One of the easiest affiliate marketing strategies has to be the content affiliate marketing strategy because it doesn’t cost anything other than the hosting fee, your time and subject knowledge. And although building content is an easy, natural method to affiliate marketing don’t miss out on the basic components that make up today’s successful content affiliate.
Topic Interest
The first thing you need is a topic that you are legitimately interested in, and you don’t have to be an expert on this topic because it’s alright to take it from the approach of a novice, but you should be able to consistently create interesting content for your audience because your content is your key to success. Most affiliate marketers will agree that content affiliates should have a strong interest in their topic because creating content really can be a laborious effort and if you don’t have the interest you will likely give up before achieving any level of success.
Selecting the Right Topic
The second thing you need for your content affiliate venture is a good topic. So while I just suggested in the previous paragraph that you blog a topic of your interest there also has to be some consideration to critical mass and the opportunity for conversion. So let’s say you are building your own hot rod, I’d bet if you blogged in detail about your project you could build yourself a nice affiliate business from this hobby in time. And if hunting or fishing is your main interest you are lucky because you can write content and promote new equipment all year long and never run out of material. Just take a walk through a Cabelas store and look at all the opportunity. And you could do the same with topics like gardening and outdoor photography. But if your interest is something obscure like antique camp stove collecting or duct tape art you’d have to discover some very clever ways to earn rewarding revenue with those topics.
Use a Blog
The third thing you need to consider as a content affiliate marketer is how you publish your content. Now I know that a blog isn’t always the right tool but in most cases it is the most useful publishing tool for the content affiliate. You probably already know that most bloggers prefer WordPress because of the CMS features and search engine friendly properties, but other advantages of the blog are that the navigation and looping characteristics make it the perfect tool for writing product reviews. And once your domain gains some authority among the search engines you could have a new product review ranking in the SERPs only minutes after you publish, so no more waiting around for Google to crawl and index update your new content. So if you are still publishing your content the old fashioned static website way updating to a blog might be the best move for your affiliate marketing venture.
Go Social!
The next thing is to Go Social! There is a lot of hype about social media and it gets old listening to all the experts try to own it, but the argument is really simple…and that argument is that affiliate marketers have been using social media for years. And I’m not talking about playing around on your Twitter and Facebook account because I’m not convinced they produce results in most cases, but what I am talking about is participating on niche forums, online communities and blogs. And you don’t have to be the subject expert but if you can be a good resource to the community they will follow and trust your content, and you will see increasing conversions. Social media presents other opportunities but for now focus on building your brand and establishing trust within your niche community.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
I hate using clichés but I think “wash, rinse, repeat” is the right phrase to describe this path to success. Many affiliate marketers overthink the process, I know I did at first, but it’s as simple as finding something that works and just doing it over again. So if you wrote a product review that results in a conversion don’t focus on why it only converted once that month but instead focus on writing more content for similar products. If a product converts once it will likely convert again, and getting that second and third conversion is where you need to place your focus for now, not on testing new networks and merchants.
One suggestion with the wash, rinse, repeat strategy is don’t over affiliate market your website. Ultimately people are visiting your website because they are seeking your knowledge, but they will quickly lose interest if every blog post is an affiliate offer. It’s very important to strike a good balance between affiliate offers and providing truly useful content.
And of course I can’t finish this article without mentioning the importance of keyword research and competitive research. Too many new affiliates launch affiliates websites themed on highly competitive categories like say, car insurance, then ask why their website is not converting. A rule of thumb for the content affiliate is if you can’t rank your website for your chosen keywords and phrases then you will likely fail.
So there you go, a few very basic recommendations that will increase your chances of building a successful or affiliate venture – of course, your success is relative to topic and your ambition.
