Complete Affiliate Marketing Course for Beginners

Hey, it’s Sam Oh and welcome you to our
affiliate marketing course for beginners. This course is made up of 16 lessons
and will walk you through the process, tactics, and strategies to create your
own revenue-generating affiliate site. There’s no fluff, no bs, and no sales
pitches for a premium course. So let’s get started with the first lesson, where
we’ll talk about what affiliate marketing is and how it works. So affiliate marketing is when you
promote another company's products. And when someone makes a purchase
because of your referral, you're compensated with a commission. Now, in order for the affiliate company to attribute
sales to the right person, the merchant usually uses a unique link that looks something like
this, which is called an affiliate link. When a visitor clicks that link from your
blog, website, or wherever,  a cookie is stored on their device.

And an affiliate cookie does two main things. First, it helps the merchant attribute
the sale back to the right person. And second, cookies usually hold an expiration
date, meaning people don't need to immediately purchase the product after clicking your link. Let's run through an example,
so everything is crystal-clear. Let's say a visitor comes to your post
about gardening hoses and clicks on some of your affiliate links. This leads them to a product on Amazon. But wait… they have to go and pick
up their kids from soccer practice. So they do that, have dinner, and then go
back to Amazon.com in their web browser.

They find the product again and then purchase
it along with a game console controller. Because they clicked on your affiliate link,
a cookie was stored on their device. And because Amazon has a 24-hour cookie
duration, you would still get compensated a percentage for both the garden hose
and the console controller, even though you weren't promoting it. Now that we've covered the basics of what
affiliate marketing is and how it works, let's talk about what you'll need to get started
with affiliate marketing which is coming up in the next lesson.

In this lesson, we're going to 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. So that might be your own
website or YouTube channel. Now, creating either of these is pretty
straightforward so we won't go into things like how to make an affiliate
website because this course is about the actual marketing of an affiliate site. The second thing you'll need is
relevant and consistent traffic. Relevant traffic means that you're attracting
visitors to your website that are interested in a topic and ideally want
to make a purchase soon.

And one of the most important parts
to getting relevant traffic is by creating content, which will house information
as well as your affiliate links. So that might be reviews of products, best
of comparison lists, and how-to articles. We'll talk about how you can come up
with these topics in a later module. As for getting consistent traffic, much of that
will come down to where you get your traffic from.

Three of the most popular channels are
social media, ads, and search engines. Now, social traffic is typically inconsistent
because social media networks are designed to surface new content. But many affiliate pages can actually
be somewhat evergreen. So if you don't have a significant following
and brand, I wouldn't count on social media as a reliable primary source
for traffic to an affiliate site. Now, ads can be great because you
can get highly relevant traffic fast. But you have to pay for every single
person who clicks on your ad.

So unless you're a part of a very high-paying
affiliate program and you have the expertise with ads and conversion rate optimization,
I'd stay away from ads because you'll find yourself underwater fast. Now, search traffic is free,
consistent and passive. And the way you get search traffic is
through a marketing method called search engine optimization, or SEO. It's the primary traffic source I recommend
and it's what many multi-million dollar affiliate websites rely on. We'll go much deeper into the tactical and
strategic elements of creating content and getting relevant and consistent traffic in
a later module but first, you need to know whether the reward will be worth the effort.

So in the next lesson we're going to talk
about how to make money with affiliate marketing and how much you can actually make. In this lesson, I'll give you a high-level overview
of how to make money with affiliate marketing. Now, as we discussed in the beginning of this
module, when you join an affiliate program, you're able to generate unique affiliate links. And when someone clicks on one of your links
and makes a purchase within a set period of time, you're paid a commission. So very generally speaking, the more relevant
traffic you get, the more clicks you'll get on your affiliate links. And the more clicks you get, the more conversions,
which equals more money in your pocket. And as long as your revenue exceeds
your costs, you'll be profitable. Now, you might be wondering how much
money you can make as an affiliate marketer? The simple answer to that
is that there is no limit. 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 revenue. Both of these gentlemen have done
an excellent job building their brand and I'm sure it's taken a lot of hard
work and time to get to where they are. But the reality is that your checks might
look more like this – at least when you're first starting out. Now, if you want to make a sustainable income
with affiliate marketing, you need to think of your affiliate site as a business. It will be a grind and there will
be some disappointing times. But that's totally fine because when you
adopt this business mindset instead of seeing it as a way to "hopefully" make
a few bucks here and there, you'll be setting yourself up for success. So with the fundamentals in the books, let's
move on to the next lesson where I'll give you a high level overview of what it looks like
to start and grow your first affiliate site.

In this lesson, I'm going to give you
a high-level blueprint to start your first affiliate website. And this lesson will give you a good idea
of the skills, techniques and strategies you'll learn throughout this course. But first, let's recap some key principles
we've covered in the previous 3 lessons which are going to play into your strategy. So, at a high level, your affiliate site is going
to be made up of primarily blog posts.

And the types of content you'll create
will mostly be informational pieces. For example, how-to articles and
comparisons of different products. And within the content, you'll add your
affiliate links to products you recommend. Now, when someone clicks on one of these
links and makes a purchase you're going to be compensated by the affiliate
merchant or partner. Now, not only will your content convert visitors
into revenue, but it's going to attract visitors to your website, too. And the marketing method we'll use to get
traffic to your affiliate site is search engine optimization because the traffic
is free, consistent and passive. Best of all, SEO traffic will help you generate
consistent revenue that compounds over time. Now, there are actually quite a few steps
to get to the point of generating consistent traffic and revenue. But to give you a high-level overview,
we can break down the process into four macro steps. Finding a niche; planning your website;
building your website; and getting traffic to it. So let's go through these phases at
a high level, starting with finding a niche. When you're starting an affiliate site,
especially if you're relatively inexperienced, it's beneficial to start with
a heavy focus on a niche.

For example, it would probably be better
to start a barbeque recipes site rather than a generic one on all types of recipes. And that's because broader topics tend
to have more competition and as a result, it'll be tough for you to get traffic to your site. And without traffic, there is no revenue. Now, this is just one small example of the things
you'll need to consider when choosing a niche. There are other things to evaluate like
breadth of the topic, personal interest, commerciality, and more. We'll go through some techniques in module 2
to do this and I'll give you a checklist which will give you the best chance at creating
a successful affiliate website. Alright, the next stage is
planning your affiliate site.

This is where you'll be creating
the blueprint for your affiliate website. And there are two things in
particular that you'll need to plan. #1. You'll want to plan your content strategy. And this is a super-important step
because it's foundational to both traffic and conversions. Now, the majority of the planning will be
done through an SEO technique called keyword research, which is a process
to understand the queries people use to search for products, services, and
general information in search engines.

And the second thing you'll need to
plan is your site or content structure. And by structure, I'm mostly talking about
grouping which is done with internal links. We'll cover all of this in
great detail in module 3. Now, after you've finished planning
your site, you'll need to build it out. This includes making a website and
setting up tools for things like tracking. Now, the most time-consuming and
important part of this stage is creating content. Because content is what will help you to rank
in search engines and it's what your visitors will use to make buying decisions. We have an entire module dedicated to
content creation where we'll talk about the content creation process, the types of
content you should create, and I'll also give you templates you can follow for
various affiliate type content.

Now, getting traffic through SEO is
much more challenging than just writing good stuff. A key ingredient to rank high in Google
and attract a ton of visitors to your site will be backlinks. We'll talk about some basic strategies that
any beginner can implement which should help power your pages to rank for their
target queries and hopefully put some money in your pocket. So now that you have a high-level overview of
what building your affiliate site will look like, let's get our hands dirty and move on
to the second module, where we'll dig deep into finding niches, qualifying them,
and choosing one that'll be right for you.

In this module, I'm going to show you
how to find, choose and qualify a niche that's right for you. But before we get to the techniques to find
and qualify a niche, you need to know what to look for in a niche. And there are four factors we'll focus on. The first factor is competition. Now, because we established in the first
module that we'll be creating content and ranking it in search engines like Google,
we'll be looking specifically at SEO and keyword competition. And the main purpose of this is to get an idea
if we could somewhat easily rank for keywords that are relevant to an affiliate site. Now, there are a lot of things that go
into assessing keyword competition, but at this stage, we just want to get
a high-level overview for a niche. So we'll use a simple 3-step process to do this.

Step 1: Generate keyword ideas. Step 2: Filter for low-difficulty keywords
using a metric called "keyword difficulty," And step 3: Narrow in on affiliate keywords. To get started, search for a phrase related
to your niche in a keyword research tool like Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer, then
go to the Matching terms report. Now, to filter for low-difficulty keywords,
just set a keyword difficulty filter to have a max value of something low like 10. Finally, you'll want to filter
for affiliate-type keywords. For example, keywords that include the word
"best" tend to surface product roundups like "best golf clubs". Or keywords that include the word "review"
will usually surface product reviews like "stix golf clubs review". To do that, hit the Include filter, choose
the Any tab, and in the text field, just add words like "best" and "review".

Now, if we hit the Show results button,
you'll see there are thousands of relevant, low-difficulty keywords that cumulatively
have high search demand. Again, we've only scratched the surface
with keyword competition and we'll go into more detail later. But if you want to learn more now, then
I recommend watching our full tutorial in our free SEO course for beginners on how
you can assess ranking difficulty for any keyword. In fact, I highly recommend watching the full
course as the concepts and techniques will be fully applicable for affiliate sites too.

Alright, the second factor is commerciality. Now, not all niches are created equal. Some have insane commercial value which can
lead to millions of dollars in monthly revenue, while others might only result in
a few hundred dollars – if even. Ideally, you want to choose a niche that
has mid to high commercial value so that you don't reach a point where you'll
max out on your profit potential.

