Top 5 SEO Tips To Get Started With An Affiliate Website

By Francis Smith Lee:

Affiliate websites are easy and affordable to get started, and they can make you a few extra bucks each month to help pay the bills Affiliate websites provide readers with information about a product, and the website owner receives a commission percentage for the referral sale. Competition is high for affiliate websites, but here are some SE0 tips to help you rank in the search engines and get you started with affiliate marketing.

Choose a Secure Reputable Product:

Some affiliate website owners go for any product that returns a high commission. If you choose a product with a bad reputation, you can create a bad reputation for your own site. Choose a product that does not perform or does not hold up to the manufacturer's promises. Avoid the snake oil products that promise the impossible. If you find a product that does not hold up to promises, tell your readers to avoid it and choose a new affiliate product to sell.

Create Content for Readers and Not for Search Engines:

Many affiliate webmasters fall into the poor SE0 trap of creating content with a specific keyword density, cloaking links and other poor content choices. Google has never suggested a specific keyword density for content, and focusing too much on the number of times a phrase is mentioned leads to keyword stuffing. Write content for readers and read the Google quality guidelines to avoid.

Do Not Use Affiliate Links in Every Post:

Google would rather send users directly to the manufacturer and not the affiliate website, so you must offer something of value that the manufacturer does not offer. The affiliate website can offer personal reviews of a product and information that is not provided directly from the manufacturer. Google's algorithm picks up on website quality signals, and creating a new affiliate link for every post can send poor quality signals to the bot. Create content that does not revolve around the affiliate. Instead, provide content for readers that focuses on the product and not affiliate sales. The information can include reviews, in-depth product specifications and your own rating system for the product.

Avoid Spamming Blogs and Forums:

Backlinking is a marketing effort required for any online website, but spam links are devalued and penalized. Not only do the links lose value, but you also anger other site owners. When creating a backlinking campaign, choose one that does not create links using automation software. Network with bloggers and other site owners to help get natural backlinks. Good backlinks will help with long-term ranking goals, but spam backlinks are devalued and eventually your site loses rank due to the devalued spam. Natural links are slowly obtained, so be patient.

Keep Track of Traffic and Ask for Feedback:

What better way to find ideas for new content than asking readers for feedback? Readers can provide feedback in the affiliate website comments section or directly in your email. Ask readers to provide you with feedback on each article you write, so you can identify reader interests and come up with new ideas for new content. Content written specifically for readers can help you keep users coming back to the website. Returning users are a goal that many affiliate website owners forget. Returning users cost nothing, and you don't need to rely on search engines to obtain the traffic. Returning users also provide natural backlinks to the site.

Affiliate websites are a challenge, but once you obtain the traffic and rank in search engines, they are a rewarding venture. Always focus on the readers, and the search engines will reward you accordingly.

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Affiliate Plan Blogging

By William M Terrell:

Affiliate program blogging is blogging to generate passive income by having ads for other peoples' products or services on your blog. For people to want to advertise on your blog, however, you will have to generate sufficient traffic to give the advertiser a satisfactory return on his investment. This will require a) blogging on a subject about which you are knowledgeable to begin with, and which you want to keep learning about, and b) getting traffic to your blog.

First of all, blog about something that interests you and for which there is an audience large enough to generate advertisers willing to accept you into an affiliate program. While your blog focus may not have to be an absolute passion for you, you should at least have an ongoing interest in the topic. That way, your blogging should be satisfying in and for itself, and that's the way you will be able to maintain interest in keeping it up. After all, a well=kept up blog will require at least two to three postings a week, and to do that you will have to be knowledgeable about your topic to begin with, and interested enough in it to keep learning about it, so that you can pass this knowledge on to your readers.

However, one danger of a blog is that you are not only the writer of your blog posts, but also the editor and publisher of the blog. This denies you one advantage of "being published" by a newspaper or magazine, which is that acceptance of your writing by an outside editor gives you some assurance that what you have submitted for publication is "good," at least in the eyes of that editor.

A blog, however, does not give you that assurance, since you are not only the writer of the blog, but the editor and the publisher. This makes it important to realize that, if you are going to get an audience-or traffic-to your blog, you must be honest enough in evaluating your work not to let yourself post blog entries that readers will find boring or unoriginal. Posts that don't interest readers will result in few return visits to your blog, and so it will be hard or impossible to build a steady stream of traffic that will attract advertisers. If you don't get the traffic, affiliate programs may drop you.

The second part is to make certain you have a sufficient pool of potential visitors, and to do that you will need to do some research. One way to discover the amount of interest in your topic is to do keyword research, either with a free tool like Google keywords or some of the paid services. But even the paid services will give you a certain number of free days to use the service, to find out if you want to pay for their upgrade. Another way is to just check out a few local magazine racks. Is your topic represented among the magazines displayed. If so, there's surely an audience for your blog topic. If not, not so much.

On the other hand, remember, in a blog your audience is potentially as large as the planet itself. The web, after all, is a world wide web. This means that even if your blog subject is highly specialized, there may still be enough potential visitors to your blog to make advertising on it worthwhile. Your task will be to find the visitors and attract them to your blog. One way to do that is to locate other sites that cater to your interest and make comments in response to their own blog entries. Writing articles (or having them written) that deal with your specialized subject, and submitting them to article directories, is another way to make your site known and attract traffic. And, if you would rather spend money than time, there are also the paid advertising methods.

The satisfaction we can get from a blog is that it allows us to share our interests with others without worrying about the difficulties and uncertainties of getting published in traditional media. An additional benefit is that we can also use our blog to generate passive income-either supplemental or full-time.

William Terrell is a writer and internet marketer. To learn more about ecommerce and internet marketing, see his blog - ebusinesstipsblog.com

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