, that post includes attribution and a link to your site.

Now, while some sites won't let you link to yourself within the content, most will, as long as it makes sense and adds value to your guest post. So the first thing you should do is find websites that are likely to accept guest posts. To get started, you can use Ahrefs Content Explorer, which allows you to search billions of pages and get SEO metrics for all of them. Simply search for a topic related to your niche and run the search. Next, let's set up a domain rating filter to remove very low and very high authority websites. Therefore, I will choose a range of 30 to 60.

I will also choose the "One page per domain" filter, since we do not need to present the same website multiple times. Lastly, I'll set the "Published" filter to the last 90 days, which will help us narrow down the websites that have published or republished content in the last 3 months. Now, we still have around 80,000 websites in our search results, which is too many to feature. So, let's go to the Websites tab, which will show you the top 100 websites based on your results. Now, it's just a matter of looking at the domain names, visiting the ones that seem relevant, and featuring your guest posts where appropriate.

For example, this site gets decent search traffic from Google, has decent website authority, and has multiple authors, which means they probably accept guest posts. So let's visit their site and take a look at some of their articles... Everything looks good here, so let's go to their About page. And since you include your editor here, I'll probably try to present my idea to you. Now, if you don't know how to find these people's email addresses, I'll link a video on how to do it in the description. Alright, the next link building tactic I highly recommend is doing podcast interviews.

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 are really experienced in your niche, this will be an easy task for you that will a) help you build a reputation as an authority in your niche; and b) get backlinks while you're at it. Now, what I love about podcasts as a link building strategy is that it only takes about an hour of your time and links are almost a given if you choose your podcasts right. Here's what I mean: Many podcasts have "episode" pages on their websites.

And these pages almost always include a link to the guest's home page and social profiles. So, to find podcast prospects who are likely to link to your site, you can simply reverse engineer the backlinks from a podcast interviewee's home page or social profile. For example, if you are in the SEO niche, you may want to check the backlinks to Tim Soulo's Twitter profile, as he has been a guest on several podcasts. To get started, I'll go to Ahrefs Site Explorer and paste your Twitter URL. Next, I'll go to the backlinks report. Now, to limit podcast links, I'll set up a page title filter to look for referring pages where the word "podcast" or episode" is in the page title.

From here, you can browse the results, visit relevant pages and feature as a guest when appropriate. The benefit of being on podcasts goes far beyond links. You get to meet like-minded people in your industry and building your network can be a huge help even from an SEO perspective. Now, if you follow the course, clarify and repeat these 3 tactics, you should have no problem getting some traction on your affiliate site. If you want to go beyond these tactics, I recommend checking out our full tutorial on link building for beginners, which I'll link in the description. And that concludes our affiliate marketing course.

I've linked a full playlist to this entire course in the description. Thank you for joining me, consider subscribing and I'll see you in the next tutorial.