A few things you can do include, market research
on the niche, look at commissions for relevant affiliate programs, and look at advertising
costs to get an idea of how valuable certain queries are to different companies. We'll talk more about understanding
commercial value in the next lessons. The third factor to consider
is personal interest. Plain and simple, you don't have to be passionate
about a niche to make a successful affiliate site. But it doesn't mean you should choose
a niche just for profit potential. From my experience, choosing a niche
that you're at least somewhat interested in is the best route to go. Because people often quit their affiliate
sites because they have zero interest in the products they're recommending 
and the content they're creating. Losing drive may be
the #1 killer of affiliate sites. The fourth factor to consider is
breadth of the search market. Again, because we're going after search
traffic, you want to get an understanding of how much traffic you can get to
your content from search engines.

Fortunately, keyword research tools make this
easy for us because they tell us search volumes, which are the number of monthly
searches that happen for a query. SEO tools can also give you search traffic
estimations for your competitors which is even more helpful than search volumes
because what we want is traffic, not searches. So by understanding the breadth of
the search market, you're essentially getting an estimation of how many people are
interested in topics you'll be writing about, how much traffic you can get from these
topics, and in turn, how many clicks you can get to your affiliate links which should
directly be correlated with your revenue.

As a general rule of thumb, you'll want to
start off pretty niche because competition will likely be lower. But your niche should be tied to a larger
industry so you have the opportunity to niche out, which is going to give you
room to eventually reach more people. For example, you might start an affiliate
site in the bed frames niche. And after doing some quick keyword research
for affiliate keywords, you'll see that there's a cumulative search volume of over 130,000
monthly searches in the US just for "bed frames." Not small at all, but not huge.

But the great thing about bed frames is that
it's quite natural to niche out to topics like "mattresses," "pillows," "sheets," and
even to the broader topic of "sleep." There's tons of room for growth. Now, what you're going to find as
you're researching niches is that lot of these factors are connected. For example, niches that are highly commercial
will also have high competition and niches with low competition will often be
things you're not interested in.

It's all about finding a balance from
this criteria then committing to a niche. In fact, these four things that we just talked
about are going to help you rate any niche so you can qualify one that's right for you. But before we get to qualifying, we need
to start brainstorming a list of niches and doing our research. And that's what we'll be talking
about 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. And these are: The level of SEO competition, which will
tell us who we'll be up against or even if we can compete.

Commerciality, which will give us hints
into how much money we can make. Personal interest, which is important
to most people because you want to to actually enjoy what you're doing. And the breadth of the search market,
which gives us an idea of the size of our addressable market – at least for
the type of traffic we'll be going for. These will help us qualify a niche so we
can make an informed decision when it it comes time to choose one. Now, the process to find and qualify
niches depends on where you are in your niche selection process. And you'll probably fall into one of two buckets. Bucket #1: You already have a general
idea of the niches that interest you. And bucket #2: you don't have a concrete
idea yet, but you're open to any and all opportunities if they seem interesting. Let's go through the process for bucket #1
first and I'll show you how you can find information to check off items on
your qualification checklist as we go. Alright, so assuming you already have
a general idea of niches that interest you, the first thing you'll want
to do is write them down.

So for me that would be topics like
golf, clean energy, and personal finance. Now, because these are all things that
I'm interested in, we can add a plus to the "personal interest" qualification factor. Now, for each of these topics, you'll
want to brainstorm some broad topics and products related to that niche. For example, if we were to do this for
the golf niche, I'd jot down ideas like: "golf," "putter," "irons," and "wedge." Now, with our subtopics in hand, the next
thing you'll need to do is about 3 minutes of preliminary keyword research. And you'll need a keyword
research tool to do this. So I'm using Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer
and all I'm going to do is paste my list of subtopics and run the search. Next, I'll go to the Matching terms
report to get a list of keyword ideas. Now, not all of these keywords will
be relevant to an affiliate niche. We want to find topics where it's easy to
naturally recommend different products.

Fortunately, so-called "affiliate keywords"
are easy to find using keyword modifiers. And these are just add-ons to a base keyword. For example, when a query includes the word
"best," it usually means you need to create a product roundup. Queries that contain the word "vs" or "review"
usually mean you'll need to write a review or comparison article in order to rank in Google. We'll get into the details in a later
module as this is more related to SEO, but we're not quite there yet. But if you can't wait, then you can watch
our video on search intent in our free SEO course for beginners which
I'll link up in the description. Now, because we know we can find "affiliate
keywords" by looking for queries that contain the words "best," "vs,' or 'review,' we can
take these words and paste them into the "include" box in Keywords Explorer. I'll also hit the Any word tab because
we want to see keywords that contain any of these keywords in addition
to one of our searched topics.

Hit Apply, hit Show keywords and we now
have a list of mostly commercial topics that would be valuable to a golf affiliate site. In fact, the fact that there are nearly two
million monthly searches in Google from just the US alone tells us that the breadth
of the search market is quite large. So we can add a plus to that
factor on our qualification list. Now, some of these are going to be quite
competitive to rank for, but we can actually filter for low-difficulty keywords
using the Keyword difficulty filter.

All you have to do is set the maximum
KD value to something low like 20. And right away, you'll see that there's
still nearly a million monthly searches that happen for these low-competition
keywords each month. So both SEO competition and
search breadth seem good to me. Now, to get an idea of commercial value,
you can scan through the CPC column to see how much advertisers are willing
to pay for a click for a specific query. But these values are only for one query
which isn't that helpful because you want to get a full picture of how valuable your
traffic would be if you were to rank for a lot of these affiliate type keywords. And the way to do that is to find a competing
affiliate site that's already ranking for queries that you'd want to rank for and are
not mega authorities in your niche because they'll be too tough to compete
with, at least when you're first starting out.

So to find these competing websites,
you can use Ahrefs' Content Explorer. Just search for something like "best golf" and
then set the search mode to a Title search. And this will show us pages that
contain the words "best" and "golf" in the title of the pages. Basically, it's going to show us other
golf affiliate pages, many that are from dedicated golf affiliate sites. Now, because SEO competition is a big part
of qualifying a niche, especially for beginners, I recommend setting a Domain Rating
filter to have a low maximum value of something like 20.

And again, Domain Rating is a metric that
tries to measure a website's authority. Hit Show results, and now you have a list of
pages from low authority websites that are likely posting affiliate content on golf products. But we don't need to see pages at this point. We want to know more about how
websites are performing as a whole. To view the top websites, just
click the Websites tab. And now you can see a list of low-authority
websites, the amount of total organic traffic they get, and their traffic values. Now, traffic value tells us how much it would
cost to pay for this amount of organic traffic if you were to buy it from Google ads. And the reason why it's a decent proxy
to understanding a site's commercial value is because if advertisers are willing
to pay this much money to get this traffic, then it's likely valuable. Now, it's important to note that when you're
looking at these metrics, you need to make sure that the sites you're analyzing are actually
going to be competing niche affiliate sites. Just scan the domain names and if it sounds
like it might be a niche blog, click it to investigate the types of content they create.

So for this site, it's clear that it's an affiliate
website as the content is primarily based around reviews and product round-ups. Now, going back to Content Explorer,
you'll see that the site gets a ton of monthly search traffic and it has
a traffic value of around $70,000/month, while being a low-authority site. Now, to be clear, it doesn't mean that
this site makes $70,000/month, but it tells us that the topics the site ranks
for have clear commercial value. So let's add a plus to that qualification factor. Now, it's important to note that you
shouldn't use traffic value as the only means to understand commercial value. One key component that we didn't talk
about here are the affiliate programs that these sites are using.

And I'll show you how to find affiliate
programs for a niche in the next video, so stay tuned for that. Alright, now let's talk about finding and
qualifying niches if you're not quite sure of the topics you want to cover. There are two effective ways to find niches. The first is to look at the sites that are
linking to a big affiliate program like Amazon. For example, that golf affiliate site we
found earlier is an Amazon affiliate.

And if we hover over one of the affiliate
links, you'll see that the link points to a page on the domain amzn.to. This is Amazon's shortened URL. So with that domain in hand, let's go
to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, type in the URL amzn.to, and run the search. Next, head on over to the Backlinks report,
which is going to show us all pages that link to this website. Now, because SEO competition and breadth of
the search market are important considerations when choosing a niche, we can set some filters
to narrow down the results, seeing as amzn.to has nearly 50 million links. First, I'll choose "One page per domain" because
we're interested in website data and not so much page-level data at this point.

And then I'll set the Domain Rating
filter to a maximum of 20 to filter for low-authority websites. Next, I'll set the Domain Traffic filter
to have a minimum value of 10,000, which will help us understand
breadth to a certain extent. Finally, I'll click on More filters
and choose Language. And I'll set this to English. All looks good, so let's hit Show results. Now it's just a matter of skimming through
the referring page column and using some common sense to infer what
the site may be about. For example, this one is a stock checker,
this one is on headphone reviews, and this one is on knives. The knives one is actually pretty interesting
because this website only has a Domain Rating of 6 and gets around 100,000 monthly
search visits from Google each month. So this tells us that SEO competition is
likely weak for this niche and the breadth of the search market, even for
low-difficulty keywords will be decent.

So let's add a plus to those factors. Now, to get an understanding of commerciality,
we can look to the traffic value for this site. To do that, I'll just run a new domain search
in Site Explorer for nothingbutknives.com. And as you can see, the site has a monthly
traffic value of around $50,000 which is pretty impressive for such a low-authority site. Now, as for personal interest, that's up to you. Alright, the second way to find niches is to
search for "best of" posts in Content Explorer. To do that, just search for "best" in
the search box and set it to a Title search. Next, we'll set a DR filter to have
a maximum value of 20. And just like we did before, I'll
set a website traffic filter to have a minimum value of 10,000. We'll set the Language filter to
English and then hit Show results. And this is basically showing us pages
from websites that get a lot of traffic, are low-authority, and are in English. Now, if you want the summarized version,
you can hit the Websites tab to see the top 100 websites in Content Explorer's search
results based on their organic traffic.

