4 Link Building Tips

Link building is one of the cornerstones of effective SEO. Google and other search engines give a lot of weight to links from authoritative sites as they recognize them as votes. The more links you get from authoritative sites, the higher your ranking.

Link building is usually a difficult task and you need to do it right to get ideal results. To help you out, here are tips that you need to put into consideration for you to build the right links:

Be Fun And Consistent

People don't like boring content; therefore, you should create content that has a sense of humor. When you decide to use humor, you should be consistent in your efforts. For example, you shouldn't create a humorous article today and then create a boring, corporate article tomorrow. By being consistent you will build a brand which will be of great benefit to your company.

Studies have shown that many people don't like reading; therefore, you should include as many visual aspects as possible. Some of the best visuals that you should go for are: videos, charts, and infographics.

Take Advantage Of Mentions From Reputable Brands

Have you been mentioned by reputable brands, but they haven't linked back to you? You should contact the brands and ask them for attribution. If you don't know the brands that have mentioned you, there are many online tools that you can use to help you with that. You can also do a random Google search and you will identify a number of mentions.

Take A Look At Your Competitors

You will definitely have competitors that are better than you. You should survey them and find out the sites that they are getting their links from. As rule of thumb you should follow their link building strategies as they are most definitely doing the right things.

Do Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is when you submit a blog post to another site, other than yours. This is a great way to build links, but you need to do it wisely. To increase your ranking, you should ensure that the site you are submitting the blog post to is reputable. You should also ensure that the site is within your niche.

Conclusion

Link building is a very effective in increasing your search results ranking when done right. To protect your site from getting penalized you should avoid bad link building strategies such as spamming.

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Three Killer Content Strategies for Building Affiliate Marketing Assets

Affiliate marketing isn’t that tough… if you’ve got attention and trust.

You can gain attention and trust through your relationship with people who agree to receive content from you. And you can gain attention from people via search engines because Google trusts your content.

Ideally, you want both.

Of course, there are ways to make money with affiliate marketing that don’t involve content at all. You can use search marketing to send traffic to pre-sell landing pages, and sometimes even directly to the merchant offer (see Affiliate Project X for those strategies).

Different strokes for different folks… but I like to build online assets. Building a subscriber list is a valuable asset, because you can market to these folks over the long-term with multiple offers if you preserve the relationship. Likewise, a site well-positioned for valuable keywords in search engines is an asset that can bring targeted traffic and revenue for years.

Let’s take a look at three affiliate marketing strategies that build assets and sustainable businesses. The first focuses on list building, the next on link building, and the last on both.

List Building with Paid Traffic

This is a classic online list-building strategy that still works wonders in email-friendly niches (and things are still more email friendly than some of you might think). The goal is to drive traffic to a landing page that persuades the visitor to opt-in to your newsletter, either with effective copy or a sample of the content. Targeted traffic should ideally come from search engine pay-per-click ads, but other advertising methods can work if they’re cost effective.

List building is all about opt-in conversion rates and the value of each subscriber over the life of the relationship. This is where valuable content comes into play… you’re not going to get someone to give up their primary email address unless you promise and deliver valuable content in return. And your lifelong customer value will be lower if you don’t maintain a good relationship with your list.

Here are 3 quick tips that make this affiliate marketing strategy work:

1. You can’t be shy about promoting, or else you won’t make any money. But you also need a balance between solid content and affiliate offers to maintain a positive relationship. Crafting content that offers independent value but also naturally leads to a product recommendation is one smart way to do it (more on this in the next installment of the series).
2. You’ll do better with Google Adwords by having a highquality score for your landing page. The best way to do that is to host the page on a domain with plenty of content and a decent amount of inbound links. So consider marrying this tactic with a blogging strategy that provides the content links you send to the list.
3. Beyond opt-in conversion rates, your main concern is recouping advertising expenses as soon as possible. One way to do that (and also make immediate profit) is to send the new subscriber to a highly-relevant affiliate offer as soon as they opt-in.

Link Building on Keyword Domains

This is primarily an SEO strategy that takes advantage of two key factors: Google’s current algorithmic preference for exact-match keyword domains, and social media link attraction strategies (aka link baiting). The idea is to build up link equity and trust in the domain itself and then rake in search traffic for lucrative keyword phrases.

