Search & Content Marketing – The Key to an Affiliate Marketer’s Success

Content Marketing

Affiliate marketing requires an audience to present offers to. Makes sense right? You need to have people who have trust in you and/or the vendor to purchase a product presented to them. There are two major ways to reach the audience – advertising and content marketing. Paid ads work. But you need to have a budget to purchase ads and the expertise to design and execute a profitable advertising campaign.

 

Succesful ad campaigns are not an easy thing to execute.

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Buying traffic also eliminates one of the big advantages of affiliate marketing – the low startup costs. With affiliate marketing, you can start with a very small budget and earn as you learn. Every skill that you acquire, keyword research, backlink outreach, content creation etc. is transferrable to any online venture. But if you have the bankroll for paid ads, have the expertise to make great funnels and landing pages — by all means go for it. It is a much faster way to get into the business.

However, for most mortals grinding out a living, search and content marketing is the way to go.

Additional Content on Amazon’s Affiliate Program

What is Search Engine and Content Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) uses search engines results to create an audience for information. It is free advertising for your content. But you need to be tactical about it. You want to find a balance between the number of people searching for a term and your ability to compete for the top results. You want to establish yourself as an authority about a particular topic that is underserved.

SEM characteristics include …

  • Millions of people are searching for information every minute.
  • Google presents them with the best information for their query.
  • You create content that search engines view as one of the best sources for a query
  • The top 10 results from Google get the vast majority of the visitors from search results
  • Affiliate Links are in the content presented to the search visitor
  • The search visitor goes to the offer and makes a purchase
  • The affiliate marketer makes a commission

Content Marketing = SEM plus all other ways of promoting your content.

  1. Create useful content that attracts search traffic.
  2. Develop an audience that believes and trusts you.
  3. Present affiliate products in your content that helps your audience solve a problem.
  4. Promote your content to a broad audience.

Audience

When you are creating your audience with content management you are developing a longer term relationship than with paid ads. You are slowly building trust by adding value.

This is a long game effort.

You want to build an audience. An audience that is defined by the topics you write about. An audience that finds you from organic search.

Your niche needs to be topically defined in a segment you can compete in. If you try to target too big a niche you will be banished away from the first page or not even in the top 100 results. No one can start tomorrow as the best pc and gaming review site and get any organic traffic. The first 50+ search results will be big pc magazines, pc vendors, large retailers etc. Remember the old cliche …

The best place to hide a dead body is page two of google

It is frustrating and demotivating to write content that does not drive any traffic. Sure not every piece will have lots of traffic but you are building a resource that helps a group of people solve related problems. The larger your body of information, the more helpful it is, the bigger percentage of that topics search traffic will come to you. You want to target the largest niche in terms of queries that you can be on page 1 for with your content.

Some interesting recent user behavior when searching Google …

  • Fewer than 1 of 200 searchers go to page 2
  • Fewer than 10 of 100 even go the bottom of page 1
  • 20% click on ads
  • 65% select an organic result
  • 83% just one click return back to the results page
So as you can see, search position is critical. You must be patient though.

SEO success will take time.

Content Marketing Strategies

You need to create a rich set of content that is interesting and relevant to a particular topic. You need to be a trusted source providing valuable content that answers questions and solves problems.

Variety of Content

Unless you are building a SaaS product or other app, affiliate marketing content shouldn’t feel formulaic. It’s also important to keep it as fresh as possible for your readers. You need more than one type of content to keep readers engaged. If you simply have a website with a few reviews and a blog, visitors will get bored. Different content types also create the opportunity for different distribution channels. Consider formats like funnels, landing pages, eBooks, webcasts, infographics, videos, white papers, case studies, emails, and newsletters. Think of it as building blocks of traffic. All the small pieces can add up to a large fortress.

Relevance Matters

Content must have topical relevance. Bouncing around from topic to topic is not a productive strategy. Google and other search engines will rank your content based on how relevant it is to the user query. The ranking will take into consideration an article’s specific relevance and the authority of the site within the topic. Choose a niche carefully with keyword research and stick to it. Don’t add products just because they pay well or are “hot” if they are not relevant and useful to the niche audience. Start with a relatively narrow niche and add more related topic silos as you grow.

Add Value

There is a lot of competition for search traffic. The first impression of the site should not be “oh another affiliate site”. A better first impression would be “wow that’s interesting I didn’t know that”.

Don’t put sales first, put solving problems for your audience first.

Be very selective in the products you offer. Find new, trending products t