Then, just skim through the domain names
to see if there are any obvious niche sites that you might be interested in exploring. For example, this site looks like it's on
work boots, which gets a ton of search traffic, has high traffic value and
has very low website authority. There's a triple plus for our work boots niche. And for good measure, I'll click through
to the site and yes, it is an affiliate site all about work boots. Now, that is a niche I would
have never thought of. Now, if you want a bigger list to skim
through, go back to the pages tab and hit the "One page per domain" filter. Finally, hit the "Exclude homepages" filter,
and you'll have tons of results you can look through along with their
SEO metrics to help qualify niches.

Now, the qualification methods we
went through are just quick checks, especially for the commerciality factor. The affiliate programs that are associated with
the niche will often determine the potential revenue you can generate because different
programs offer different commissions. So in the next lesson, I'm going to show
you the best affiliate programs to join and how you can find niche affiliate
programs that are worth exploring.

So let's kick things off with possibly
the most popular affiliate program, and that's Amazon Associates. This is Amazon's affiliate program. They have millions of products you can
promote and it's probably the most trusted ecommerce brand in the world. So in my opinion, Amazon Associates is
the best catchall affiliate program in the world. Now, their payouts differ based
on the category of the product. And commissions can range from
1 to 20% of the sale price. Now, let's look through the pros and cons
of this program, starting with the pros. We already touched on one and that's
the fact that you have a huge inventory of products to choose from. Another pro is that you can monetize
international traffic using their OneLink feature. Basically, you create a single affiliate link for
a product and depending on the location of that visitor, they'll be sent
to their local Amazon site.

For example, let's say a person from
the US clicks your affiliate link. They'll be directed to
the Amazon.com product page. But if someone from Canada or the UK
clicks that same link, they'll be redirected to the amazon.ca or amazon.co.uk
product pages, assuming they exist. And the final pro is that Amazon's
conversion rate is extremely high. Because it's Amazon and most people, at
least in the US, have an Amazon account, there's very little friction from
product page to checkout.

And remember, as an affiliate,
you don't get paid for clicks. You only get paid when the merchant gets paid. Now, the main con with Amazon's affiliate program
is that the commissions are generally pretty low. And for many niches, there are other
programs that offer better payouts. We'll get into finding these
affiliate programs in a bit. The next affiliate program is Target. Target is a big box store in the United States
and has a huge inventory of products – much like Amazon. Now, their payout is pretty low at "up to 8%." But one differentiator from Amazon is
that Target offers a 7-day cookie life, while Amazon only has a 24-hour cookie.

This means that if someone clicks your Target
affiliate link and makes any purchase within 7-days, you'll be paid a commission. Whereas with Amazon, the person who
clicks the link needs to make a purchase within 24 hours. The next affiliate program is Commission Junction. Actually, CJ is an affiliate network. Basically, companies who want to start
an affiliate program will sign up with Commission Junction and they'll handle
all the tracking and software related things. Now, the pros of CJ is that you get access to
a directory of thousands of affiliate programs.

They also share stats like the average 
earnings per click over 7 and 30 day time periods, as well as the commission rates. Another pro is that unlike Amazon,
you're not limited to physical products or Amazon subscriptions. There are companies that offer
intangible products like Booking.com, which handles travel bookings and
software companies like GetResponse which offers email marketing services. Now, a downside to CJ is that you have
to actually apply for each program and get accepted. Most of these affiliate merchants from
my experience are much pickier in who they allow to become an affiliate
compared to Amazon. So while it doesn't hurt to create a CJ
account and apply for these programs, you may initially get rejected until you reach
a certain amount of consistent traffic.

But there shouldn't be anything to worry
about because if you follow the steps in this course, you should be able to do that
with SEO, which we'll get in another module. Alright, the next affiliate program is ShareASale. And actually, this is also an affiliate network. Now, I won't bother talking much about
ShareASale because it's pretty much the exact same as Commission Junction,
but there are different merchants that use it. For example, Etsy and Weebly both use
ShareaSale to run their affiliate programs. Alright, so now that we've covered some of the
more general affiliate programs and networks, let's talk about how you can find
niche affiliate programs that are likely high-performers in your niche.  And it's quite simple.

You just need to look at which affiliate
programs your competitors frequently link to. After all, if a lot of your competitors
are using a specific affiliate program, then chances are, it converts
and/or pays out well. And there are two ways to do this: The first is to go to Google and search
for something like "best [product name]." For example, in the previous lesson,
we found an affiliate site about knives. So I might search for "best knives for camping." Then you can click on a few of the
articles to open them in new tabs.

And all you have to do now is hover over
their affiliate links to see who they link to. Now, this is functional, but
it's not exactly efficient. A better way is to use a free
feature in Ahrefs' SEO toolbar. Just click on the icon, choose the Links tab,
and select "External" from the dropdown to see all external links on that page. And as you can see, this page only seems 
to link to Amazon's affiliate program.

Now, if we look at the next ranking page, you'll
see that they link to Amazon and another one called "Avantlink" which is an affiliate network 
that companies like REI and Campsaver use. So to research the programs further, you'd
need to sign up for an account at Avantlink and check out the metrics they
provide on these programs. Now, the downside to this method is
that we're looking at just one page.

And this page happens to be
about knives for camping. But a site about knives would probably
talk about kitchen knives too. And you don't buy kitchen
knives at a camping store. So a much better way to get a holistic view
of all affiliate programs in a niche is to see who your competitors link to
most across their entire site. For example, in the last lesson on finding
niches, we found this niche site about knives. And according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, it
gets a ton of search traffic which is quite valuable as you can see from
their monthly traffic value.

Now, to find the affiliate merchants that
this knife site links to, you just have to go to the Linked Domains report in Site
Explorer, which shows you all websites that this site links to. Just sort the table by the "Links to Target"
column to see who this site links to most. Now, all you have to do is skim the domain
names to see if they look like it would lead to an affiliate program or network.

We already know that all of the Amazon
links will be affiliate links. Then you'll see this shortened URL
shrsl.com which this site links to hundreds of times. This is Shareasale's shortened
URL for affiliate links. Now, if we click on the number for this row,
and click one of the affiliate links, you'll see it leads to a knife company called BladeHQ. And if we look up that site in ShareaSale,
you can see the commission amount and earnings per click metric. Scrolling further through the list,
you'll see that this affiliate site also links to avantlink.com.

And if we expand these links in Ahrefs,
and click one of those affiliate links, you'll see it sends us to another
site called Buck Knives. Then it's just a matter of researching
the details on their affiliate program. Now, if you rinse and repeat these steps
for a few popular niche affiliate sites, you should be able to find some common
programs which will be helpful when choosing the best affiliate program for your site. Your competitors have basically done
the research and testing for you. Now, when you're choosing an affiliate
program, you'll want to consider two additional things. The first is product and brand reputation. Beginners often choose programs
that have the biggest payout. But the reason why a lot of affiliate programs
offer huge payouts is because their product is inferior to many of their competitors' products. Remember, after someone clicks your affiliate
link, they have to make a purchase in order for you to get compensated.

Also, people who purchase poorer quality
products are more likely to return them. And when refunds from your referred sales
happen, you lose your commission too. By recommending good quality products
from solid and well-known brands, you'll help your visitors and your bank account. Quick sidenote: this is actually why I don't
recommend using Clickbank as an affiliate program as I've never once seen a quality
product or brand run their affiliate program there. Alright, the second thing to
consider is conversion rate. Now, most affiliate programs won't list
conversion rates for their product and landing pages. But if you happen to be working with an
affiliate manager in one of your programs, it doesn't hurt to ask. To illustrate the importance of conversion rate,
let's run through an example for the knives niche. So according to Amazon's commission table,
sports and outdoor goods pay out 3% of the sale. And most camping knives
will fall into this category. But that other affiliate program we found
on Shareasale, BladeHQ, pays out 5%. Well, let's say you get 100 clicks to
your affiliate links and the average order value is $100.

If 7% of those clicks convert on Amazon
and only 3% of clicks convert on BladeHQ, then that means your commissions
from Amazon would be $21, while your commissions from BladeHQ would be $15. So despite the fact that BladeHQ has a bigger
payout, Amazon would be the affiliate program to go with in this scenario. Now, this example is a bit oversimplified
because you need to consider things like traffic source, your content,
and the intent of the visitors. These are all things we're going
to cover over the next 3 modules. In fact, the next module is all about
planning your affiliate site's strategy which is going to give you a blueprint
to follow for the rest of this course. In this module, we're going to do some
planning for your affiliate marketing site. Now, before we work on the actual tasks
involved in site planning, it's important we get on the same page and go over
the affiliate marketing strategy we'll be using for our site.

And we'll basically be expanding on
the affiliate blueprint that was covered in lesson 1.4. So as a quick refresher, we want to create an
affiliate site that'll generate consistent revenue. In order to do that, we'll need consistent
traffic to pages that organically recommend affiliate products. And the best way to get that traffic is
through a marketing technique called SEO or search engine optimization because
traffic is free, passive, and consistent. Now, the general process to get SEO
traffic will follow three basic steps. Step 1 is to do affiliate keyword
research which is the process of finding topics suitable for an affiliate site
that people search for month after month. Step 2 is to create content that people want
to see when searching for these products. And step 3 is to get backlinks to these
pages, which will help you rank high in Google search and get that consistent
traffic to your pages, which again, can allow you to build that consistent revenue. Now, these are the technical and creative
things we'll have to do to get to our end result.

But what we haven't really talked about
yet is what the overall strategy looks like from a birds-eye view. The basic idea is to choose a niche
that has plenty of things to talk about and then to choose a sub-niche
from that niche. For example, you might choose golf
as your main niche and then "putting" as your sub-niche. Then you'd cover absolutely everything
in the putting category before moving on to the next sub-niche. Let's dive deeper into an example to help
you visualize what this strategy looks like. So let's say your niche is fitness equipment
and your sub-niche is dumbbells. That means you're going to cover
everything under the topic of dumbbells.