Your first task is to invest in the right keyword-match domain. I say “invest” because if it’s an exact-match keyword phrase that pulls significant traffic, someone already owns it. And I say “right” keyword-match domain because these keywords must revolve around a topic that is supported by lucrative affiliate programs.

Next, you must come up with a social-media friendly content strategy. So while the main portion of your site is professionally designed to make authoritative affiliate offers (say for credit cards), your blog must contain a steady stream of Diggable andbookmarkable content. What you’re after are the links more than the direct traffic, because you want to build the overall authority of the domain from a search engine standpoint.

To pull this off, the content strategy is just as crucial as the domain name, and it has to be aimed squarely at what people have demonstrated they want. Social media news sites love big resource posts related to getting ahead and getting things done. So if you’re promoting a credit card site, you need to promote content with financial “life hacks” that show people how to get more for their money, eliminate revolving debt, and live life well for less.

Building Authority Sites

Building an authority site allows you to enjoy the benefits of subscribers and search traffic, and it can be done without advertising or expensive domain names. You’re more focused on building a real brand and a site that also ranks well in search engines. If you take the time to do it right, you have a truly defensible online business that can’t be crippled by an algorithmic alteration.

Authority sites come into being because they deliver great content that people have demonstrated they want, and they make money by covering topics that can be supported by (among other things) lucrative affiliate programs. Your overall strategy involves matching up desirable topics with profitable products and services.

You don’t need a huge audience to make good money from affiliate marketing, but you do need a strong relationship with the right people. Publishers often worry that they’ll lose part of their audience if they make affiliate offers, even if those offers are highly relevant.

My response to that is, unless you’re using the wrong tactics (which we’ll explore in the next installment), people who desert you for making relevant offers are not the right kind of people. Put another way, would you rather have an audience of 5,000 that makes you $10,000 a month, or an audience of 40,000 that makes you $3,000 a month?

Sure, you want subscribers… and when you dish out great content on a regular basis, you’ll have them. But when it comes to making money with affiliate marketing, what you need are buyers. People who won’t even consider buying are not good for your business.

Copywriting Tactics That Work for Affiliate Marketing

Up next, we’ll explore various copywriting techniques that can be used to maximize affiliate sales. The key is to match up the right copy approaches with your content model and audience.

Stay tuned…

http://www.copyblogger.com/affiliate-marketing-content/

How to Create Content and Build Links to Affiliate Sites

Reaching the top spots of search results for certain keywords is difficult for affiliate marketers given that the search engines are now favoring big brands to be more visible on SERPs. This made the notion that content marketing and link building for big brands is far different from what affiliate marketers should be doing in their marketing campaigns.

Though at some point, there are differences between a big brand’s site and an affiliate site like the product they’re promoting and the resources they utilize, it’s not quite as big as you think it was.  The approach use in link building and content marketing both for an affiliate site and a big brand’s site is almost the same.

In this post, I would not share to you how you could build links to both of the two sites but as you go further reading, you will start to notice that the your link building approach for big brands could actually be your techniques to get links for your affiliate site.

Core Principles of Affiliate Marketing

I’ve been working on affiliate sites (my clients’ sites) few months ago and I saw that there are still lacking with how they approach affiliate marketing in the real sense. It made their strategies difficult to climb at its peak of success given that most of their strategies are centered on their sites alone.

There are three core principles that made affiliate marketing more useful and meaningful to both affiliate marketers and its customers.

• Value. What makes your affiliate site more compelling to your customers is the value you’re providing to them. If they always see a product review or a product comparison page (which you should still be doing), customers won’t get enough value from it in terms of how the offering is applied to their everyday lives. Your site’s content should connect to your customers by not only giving them tools that could help their work become more efficient and effective but also give them a chance to live a meaningful life.

Pat Flynn is a good example of an affiliate marketer who helps his audience not only to earn money but also gives them inspirational insights on how they could strive more to become successful on their career. (sounds, drama ha!)

• Trust. It’s easy to buy a product from a person whom you’ve been built relationship with. The trust goes a long way. You’re building a solid army at the top of your marketing funnel. This army consists of people who trusted you the most and would help you earn more commissions by leveraging the content distribution of your site because you’ve invest time and money for them. Remember the law of reciprocity!

• Market Analysis. You can’t provide any value to your target audience and get them trust you if you don’t know their deepest needs. Identifying how you should be helping them with your site’s content assets could get your affiliate marketing system a lot easier.