As an example, you might create equipment
roundups on "the best adjustable dumbbells", "the best dumbbell sets", and
"the best dumbbells for home". Now, let's zoom into adjustable dumbbells. So let's say you cover five different adjustable
dumbbells in your post like these ones. Well, to cover this in full, you now
have five new reviews to write up. Now, let's say you also want to write
up content on dumbbell exercises. Well, you can now write about dumbbell
exercises for chest, biceps, triceps, back, and legs. Let's zoom in on dumbbell
exercises for biceps. This would be a listicle that talks about
all sorts of great exercises for your biceps. And assuming you cover these bicep exercises,
you have a bunch more posts you can create.

Now, assuming your content is great, what
you're essentially doing is positioning your site to be the authority of dumbbells in
the eyes of visitors which will help with conversions and search engines,
which will help with traffic. Now, assuming you get through the hundreds
or maybe even thousands of dumbbell-related content, this is where you'd revisit your
main niche, and then choose another sub-niche – let's go with barbells. Then you'd become the authority of
barbells and do the exact same thing. And what you're essentially doing here is
creating a massive web of related content that's going to be the foundation to not just
an authoritative affiliate site, but a business that has potential to go
beyond affiliate marketing.

Now, I need to pump the brakes here
because before we can even think of becoming this mega authority site,
we need to start from square one and find some topics that would
be appropriate for our site. So throughout the rest of this module,
I'm actually going to do all of the work with you to plan for this
hypothetical affiliate site. And in the next lesson, we're going to go
up here to step 1 which is to do affiliate keyword research for your niche. Now, keyword research is the first step in
our flowchart in our journey to a consistent income through an affiliate site.

And it's basically going to set the foundation
for the topics you'll create content on. So simply put, keyword research is
the process of finding search queries people use when looking for products,
services, or general information. Now, because we won't be selling products or
services directly to consumers with an affiliate site, we ideally want to find topics where
it's easy to organically recommend products.

But before we get into the techniques to
find topics, it's important we talk about one foundational thing that's
massively important in SEO. And that's search intent. Search intent tells us about
the purpose of a searcher's query. And by understanding the intent of a query,
you'll be able to determine whether you can easily recommend products or not. For example if someone searches for
"best protein powder," chances are, they're in the market to purchase a product
but they want to weigh out the pros and cons, look at different brands, and assess
variables like price, quality, and so on. As a result, you actually need
to recommend products.

And the people who read this article may
very well click affiliate links to the products and make a purchase. Whereas a topic like, "what is protein
powder," is more informational in nature. Based on the keyword alone, we don't
know whether the searcher is writing a research paper, exploring the world
of supplements, or wants to know which type of protein powder to buy. Simply put, this topic probably wouldn't
generate many clicks to protein powders because the majority of people
aren't in the market to buy any.

So adding product recommendations
would probably be unnatural. Now, in general, there are four types of so-called
affiliate keywords we'll want to go after. And these are: general comparisons; branded
comparisons; product reviews; and T&A keywords. Now, before we get into how you 
can find these types of keywords, I'm going to choose a niche and
do keyword research with you.

So to set some context, I'm choosing
baby products as my main niche. And as I taught in the previous lesson,
I'm going to choose a sub-niche to start. Let's go with car seats. Alright, so let's talk about the four
different types of affiliate keywords, how they fit into an affiliate marketing site,
and how you can find them for your site. The first type of keywords
are general comparisons. These are your typical "best
[product name]" keywords.

For example, "best car seats," "best
booster seats," "best strollers," etc. It's super easy to recommend products
in posts targeting these keywords because searchers are looking for
product comparisons. After all, the keyword, "best" implies
that a comparison needs to be made. On top of that, people searching for these "best
product name" keywords are likely in the market to purchase something in the near future. They just don't know which product. So to find these keywords, you'll
need a keyword research tool. And I'll be using Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.

Alternatively, you can follow along with this
tutorial using Ahrefs' free keyword generator. To get started, I'll search for a few broad queries
related to my sub-niche like "car seat," "car seats," "booster seat," and "booster seats." Let's run the search. Next, I'll head on over to the Matching
terms report to generate keyword ideas. Now, since we're looking for general
comparison keywords, I'll click the "include" filter and type in "best." Apply the filter and you'll see over 18,000
keyword ideas that include at least one of our seeds and the word "best." Now, since there's probably too many keywords
to filter through manually, let's narrow this list down to just low-competition 
topics to get started. And to do that, we'll set a maximum keyword
difficulty filter to something low like 20. And there are some great topics
here that are worth considering like "best rotating car seat" and "best 
car seats" for various different ages.

So from here, you can jot down some keyword
ideas that interest you or if you have an Ahrefs' account, you can actually add these
to a keyword list which is what I'll do. Now, if you don't have an Ahrefs account, you can
still use our free keyword generator and search for something like "best product name." You'll have limited data, but it should be good
enough to set you off on the right track.

Now, a quick but important sidenote: you
shouldn't just go after keywords with low Keyword Difficulty scores. Higher competition often indicates
that there's more popularity and/or commerciality to a topic. For example, the query, "best car seat"
is significantly more competitive than the ones we were looking at. And according to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer,
the top-ranking page for this query, gets around 38,000 monthly organic
visits from the US alone. So these types of keywords are worth adding
to your keyword list too to tackle at a later time when your site is a bit more established.

Alright, the next type of keywords
are branded comparisons. These are keywords where a searcher
wants to compare the differences between two branded products. For example, that might be
"chicco car seat vs graco". These types of keywords usually have lower
search demand, but they typically convert better than general comparison keywords because
the searcher has likely narrowed down their purchasing decision to a few key products. The easiest way to find these keywords
is to create a list of brands or products in the same category. So assuming I wanted to find branded car seat
comparison keywords, I could search for a bunch of car seat brands and run the search. Next, I'll go to the matching terms report. And again, I'll go to the Include search box,
and this time, I'll type in "vs" and I'll also add the phrase "car seat" since these companies
make all sorts of baby products.

Apply the filter and we now have a list
of keywords that would work perfectly for branded comparison blog posts. Now, if we do the same thing but instead of
brands as our seeds we use a list of specific car seat models, you'll find even more
great branded comparison keywords to add to your list. Now, if you don't have an Ahrefs account,
you can do something similar with our free Keyword generator tool.

Just type in something like "product
name vs" – and run the search. Jot down any keywords that are of interest to
you, then rinse and repeat for the next brand. Alright, the next type of keywords
are detailed product reviews. These queries will typically follow
the format "product name" review. And people who search for queries like this
are likely very close to making a purchase. They've researched multiple products,
something caught their attention about a specific model, and now they
want a more in-depth review on it.

Now, just like the branded comparison keywords,
search volumes will be lackluster to say the least. So if you're going to buy these products and
actually review them, choosing products that people are actually searching
for may be a smart way to do it. A simple way to find brands and models worth
reviewing is to go to a popular ecommerce site and look through the different categories
and brand names in their navigation. So right now, I'm on buybuybaby.com and
I'm looking at their "shop all car seats" page. Now, if I click on the dropdown for Brand,
you'll see a list of brand names that you can jot down. So I've already gone ahead and done
that and saved a list to my clipboard.

So I'll paste a bunch of these into
Keywords Explorer and run the search. And let's head over to
the Matching terms report. Again, we'll hit the Include filter but this
time, we'll search for the word "review" and add an asterisk at the end,
which will act as a wildcard. And just like that we know exactly which
brands we'd want to review, and some specific models which we now have keyword metrics for. So take some time to add more keywords
to your keyword list and when you're ready, we'll move on to the last type of
keyword which are T&A keywords, which stands for "Trust and Authority." Now, in order to rank your pages, you
need to have some kind of page-level and website authority.

Meaning, you need backlinks. But since all of the keyword types we've
discussed so far are commercial in nature, it'll be tougher to get links to these pages. I mean, would you rather link to
a post about 10 random car seats or one about car seat safety? Probably the latter, right, seeing as it's
non-commercial and provides more objective value for your audience. Now, while these keywords may not
directly contribute to your revenue, it'll still serve two important purposes. #1. You'll build trust with your audience
since you're creating helpful content. And #2. You'll build authority through
links – hence, "trust and authority." So to find these keywords, let's search for
a few seeds that are related to car seats like "car seat," "car seats," and "booster seat." Next, I'll go to the Matching terms report
and then I'll hit the Questions tab since we're looking for informational topics. Let's set a Keyword Difficulty filter to
a max value of 20 and we now have a list of relatively easy-to-rank-for keywords.

So I'll add some to my list until
I'm satisfied and you should too. Now, if you don't have an Ahrefs account,
you can use our free Keyword generator. Just search for a seed keyword
and then hit the Questions tab. Then you can rinse and repeat
to build out your keyword list. Alright, so by now, you should have
a nice list of keywords from each of of the four affiliate keyword categories:
general comparisons, branded comparisons, product reviews, and T&A keywords. But all we have at this point is
a brainstormed list of topics. There's no real order or structure to
the content which is important in SEO as it helps to build out that huge web of
related content that I showed you earlier.

So in the next lesson, we'll take your list of
topics and actually plan out specific content pieces we'll need to create and start building
out what SEOs often call "topical authority." In this lesson, I'm going to walk you
through a simple affiliate marketing content strategy. More specifically, we'll be taking the list
of topics from your keyword research and organizing them into logical structures
that'll help grow your SEO traffic to your affiliate site. Now, as I mentioned in lesson 3.1., we want
to create a massive web of related content, covering all of the important
topics in our niche.  And the main benefit here is that all of
these relevant pages will be connected and essentially work together to build
what SEOs loosely call "topical authority." And if we had to define topical authority, it's
when a website becomes an authoritative source on a given topic in the eyes
of visitors and search engines. Now, the two parts that make up so-called
"topical authority" are topical coverage, meaning content, and backlinks.

We'll talk about the latter a bit
later because I want to illustrate the importance of topical coverage. Let's say you have a site in the golf niche.  If you publish a post on the best
golf clubs, no one's going to think: "Oh yeah…they're the authority" in
golf or golf clubs or golf equipment.

To become the go to place for information
on golf, you'd need to cover topics like "best golf balls," "best putters," "best golf shoes," "how
to hit a driver 300 yards," "what is a handicap in golf," and I could go on for hours. Plus, the content would actually
need to be good. Now, even this example hardly illustrates
becoming an authority in the golf niche because there's just so many things you'd
need to cover because golf is a huge topic. This is why focusing on a sub-niche
is a much better approach to building topical authority. And this is the way we chose
a niche in module 2. So you'd cover topics like: "best
golf balls," "pro v1 golf ball review," "pro v1x golf ball review," "taylormade
tp5 review," "how many dimples are on a golf ball," "how to properly clean golf balls,"
"which golf ball generates the most spin," "best golf balls for high handicappers,"
and add another hundred or so topics.

Assuming your content is of high quality,
over time, people will begin to see you as an expert in your niche and because of that,
they'll more likely link to your web pages because it's well-trusted. Again, I'm barely scratching the surface, but my
point should be clear: building so-called topical authority a) requires extensive topical
coverage; b) is much more achievable in a sub niche because of a); and c) building
it is a win-win for visitors and website owners. For visitors, they'll find a plethora of
resources to dig through on your site. And for website owners, you'll likely have better
potential to rank for topically related keywords, assuming your content gets linked to. And I'll expand on why topical authority
may help your rankings later in this lesson.

Now, if you've been building your site
with me throughout this course, then you should have narrowed in on
a sub-niche and done all your keyword research for that sub-niche. I chose baby products as my main
niche and car seats as my sub-niche. And in total, I generated a list of 239 car-seat
related keywords that I also categorized into the four different "types" of affiliate keywords. General comparisons; Branded comparisons;
Product reviews; and T&A keywords. The only major thing that's left to do 
in this planning stage is to map related topics together so we can start
building our web of related content. And we'll be using our keyword lists to do this. Now, if you get no clue what I'm talking
about, then I highly recommend going back to lesson 3.2. where I walked you
through how to do keyword research for affiliate marketing sites. But if you're all caught up, then let's
talk about perhaps the most efficient way to map affiliate topics. And that's by creating product clusters. A product cluster is a simple content structure
that connects a general comparison post with multiple product review posts.

Let's look at what this might
look like for my car seat site. So 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 need to choose
some car seats to compare in our post. And in my opinion, the best place to start 
is to draw from real-life experiences. For example, I actually own nine car seats
– so it's fair to say that I've done my share of research and real-life testing.

Now, I also have a couple kids that are
now older than three and so I know that the types of car seats we'll be
covering are "convertible car seats." One of our car seats is the Diono Radian
3RXT which I really like so I'll definitely include it in my round-up. Now, visually speaking, we would just
add a branch under our main topic: "best car seat for 3-year olds" and
call it "Diono Radian 3RXT review." 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 bought, so let's look at our product review
keywords to see which other car seats we could potentially add. Now, I've already gone ahead and
looked at product specs, reviews, and installation videos for 14
different convertible car seats.

And after researching, I've narrowed
down our list of "best car seats for 3-year olds" to a total of six car seats. The two that I have hands-on experience
with, the Britax one4life, Graco Extend2fit, Graco 4ever dlx, and the Safety 1st Go and Grow. So let's add branches to our flow 
chart for each of these models. So to review, we know we're going to create
a post on the best car seats for 3-year olds plus, we're going to write six different
product reviews for each model in our general comparison post like "Britax one4life
review", "Graco extend2fit review" and so on. Now, from an on-page perspective, we can simply
"connect" these pages by using an internal link from our general comparison
post to our product reviews. And it would also make sense to link
from our product reviews to our general comparison post. We now have a product cluster.

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

Now, branded comparisons also fit
seamlessly into product clusters. Looking at our list of branded comparison
keywords, you'll see that there's this topic on "graco extend2fit vs 4ever". Well, we just wrote two product reviews
for these so writing a branded comparison post would be super-easy. And of course, we could easily add
internal links to the product reviews whether they're one-way or
reciprocal in a very organic way. Alright, the last type of keywords on
our list are T&A keywords which again stands for trust and authority. And these are mostly informational topics. Now, these topics may not directly
impact your revenue but they serve important purposes: they can help you
earn more backlinks, reach larger audiences, and build trust and authority. Now, unlike product clusters, informational
posts on affiliate sites typically have less of a pyramid-type structure to them. For example, if you have four pages on
T&A topics, they won't necessarily link together creating a perfect pyramid. Internal linking on these pages will mostly come
down to "do it if and when it makes sense." For example, let's say we're
a writing post on car seat safety.

It would be perfectly natural to link to
another page on "when car seats expire", "when you should turn the car seat
around from rear to forward facing" and "requirements to change
to a booster seat." These are all related to car seat
safety and they all happen to be topics on our T&A keyword list. Now, it would also make perfect sense to link
from our post on "when do car seats expire" to our commercial page on "best car seats"
because people reading that post may need to buy a new one and could probably
use some help narrowing their search to an appropriate product.

As you can see, creating these structures
and mapping content isn't so much about strict adherence as it is about creating
a strong foundation for your content SEO. When you have a big list of topics and you
prioritize based on search volumes or keyword difficulty scores, it's tough to visualize
the relationships between your content. And what happens more often than not,
is that you haphazardly do internal linking creating poor structure, which just makes
ranking your pages harder than it has to be. But by having a solid internal linking plan,
you're going to do yourself a couple favors that should ultimately help you rank higher in
Google and get more free traffic to your pages. #1. You'll create a better user experience for
your visitors by providing them with relevant resources that may be helpful to them. And #2. You'll facilitate the flow of
PageRank which will help your pages rank higher in Google. And without getting too technical, that just
means that when one of your pages gets backlinks, the pages that it links to
will also benefit from that backlink – although to a lesser degree.

Alright, so now that we've mapped out our
content, we'll need to actually build out our site. And I won't go into how to create a WordPress
blog or suggest specific themes because a lot of that is entirely up to your preferences. But I do want to talk about two super-
important things related to site creation. And these are your homepage's content
and your website's navigation menu. And that's coming up in the next lesson. Alright, so let's talk about homepages
first and we'll get to navigation after. So very generally speaking, a homepage
serves three main purposes regardless of the type of website. #1. It should communicate what
your brand or company does. #2. It should lead people
towards a conversion goal.

And #3. It can be used to help rank
important pages higher in Google. Now, the first purpose is
pretty straightforward. But the second and third points
may be tougher to understand, especially in the context of
an affiliate marketing site. So let's expand. A conversion for an affiliate marketing site
happens when someone clicks your affiliate link and buys something
from the affiliate merchant. Now, the thing is, you don't have
any control over the merchant's site. But what is in your control, to a certain
extent, is getting people to click your affiliate links in your content. So therefore, leading people towards
a conversion goal for an affiliate site just means getting visitors to engage
with your content that naturally recommends affiliate products. And the actual conversion that happens
on your website will be when a visitor  clicks one of your affiliate links. Now, as for my third point on using
your homepage to rank important pages higher in Google, this comes
down to what we discussed in the previous lesson. When you link to pages on your site with
internal links, you're facilitating the flow of something called "PageRank." Basically, when the linking page gets
backlinks, it's passing so-called "authority" or "power" over to the pages it links to,
helping them rank higher in Google.

And it just so happens that homepages are
often the most authoritative page on a website. Alright, let's look at a couple of examples
of affiliate websites that do all three of these things on their homepage. The first is Garage Gym Reviews. They state that their brand is about
"connecting the garage gym community." And on their site, they "provide
in-depth and honest reviews on everything fitness-related." Scrolling down, you'll see some
of their "best in-class reviews." These are all clearly targeting
"general comparison keywords." Now, according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer,
all these "best in class review" pages that are linked from their home page
get a good amount of search traffic because they're actually ranking
high for their target keywords. In fact, all four posts are ranking in
the top position for their target keywords.

Here's another example from Dog Food Advisors. They clearly state that their site is
about Dog Food reviews and ratings. They're leading people towards their post
on the "best dog foods" which is obviously an important post for this site. They're also linking to a "dog food reviews A
to Z" page which is a page that links to tons of different dog food reviews – all of which would
naturally recommend products to purchase. Now, their "best dog food" page gets
around 60,000 monthly search visits. And yes, they rank in the top
position for "best dog food." Their dog food reviews page also gets a lot
of search traffic and ranks for the query, "dog food review." 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 homepage at any time.

Alright, let's move on to setting up
your site's main navigation menu. Now, your navigation menu
should serve two main purposes. #1. It should help provide a good user
experience for visitors so they can find whatever it is they're looking
for on your site quickly. And #2. it should make it easy for search
engines to access your content. Here's what I mean.

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

Now, if all links are removed from page
B, then the search engine won't be able to discover any of these URLs because
the path has effectively been broken. This is an overly simplified explanation
of how Google finds content. But the main point is that we want
to make it as easy as possible for search engines to discover our content
so they can add it to their search index.

And a well thought out navigation
menu makes this possible. Now, your navigation links will largely depend
on the number of pages you have on your site or plan to have, which is typically dictated
by the breadth of your niche and sub niches. For a small site, the solution is easy
because you've already created "product clusters," which I taught you how to
do over the past couple of lessons. So you can simply link to some of your general
comparison posts and your blog archive page. This way, all your pages are accessible within
a couple clicks from any page on your site. Now, for a larger site where you have too
many comparison posts for your nav menu, you'll want to create category pages
and link to them from your navigation.

For example, if we look at the Wirecutter
which is a huge affiliate site, you'll see they have various categories
in their navigation menu. Now, if I hover over Tech and click on
the "headphones" category, you'll see the majority of posts at the top of this
page are for general comparisons. And these pages link out to all
sorts of other posts on their website. Again, there's no exact formula
for navigation or internal links. Ultimately, you want to create a good
user experience for visitors and make your content accessible to search engines. Alright, so if you followed along from
lesson 3.1. to now 3.4, then you should have completed your keyword research, 
your content mapping strategy, and now your homepage and navigation architecture. Now it's time to actually create
your affiliate content. And that's what we'll be diving
deep into in the next module. In this module, I'm going to show you how
to create content for your affiliate site. And there are two main goals for our content.