Also, the feedbacks that came from seeking every discussion in community sites (e.g. forum) would give you a feel of how you could further improve your affiliate site, not only enhancing as a money-making site but make it worthy of being an authority website.

Keyword Research

Affiliates marketers should be focused on what people are searching for in a particular product. Those are the keywords that tend to have high conversions given that these terms incorporate the intention of the searchers (they’re ready to buy the product).

Google Suggest

The common way of searching for ready-to-buy keywords is Google Suggest. You can use phrases like, “where to buy” +“product” or  ”where can I buy” + “your keyword” or “I want to buy” + “your keyword” to get more ready-to-buy keywords. Use variations so you can get more list of this type of keywords.

Do not hit enter so you can find more specific keywords/products.

If you want to scale up your Google Suggest keyword research process then you can try Keyword Snatcher which can scrape lots of different sources quickly.

Keyword Snatcher uses the Google, eBay, Amazon, Bing and Yahoo search suggestions to create a combined list.

Resource pages

Use the common queries: inurl:links + “your keyword” or inurl:resources + “your keyword” to find product-based resource pages. List them down in a spreadsheet so you can go back to each of the URLs when you start building links.

Use the functionality , “Ctrl + F” to easily find keywords that are related to your product or industry.

Comments on product reviews and community sites

Product review sites and niche-specific community sites allow product reviews which are gold mines for finding conversion-focused keywords. Given that these terms are used by people when they comment on product-review sites, it will be more likely that they will also use those keywords when they search for product-related pages.

Content Marketing

There are still other content pieces that can be created aside from product review and product comparison pages. Here are some content marketing examples that you should try and would need resources but all the effort are worth it if they are done creatively:

Product videos

This is a common content you’ll see in any niche. But what does a product video content could provide to the target audience? Well, it brings people into action. When you’re showing to people how you use the product you’re promoting, they’ll be able to know how to use the product and understand both the advantages and disadvantages of using that product.

One common mistake of many affiliate marketers when they create a product-testimonial videos is that they’re not telling people the cons of the product which may lead to disappointment on the part of the consumer when he started to use it. It would affect their branding as affiliate marketers so they better to give to their audience everything they need to know about the product.

Don’t create mediocre video content. Add slide presentations to make it look professional just what people would do in a webinar. Outline what you will preach to your audience so the outcome/message would not be misleading for them.

Series posts

One of the effective ways to earn more commissions from your third-party products is to create solid series posts. This would help your prospect customers to walk through a step by step procedure on how you can actually create one thing (e.g. Triple X Niche Site Case Study).

Series posts are like resource pages that list down links with brief descriptions for each link. Unlike a resource page, series posts only link to internal pages since they’re giving people step by step posts about a particular topic. Internal linking of pages is strong in this type of post since one post could pass link value to another post. This made series posts beneficial on the site’s performance.

Additionally, series posts would spark relationships with your potential customers given that they would be able to learn more from your site other than the content pieces you published on a regular basis.

If you want to learn more about building relationships with your customers/influencers, you may want to check out this post on relationship building.

Instructographic

Step by step instructions could also be presented in a visual form. Instructographic is a good example of this kind of visual and had been very popular ever since given that this type of infographic allows people to read the text from top to bottom (reading step 1, step, and so on…).This would simplify the process of learning for your visitors since they would not only read but also see the image in the infograph that tells them how to use the product.

You can also do this for your affiliate marketing. However, you need to target a good keyword so you can get the most value out of your infographic. Most people would use the title of your visual as the anchor text when they used to link to your page. The more people are linking to you, the more link juice is passing to your page (whether it’s a do-follow or no-follow). And as these people would use your title as anchor texts for external linking, the likelihood of your visual to get on the top spots of search results for that particular keyword/title you’re targeting is high.

Getting started page

This page would help beginners in your industry understand what your page is all about. Not all of your visitors would want to read each and every post you published. They might only consume readings that are suitable for them and would help them learn about the basics.

This is another content that you shouldn’t miss in your content strategy given that this page would give your site a positive user experience (especially for beginners whom you need to teach where to click and what page to find in your site).

Income Reports

Transparency is what makes income reports valuable to the readers. The more you’re providing information of what products provide you the highest earnings, the more your potential customers are encouraged to check out reviews about those products. Maybe the reason would be the curiosity that came from listing your top third-party products. They would want to know why people would want to buy those products and how they would benefit them as buyers.