#1. We want it to rank in Google so we
can get consistent traffic to our site. And #2. We want our information to
be helpful to visitors so they can make informed purchasing decisions and we can
get compensated with affiliate commissions. Now, before we get into actually creating
this content, I want to talk about something that's frequently pondered upon and that's
"how much informational vs commercial content should I create for an affiliate site?" Before we can try and answer this question,
I want you to envision two different sites at opposite extremes – one site with just informational
content and another with just commercial content.

Let's talk about the completely
commercial site first. To help you visualize the types of content
on this site, it'll be just best of comparisons, vs. posts, and product reviews. Now, the problem with this kind of site in my
opinion, is that unless your reviews are legit, one of a kind, and demonstrate authority
and expertise that's unmatched, it's going to be tough to really stand out.

The only example I can think of that did
this well was TheWireCutter before they were acquired by the New York Times. At that time, no one was really doing
hands-on reviews of products with well thought-out tests because it required
a lot of time, money, and expertise. But the Wirecutter consistently did this really well. As a result, they earned the trust of people
and earned backlinks with ease, making it an overall authority in product reviews.

The bar is much higher now. So to translate, if you're unable to at least
get backlinks to your commercial pages, you probably won't be able to rank, therefore,
you won't get much traffic to your site, and you won't make much in commissions. Now, let's look at the other extreme –
the completely informational content. This site will have tons of how-tos,
tutorials, guides, and basically anything for purely informational purposes. Now, because informational content typically earns
backlinks more easily, you'll have a better chance at ranking and getting traffic to your site.

But the main downside to creating a fully
informational affiliate site is that you'll stunt your revenue potential because
commercial topics are going to be easier to naturally recommend products. And affiliates get paid when people click
those  affiliate links and make a purchase. So back to the question: what is the ideal
ratio of commercial to informational content for an affiliate site? Well, as I just explained, there's positives
and negatives to both types of content. And because both are important, it's my
opinion that any ratio that's roughly equal is completely fine. That might be a 40/60, 50/50, 60/40, or whatever. Now, the good news is that if you followed
the steps I taught in module 3, then you've already set yourself up for success. If you remember, one of the core content
structures I taught was called a product cluster. And again, these are groups of commercial
content pages that connect general comparison posts with multiple product reviews
as well as branded comparison posts. So if we were to transform this map into topics
for our hypothetical car seats affiliate site, we might have "best car seats" as our general
comparison, these topics as our product reviews, and maybe one branded comparison post
like Diono Radian vs.

Britax Marathon. Boom. Our product cluster is complete
with a total of 6 commercial pages. Now, if we were going for a 1:1 ratio, we'd
want to choose around six informational pieces about car seats. To do that, I'll draw from my keyword research
list which I created with you in module 3. Now, all we have left to do is
create content on these topics. And creating content is what we're going
to go deep into in the next lesson, where I'll show you how to write commercial
blog posts that get traffic from Google and convert into affiliate commissions. Hey, it's Sam Oh and in this lesson, I'm going
to show you how to write money-making blog posts for an affiliate site. And when I say "money-making," I'm referring
to the three types of commercial posts we covered in module 3. And these are general comparisons
like "best golf balls", product reviews like "Titleist Pro V1 Golf Ball Review," and
branded comparisons like "Titleist Pro V1 vs.

Taylormade TP5 Golf Balls." Now, when you're writing these kinds of
posts for your affiliate site, you should have one primary goal in mind for your content. And that's to serve the intent of a visitor,
meaning you want visitors to be happy with the information they find on your page. Now, the reason this is important is because
when content satisfies the intent of visitors, you increase your chances of ranking higher
in Google because Google wants to show the most relevant pages for any given query. And because these queries have commercial
intent, when visitors are satisfied with the content, they're more likely to buy something from your
affiliate merchant, leading to an affiliate commission. Fortunately, creating content for these
three types of keywords is quite similar. So I'm going to give you some flexible
templates you can use to give yourself the best chance at ranking high
and earning more commissions. So, let's talk about the first type
of commercial post which is for general comparison keywords. Again, these posts are going to be what
you use when you're targeting keywords like "best [product name]." So, "best garden hose," "best
booster seat," "best golf balls," etc.

Now, because the word "best" implies that
a comparison needs to be made, the format you'll use for these general comparisons
will most likely be a listicle, which is just an article in list-format. And these general comparison posts
will typically have four main parts: The introduction, the summary,
the list points, and the conclusion. So let's start with the intro. Plain and simple, a listicle is not meant
to be read from start to finish. Nearly all readers will go in
with the mentality to skim. So with our intro, we want to keep it short
and sweet, while building credibility so they'll actually trust what you have
to say about these products.

For example, if we're writing a post on the
best car seats for 3-year olds, in the intro, I might say something as simple as: "We tested 10 car seats and rated
them by comfort, price, and safety. In this post, we'll share our research
to help you find the best convertible car seat for your 3-year-old." It's short and sweet, instantly builds
credibility, and also tells the reader that they're in the right place. Alright, next up is the summary. As I mentioned before, listicles
won't be read in full.

And that's because some, if not most
people just want the answer to what the best product is. That's why I suggest having a section 
like "Best [product] at a Glance." Here, you can simply add bullet points for
different categories like "best overall car seat," "best car seat money can buy," "best car seat for
travel," and "best budget car seat" to name a few. Not only can this help improve clicks
on your affiliate links, but it provides good user experience for those
no-nonsense skimmers. Alright, now we're on to the list points,
which is going to be the meat of your post. Now, a list point is made up of
a heading and description. The heading will usually be the name 
of the product you're recommending. For example, my post on "best car seats for
3-year-olds" might have headings like "Diono Radian 3RXT," "Britax Marathon,"
"Britax one4life," and so on. As for the description, you're just
describing the heading in more detail.

You want to give only necessary
information to help the buyer make an informed purchasing decision. Now, when it comes to writing descriptions,
it's best to keep the format consistent throughout the post. For example, if we're reviewing car seats for
3-year-olds, then we might have one sentence to describe the car seat, a few sentences
about how that specific car seat scored on our test categories like build quality,
safety, and performance – a supporting image of our analysis, and then perhaps
an overall score with a concluding statement. Predictable formats help people absorb
information more efficiently and that's what we want for our readers.

Now, last but certainly not least, we want
to include links to the affiliate products and your product review page in the description. We'll get into writing product review pages in
a bit because first we need to write a conclusion. Here, you'll want to wrap up the post. You can do this by summarizing your top
picks and recommending other posts on your site that might be interesting to that reader. For example, it might make sense to link
to a post on the best car seat accessories at the end of our best car seats post. Now, these general comparison pages tie in
directly with product reviews because if you remember from module 3, a part of our
overall strategy is to build "product clusters." And product clusters are simply content
structures that connect a general comparison post with multiple product review posts. Now, when you're writing product reviews,
the intent of most visitors will likely be different than the intent of those
visiting a general comparison post. People who visit a "best of" post most likely
don't know which products they're interested in.

Whereas someone who visits a product review
page titled something like "Diono Radian 3RXT review" has likely narrowed down their search
to a few products that interest them most. They're likely closer to making a purchase, and
want to dive deep before they spend money. So your goal for product reviews should
be to outline the positives and negatives to help visitors decide if that specific
product is right for their needs. So with that said, here's how I think
a product review should be written. First will be the introduction. And much like the "best of" post, you'll
want to keep it short, sweet and on point.

And the two things that I think are
important for product reviews is to a) show the reader they're in the right place,
and b) to internally link back to the general comparison post to complete
the product cluster structure. For example, if I was writing a post titled
"Diono Radian 3RXT Review" I might say: "With its slim size and high safety ratings,
the Diono Radian 3RXT has become one of the most popular car
seats for kids. In fact, we classified it as one of
our best car seats for 3-year-olds. But it's not all glitz and glam. The Radian 3RXT is one of the heaviest
car seats and scored surprisingly low on some of our hands-on tests.   In this review, we'll share the results of
our research to help you decide if this car seat is the right one for your toddler." Alright, now we're on to the body of the
content.

What you decide to cover here
will vary based on your niche. Basically, you want to cover the most
important categories that shoppers in your niche care about. For example, with car seats, that might be
safety, size, comfort, ease of installation, portability and specs. For golf balls, that might be distance,
spin control, materials, feel, and price. These are the things you should cover in
your product reviews where each category will be your heading. And these categories are essentially what
will create your product review template. Now, with the conclusion, you'll just want
to wrap things up and perhaps suggest who the product is best for. For example, for our Diono Radian
3RXT post, I might say: "The Diono Radian 3RXT is a solid
choice for children ages 2 – 6. In fact, it scored extremely
high in all of our tests. On top of that, it's the only car seat we
tested where we could easily fit 3 of them in the back of a small sedan.

If budget is not an issue for you, then you
won't be disappointed with the Diono Radian 3RXT." And we're done. Alright, the final commercial blog post type
I want to talk about are "branded comparisons." And these are your typical "vs posts". For example, Diono Radian 3RXT
vs. Britax Marathon. Now, when we think about someone who's
coming to a page like this, we know that the visitor has likely narrowed their product
research down to two or more products. But, they can't really decide on which
one is right for them so they want to do a side-by-side comparison. Basically, they're coming to your
page to weigh out the differences. So just like with the product review posts,
we want to address that in the introduction and again, help them make an informed
purchasing decision throughout the body. So here's what the intro might look like: "The Diono Radian 3RXT and Britax Marathon
are the heavy-weight champions of convertible car seats. They both have all the bells and whistles,
yet, they're completely different in just about every way. In this post, we'll compare the main features
of both models to help you decide which car seat is best for your little one." Now, as for the body, we want to take
a similar approach to product reviews and cover important topics that someone
looking to buy a car seat would want to know.

So again for a car seat shopper, that might
be safety, size, comfort, ease of installation, portability and specs. But a key difference here is that instead
of highlighting these things for one product, we want to compare the differences
between the different models. Think of comparison tables that I'm
sure you've seen on sites like Apple or your favorite ecommerce store. Now, for the conclusion, it
would be much the same. Just wrap things up. Now, two important things to note from an
SEO perspective in these branded comparison posts, is to internally link to the individual product
reviews as well as the general comparison guide. And this is going to help you complete your
product cluster and create that beautiful structure we talked about in module 3. Now, writing money-making or commercial posts
is pretty straightforward for an affiliate site.

Creating informational content on
the other hand is a bit more nuanced. So in the next lesson, I'll show you how to
write informational blog posts that are likely to
rank and show you how you can turn informational
pieces into silent profit generators. Hey, it's Sam Oh and in this lesson, I'm going
to show you how to write informational blog posts for an affiliate marketing site. And by informational blog posts, I'm talking
about how-tos, step-by-step tutorials, definition posts, and basically any type of content
where the primary intent is to learn. On top of that, I want to show you how
to generate affiliate commissions from informational blog posts that may not seem
to have commercial value at first glance. Let's call these silent profit generators. So let's get started. Now, before I walk you through some blog post
templates, it's important we discuss the first and most important step to creating content
for search – and that's search intent. Search intent represents the reason
behind a searcher's query.

And the reason why it's important is because
you need to match intent in order to rank high in Google. For example, if we were creating a post about
how to clean car seats for a hypothetical kids' car seats site, what do you think
our content should look like? Should it be a step by step tutorial where
you walk them through cleaning your kids' convertible car seats? Or should it have a different format? Or wait… is this for convertible car seats,
infant car seats, or booster seats? Well, this was kind of a trick question because
the intent for the query "how to clean car seats" is actually about cleaning the seats in your
car – not cleaning a kids installable car seat. How do I know this? Well, the way we identify search intent is
by entering the query in Google and looking at the top-ranking pages. After all, search engines want to show
you the most relevant result for a query so the top-ranking pages are essentially
a guide to what Google thinks best serves the intent of a searcher.

So as you can see, the top pages for "how
to clean car seats" are all about cleaning regular car seats so creating a post on
cleaning kids' car seats probably wouldn't rank for this query because
it's not matching intent. Now, for argument's sake, let's say that intent
was about cleaning children's car seats. Because the keyword has the word "how to"
in it, you might automatically think that you need to create a step-by-step guide. But what's interesting, is that the top 2
ranking pages are actually listicles with a set of tips – meaning, an unordered
list of methods to clean a car seat.

So if you want to compete, you should follow
suit and create a post with a similar format to improve your chances of ranking high. We have a full SEO course for beginners where
we go much deeper into matching search intent and actually creating optimized content for
search, so I highly recommend watching that. I'll link that up and some SEO content
writing tutorials in the description. Alright, let's move on to a few blog post
templates you can use for different types of informational content. And all of these content pieces will contain
a title, introduction, body and conclusion. Let's kick things off with the first
post type and that's listicles. Listicles are blog posts that contain non-chronological
lists such as tips, product recommendations, tools, techniques, myths, mistakes, or whatever. For the title you can use any of these templates. Let's turn them into working titles: "11 Ways to Sneak Snacks onto a Plane" "7 SEO Tips that Actually Work" "4 Blogging Techniques to Grow Your Audience" Titles for listicles are about as easy as
they come.

Now, as for the introduction, your goal
should be to build trust and excitement in as few words as possible because most
people are coming for the list points. For example, if you're writing a post on 7
SEO tips that actually work, you might say: "Ranking high in Google is more
challenging than ever before. But that doesn't make it impossible. As you can see, our blog ranks for over
11,600 keywords in the top 10 of Google. Today, I want to share a few simple
SEO tips that helped us get there." The intro is short and helps build trust because
we have proof that we've already achieved what the reader is hoping to achieve –
higher Google rankings. The last thing I recommend including in the
intro is a table of contents with jump links.

This makes it much easier for visitors to
navigate throughout your post, especially since listicles need to be skimmable. If you're using WordPress, there are plenty
of free plugins to choose from, just search for, "table of contents" in WordPress's plugins
repository and you'll find plenty of free options to try. Alright, on to the main content. In the most basic form, your main content
will have a series of H2s or heading tags, and content that complements the headings. Now, depending on the type of listicle
you're creating, your H2s will vary.

For example, if you're doing a series of tips
to achieve a goal, you'd want to use short and descriptive headings that would make
the reader want to read your content. For example, if your post was on 17 Weight
Loss Tips, rather than having point 5 as "Eat Spicy Foods," you might put "#5. Eat
Spicy Foods to Burn More Calories." Now, as for the content that goes under these
headings, you may want to consider creating your own mini-template.

For example, if your post is on weight loss
tips, you might explain why your tip helps with weight loss in one sentence. Then you might explain how it works
and cite some research studies. Then you can end off the list point with two
sentences that will help the reader put that tip into action. Consistency creates a predictable reading
experience for your visitors and it also helps you as a writer to avoid tangents
which break flow. So with a mini template in hand, it'll just
be a matter of filling in the blanks for each subheading and before you know it,
you'll be onto your conclusion. For list posts, I wouldn't overthink the conclusion. The majority of people aren't even going to
get here but it's still important to create closure for people who do.

My recommendation is to briefly summarize
a key takeaway and then recommend additional content that's related to your post. And internal links are good to use because
they pass link authority and overall, create a better user experience for your readers. So here's a sample of what
this template looks like. 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 your typical "how-to"
posts where you run through a series of chronological steps to teach how
to accomplish something. Now, for the title, you can use one
of these formats to get started.

So if we turn these into real
titles, they might be: "How to Build a Deck (7 Steps)" "How to Start a Business (Even if
You Don't have Money)" "How to Find Email Addresses for
Link Building (Fully Automated)" Now, for the intro, write a short one using
the PSP method, which stands for problem, solution, and proof. For example, let's say you have a step-by-step
guide on how to do YouTube keyword research. Your intro might read: "Looking to grow your YouTube
channel and attract more views? The "trick" is to target topics
with search demand. This is the approach that helped us grow our
YouTube channel from ~10,000 to over 200,000 monthly views in one year." Now, the reason why the PSP method is effective
is because people who are reading a step-by-step guide usually come with a problem.

They're looking for a solution. And if you have proof of that solution,
you'll get their attention. Alright, so with the intro in the books, we
need to write the main content which will be your step-by-step instructions. And because step-by-step guides have a logical
sequence of instructions, you can use your H2s as the main steps. For example, our post on YouTube
keyword research might have H2s like: "Step 1: Map out a hierarchy of topics." "Step 2: Generate keyword ideas" "Step 3: Check search intent" …and so on and so forth.

As for the conclusion, just keep it short
and sweet because step-by-step guides tend to be quite long. Again, I recommend adding internal links to
other relevant posts so you don't leave readers to want more at a dead end. So from our hypothetical YouTube keyword
research post, we might link to our guides on YouTube SEO and getting more subscribers
on YouTube – both are relevant to YouTube keyword research and serve what
a reader might want to learn next. Here's a sample of what this
template looks like. 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. Expanded definition posts are
somewhat similar to how-to guides. But rather than being written as a logical
sequence of steps, it's meant to give a high-level overview of a topic. Now, because these posts are expanded definitions,
you'll want to make your title something like: "What is or what are [concept or acronym]"
and then any additional details about your piece.

For example, "What is an Oligarch:
Everything you need to know." "What are SERPs: Search Engine
Results Pages Explained." "What are NFTs? A Detailed Introduction
to "Expensive JPEGs." Now, the great thing about expanded definition
posts is that there's a clear format you can follow for the intro, main content, and conclusion. In short, you want people to come for
the definition and stay for the details.

So for the introduction, you'll want to keep
it short and sweet by defining your concept or acronym. For example, our page on "What are SERPs"
immediately gives the definition, shows a supporting image, and then tells you
what you'll learn in the rest of the post with jump links to each section. Now, for the main content, I highly recommend
spending some time on your outline because you only want to include the most important
points that a person searching for "what is [something]" would want to know. For example, if we created a post targeting,
"what are NFTs," you can start by searching for ideas in Google's People also ask box.

So from this list, these could act
as potentially good subtopics. You can also look in the related terms
report in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. So based on these keywords, I'd probably want
to talk about the meaning of fungible, which is the F in NFT, I'd want to talk about how you
can buy an NFT, and how to invest in NFTs. Finally, look at the subheadings for
top-ranking pages for your target query. So this page talks about what they are,
how they're different from cryptocurrency, how they work, what they're used
for, and so on and so forth.

So assuming we were creating
a post titled "What are NFTs? A Detailed Introduction to "Expensive JPEGs,"
we might have a main content outline that looks like this, where our intro solves the
"what" and the rest of the article will give a decent introduction to the NFT space. Now, for the conclusion, you just need
to summarize the key learnings. And again, I highly recommend adding internal
links to other articles that a beginner would want to learn more about. Because if they've made it to the bottom of
your expanded definition post, they'll likely want to learn more since the content
will typically be high-level.

The bottom line with all of these templates
is that they need to match the intent of the
searcher. And the better you match it, the better your
chances of ranking higher in Google. Now, I've previously talked about how informational
blog posts can be silent profit generators. The way you do that is by
creating product-led content. And product-led content is simply content
that helps people solve a problem with the help of your product. Now, since you, as an affiliate, won't own
the products you recommend, you can think of it as creating product-led content for
other companies but posted on your own site. For example, let's say you have a DIY home
improvement site where you recommend various tools like drills, drivers and other tools. You might want to create a post on how to
winterize your sprinkler system which gets an estimated 2,700 monthly searches in Google.

Now, as far as I'm aware, you need an air
compressor to winterize your sprinkler system. So it would be super-natural to organically
plug this product into your post. And because air compressors aren't exactly
a common household item like a hammer, some of these people will likely take your
advice and buy one through your link, leading to a commission. We have a full tutorial on product-led content
that I highly recommend watching if you want to learn how you can master silent profit
generators for your affiliate site. And that wraps up this module. In module 5, we'll be talking about
link building for affiliate sites. Get good at this, and you'll have no problems
generating consistent traffic from search engines. In this module, we're going to talk about
affiliate link building tactics and a simple macro
strategy that'll help you get higher Google rankings,
more search traffic, and more affiliate commissions.