Interactive tools

There are several linkbaits that managed to earn links/shares in every type of industry. One good example of this is a toolbait where people could easily use the tool for FREE and make their work more efficient/effective than their normal tasks.

When you have this kind of linkable asset hosted on your site and you targeted that page for a highly-searchable keyword, the chances of ranking the page for that keyword is high given that links are easily obtained from authority sites and/or bloggers who could write reviews about the tool. Also, people would be happy to mention your tool in any kind of linking (newsletter link, editorial link, etc..) if they found it useful for their followers.

General resource page

You’ve seen this page all over the web. But what really a general resource page does is that it allows people to see a list of links where they could get a lot of value from (you don’t need to link to all of your product reviews). It would just give people a reason to leave your site since your resource page looks like a spammy one.

Use your resource page as your own advantage by linking out to another external resource pages. This is a good angle when you pitch the content publishers of those resource pages. If you linked to them, there is a high chance that they could link to you as well (aside from the relevancy factor).

Your own products

Once you see that you’re starting to already make your affiliate site as an authority brand in your industry, you probably don’t want to always link to external products. You could try creating your own products that would suit the needs of your target audience. If you’re good at promoting other people’s products, you should also be keen at advertising your own products as well.

Look at how Pat Flynn did in his niche sites (GreenExamAcademy and SecurityGuardTrainingHQ). He created products that people could remember not just the products themselves but the brands Pat wants to expose to his audience.

Venchito, How about for advertisements? What are the right spots to place my advertisements on the page?

Well, there are no definite answers. What people would always want to do is to test every advertisement they place on their page. Not all industries have the same type of audience that click only on the same spots of the page so you better have to test the CTRs of every advertisement (large or small).

You may want to check out this group interview by Ana Hoffman about banner advertising and what famous affiliate marketers consider the best spots of the page to put your ads.

Other Resources:

Creating and Developing Content Assets Like A Pro

Should Affiliate Marketers Do More Content Based Marketing?

Link Building

Just what I mentioned earlier, link building for an affiliate site is not different from how you approach link building for a big brand site. Here are a few common but still effective strategies to earn/build links to your page/site.

Internal linking

Related posts should be linked to each other. Vary your anchor texts to make your site looks natural in the eyes of your audience. You could also link to your money pages or pages that tend to convert well on your site (in terms of buying third-party products).

Instructional guest posts

This kind of post helped Pat Flynn got followers and potential customers for his Green Exam Academy given that the post provides step-by-step instruction on how to pass the LEED Green Associate exam. If you’re into that niche, you probably want to get yourself sharing the post to your peers/friends.

Creating high quality guest posts is a sure way to obtain leads/sales for your affiliate site. The moment those posts rank high on search results, continuous flow of potential customers to your site is possible.

Conversion-focused content distribution

Interviews, guest posts, collaborated industry guides, and other content distribution initiatives should be done with a mindset of conversions. You won’t be linking to your product link right from your guest posts but you could link to your conversion pages or your site’s inner pages that need boosting in terms of links (link to your posts that are not well performing on search results but have high quality content and have high conversion rates).

It’s also a good idea to look  for link building opportunities with testimonials too.

Natural linking

Aim to earn editorial links from news sites and authority blogs. This would help your affiliate site to build its authority and influence over its target audience. You could achieved this by producing high quality content assets that could earn links over time (linkbait) and focusing more on building relationships not just only links (because these are assets that are hard to replicate by your competitors).

Niche-specific web directories

There are several web directories that you may want to submit your site to their forms. Some folks are still arguing this topic if web directories still have link values. As long as people are looking for websites that people could benefit from, web directories would always still be valuable to users since directories list down sites according to different categories (which people would want to visit first when they’re new to the industry).

Nail it down! Submit your website to niche-specific web directories but please don’t focus your efforts on it. Diversity your resources to any link building tactics that work so you could test which one is the most effective in your industry.

Other Resources:

Link Building for Affiliates

SEO Experts Discuss Link Building for Affiliates

Conclusion:

The aforementioned tips about content creation and link building are proven to be effective nowadays. However, you have to test each tactic since not all industries have the same market system and same type of audience that affiliate marketers are trying to reach out.

http://tripleseo.com/link-building-affiliates/