Now, backlinks are basically the fuel
to higher Google rankings. And while you may want to jump straight into
link building tactics, it's important that you first understand how you can best harness the power
of backlinks and also understand the realities of link building for affiliate sites. So, link building, whether it's for an affiliate
site, blog, or ecommerce store is most commonly done through email outreach. And this is where you contact people who might
be interested in linking to your web pages. Now, reaching out to some
random stranger and saying: "Hey, you like gardening? I sell garden tools. You should recommend my product
pages by linking to them everywhere." … is kind of awkward.

And beyond being awkward,
it's selfish in a weird way. There's no benefit for the recipient of
these emails and that means you won't be getting any or many backlinks at all. Now, let's flip the script a bit and
let's say we email someone saying: "Hey, Sam here from thegardenseo.com. Just wanted to say thanks for sharing
your tutorial and detailed experiences with [Company A's] garden box kit. I bought the same model and had the exact
same problem with the pieces not lining up properly. After some tinkering, I found a cool way
to seal the gap seamlessly for under $5. I wrote about it in this post and
thought you'd like to check it out. If you find it helpful, perhaps your
readers would find it helpful too? Cheers, Sam" This is a bit less awkward because there's
inherent value for the recipient to actually want to share and link to your content. It's genuinely helpful and people
want to share helpful information. Now, that brings us to the realities
of the current state of link building.

Yes, helpful content is going to be
easier to get backlinks to. So this will mostly be your informational
posts which we called T&A keywords in module 3. Now, as for commercial content like your
general comparisons, branded comparisons and product reviews, these are a bit trickier
to get links to because the only real value goes to you. And people receiving these link
pitches know that too. But that doesn't change the fact that you
need to get backlinks to these commercial pages
too.

So I have two suggestions for you. #1 is to use the middleman method. This is when you build backlinks to the more
helpful pieces of content on your site because it'll be easier to get links. And as the links pile in, that page's
so-called ‘link authority' will increase. Now, since you control this authoritative
page, you can actually add internal links from here to your money pages. And what ends up happening is that some
of that link authority will get passed over to your commercial page that will hopefully
give you a boost in rankings. The informational post is essentially acting
as a "hub" to power pages that would typically be hard to get backlinks to and will help
you generate affiliate commissions. We have a full tutorial on this SEO strategy
which I'll link up in the description.

Now, for more competitive topics, you're 
going to have to get backlinks directly to the commercial content. And the best way you can do that is to just
make your content really really really really
good. And when you actually have content that's
hit a level way beyond your competitors, you're going to want to promote it because
the reviews and roundups will be so good that it'll feel like a crime not to share
it. A few things you can do to improve your content
is to actually do hands-on reviews with videos, add custom photography or graphics, or get
unique insights from experts in the industry. Making your content better than your
competitors will be pretty custom to your niche and personal taste. So I highly recommend watching our 
video on how you can create content that's better than your competitors which
has a ton 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'm going to share
some proven link building techniques you can use to start putting this strategy into action. Hey, it's Sam Oh and in this lesson, I'm going
to show you how to execute a few proven link building tactics for your affiliate site. Now, link building is largely a numbers game
– meaning, you need to send a lot of emails to get backlinks. But there's one thing that can significantly
increase your chances of getting links using the techniques that I'm about to share with
you. And that's expertise. When you're an expert in something, that
usually means you have unique and interesting insights to share. And as a result, people will take
your word more seriously.

For example, let's say you have a beauty blog
and in one of your posts, you mention that getting a regular teeth whitening is good
for your overall oral hygiene. Now, if some random person emails you
saying that you're wrong and they wrote a post explaining why you're wrong called
"best teeth whitenings", you'll probably ignore
them. But if a dentist emails you and tells you
that only certain types of teeth whitening products are good for you and the ones
mentioned in your post are downright dangerous, because of x, y, and z, you might
be inclined to make changes to your content and link to their content. They clearly have expertise. Now, being an expert, in the context of
link building, doesn't mean you need to be in the top 1% of your field.

The majority of people writing content probably
aren't even interested in the topics they write about. So even being a passionate hobbyist can go
a long way as you have interesting insights to share from your own personal experiences. Now, I know absolutely nothing about
teeth whitenings, so don't pass around this misinformation. But the point is that if you're positioning
yourself as someone who's knowledgeable in your niche, link building will be much
easier – especially for the tactics I'm about to share with you today. And that leads us nicely into the first link
building tactic, which is to get free press from HARO. HARO stands for help a reporter out. It's a service that connects
journalists with sources. Just sign up for an account as a "source"
and you'll start getting emails with a list of
queries from journalists at various publications. And these include Business Insider, The New
York Times, and USA Today to name a few. Now, HARO is a super-easy way to get high-
quality backlinks because the journalists are the ones that are soliciting sources
— not the other way around.

Now, there are tons of requests that come
in on a daily basis and the majority won't be relevant to your niche. So you can set up a simple Gmail
filter to sort through the noise. Just go to your Inbox and click on the caret
to bring down Gmail's search options. Next, set the "From" field to
haro@helpareporter.com. Then, you'll want to set the subject to "HARO"
within square brackets since all of their emails include that in the subject line. Finally, set the "Has the words" field
to any keywords you want to monitor. And also use the OR search operator to
include multiple keywords or phrases. Click "Search" to see the results your
search filters would include and check out some of the emails to ensure
you're getting relevant results. If everything looks good, click on the
caret again and then click "Create filter." Now, even though we've filtered down the results
to relevant ones, it doesn't mean journalists are going to cite you just because you responded.

And while you should go the extra mile to
provide unique and insightful information, half the
battle is in responding to the right questions. So to increase your chances of getting mentioned,
prioritize queries where journalists are likely looking for multiple experts on the topic. For example, in this query, Bustle is
looking for relationship therapists as in the plural of therapist. And they want to know more
about boredom in relationships. Now, the description is even more
clear that they want multiple experts. She says: "I'm working on an article
called "13 common mistakes that lead to boredom in a relationship." So more likely than not, she's looking
for multiple experts that can fill in the blanks in her outline. So if that niche makes sense for you, then
provide your best answer in as short of a response as possible, and then
move on to the next query.

Now, if you're an expert in the field, then
make sure to state your credentials in the beginning of their email to set a tone and then earn
your trust through your knowledge and experience. I'd recommend using HARO without
an end date in mind. The quality of links are just that good for
the amount of effort it takes to respond. And if you're pairing HARO with the affiliate
homepage strategy I taught in lesson 3.4, you'll be maximizing the mileage from
these highly authoritative backlinks. Alright, the second tactic
I recommend is guest posting. Guest posting is when you create
content to be posted on another website. And generally speaking, that post comes
with attribution and a link back to your site. Now, while some sites won't allow you to
link to yourself within the content, most will, as long as it makes sense and
adds value to your guest article. So the first thing you need to do is find
websites that are likely to accept guest posts. To get started, you can use Ahrefs Content
Explorer, which lets you search through billions of pages and get SEO
metrics for all of them.

Just search for a topic related to
your niche and run the search. Next, let's set a Domain Rating filter to
weed out both very low and very high authority websites. So I'll choose a range like 30 to 60. I'll also choose the "One page per domain"
filter since we don't need to pitch the same website multiple times. Finally, I'll set the "Published" filter to
the past 90 days, which will help us narrow in on websites that have published
or republished content in the last 3 months.

Now, we still have around 80,000 websites
in our search results, which is just way too many
to pitch. So let's head on over to the Websites tab,
which will show you the top 100 websites from your
results. Now, it's just a matter of looking at
the domain names, visiting ones that look relevant, and pitching your
guest posts where appropriate. For example, this site gets decent search
traffic from Google, has a decent website authority, and has a bunch of authors, meaning,
they likely accept guest posts. So let's visit their site and take a look
through some of their articles… Things look fine here so let's head
over to their About page. And since they list their editor here, I'll
probably try and and pitch them with my idea.

Now, if you don't know how to find these
people's email addresses, I'll link up a video on how you can do that in the description. Alright, the next link building tactic I
highly recommend is to do podcast interviews. Much like guest-posting, being interviewed
on a podcast puts you in the spotlight as an
expert in front of a someone else's audience. So if you actually have expertise in your
niche, this is going to be an easy one for you that’ll a) help you build a reputation
as an authority in your niche; and b) get backlinks while you're at it. Now, the thing I love about podcasts as a
link building strategy is that it only takes around an hour of your time and links are almost
a given if you choose your podcasts appropriately. Here’s what I mean: a lot of podcasts have
“episodes” pages on their websites.

And these pages almost always include
a link back to the guest’s homepage and their social profiles. So to find podcast prospects that are likely
to link to your site, you can simply reverse-engineer a podcast interviewee’s homepage
backlinks or social profile backlinks. For example, if you’re in the SEO niche,
you might want to check backlinks to Tim Soulo’s Twitter profile, since he’s been a guest
on a bunch of podcasts. To get started, I’ll go to Ahrefs’ Site
Explorer and paste in his Twitter URL. Next, I’ll go to the Backlinks report. Now, to narrow in on links from podcasts,
I’ll set a page title filter to search for referring pages where the word “podcast”
or episode” is in the page title.

From here, you can sift through the results,
visit relevant pages, and pitch yourself as a guest when appropriate. The benefit to being on podcasts
goes way beyond links. You get the chance to meet like-minded people
in your industry and building your network can go a long way even from an SEO perspective. Now, if you follow the course and rinse
and repeat these 3 tactics, you should have no problems getting some
traction to your affiliate site. If you want to go beyond these tactics, then
I recommend watching our full tutorial on link building for beginners which
I’ll link up in the description. And that wraps up our affiliate marketing course. I’ve linked up a full playlist to this
entire course in the description. Thanks for joining me, consider subscribing
and I’ll see you in the next tutorial..

As found on YouTube

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