Succeeding in affiliate marketing does not need a degree in rocket science. It is easy but needs to be procedural.
Steps You Follow to succeed in Affiliate Marketing
Here are the steps that you need to take:
- Select a good niche that has an audience. A niche is a topic or subject matter that you blog about. Say for example that I am interested in pregnancy as my niche of choice. We have looked at tips on niche selection here.
2. Do your keyword research. We will be looking at that today using free tools.
3. Buy domain, host your blog, enter correct permalinks and get a custom made logo. You could also add your premium theme at this point. Personally though, I wait till I am making some good money from the site before I can invest in a good WordPress theme.
4. Create content and upload it making sure that it is well optimized and topically relevant.
5. Create backlinks and social profiles. There is however a group of people that do not create backlinks but still do well.
6. Wait for the traffic to stream in. As you wait, you could be creating more content and interlinking it with your previously uploaded articles. At this juncture, you will also be tracking everything using commercial SERP tools, Google analytics and Google Search Console.
7. Once the traffic starts streaming in, you could sign up to affiliate marketing programs and once approved, tweak things a little adding call to action buttons, comparison tables and featured products lists to push your audience to buy off your affiliate links.
8. If you are getting good traffic on your informative articles, you could go ahead and sign up for ad networks so that you can monetize your traffic with ad networks such as Google Adsense, Ezoic and Mediavine.
9. Make money. Better your sites by working on your conversion rate optimization. Rinse and repeat.
NB: The first two steps can make or break you.
Select a bad niche that has no audience and you are doomed.
Work on wrong keywords and you will never see a dollar stream into your bank account.
It is therefore important that niche selection and keyword research be done really well.
But what is a keyword?
A keyword is a phrase that your audience is typing on search engines so as to answer their needs.
Say for example that a pregnant woman is looking for free apps to track how her baby is growing. She might type ‘free pregnancy apps to track baby growth’ on Google search. This is a keyword.
What makes a good keyword?
My rule when hunting for keywords is get those that have high search volume but low competition. It is however never that easy.
Often keywords that have high search volume also have the highest competition. Why? Because the big boys are chasing for them. And since they have better authority than a newbie, you are better off throwing in the towel.
To fix this, we have the keyword golden ratio. Here you get low search volume keywords but at the same time with an incredibly low competition.
How to do keyword research with Ubersuggest
One of the free tools that you can use for your keyword research is Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest. The tool is able to show you the search volume of a keyword as well as the difficulty in ranking for it.
Ubersuggest is a freemium tool meaning that you can use some of its features without paying a dime. If however you want all its features like unlimited keyword searches per day, then you could pay up
I am still interested in the pregnancy niche and so, let us research for the keyword ‘free pregnancy apps to track baby growth‘ to see whether it has 1. A good search volume and 2. Low competition using the KGR strategy.
So I head over to Ubersuggest, type my keyword into the text box saying enter a domain or keyword and go on to hit the search button
Here are the results:
You will find that the keyword has 0 search results.
I therefore do not need to work with it.
But how about I look for ‘free pregnancy apps‘.
Here are the search results for that on Ubersuggest:
Awesome! It shows that it has some 320 search results.
But I still do need to check for its competition using the KGR technique.
For KGR technique, I need to do the computation below and if it is below 0.25 then, that is a low competition keyword.
So, I go to Google and search for the term ‘free pregnancy apps’ with the allintitle search tag so that whatever I search for on Google is “allintitle:free pregnancy apps” without the quotation marks.
It shows that we have 1250 search results that have ‘free pregnancy apps’
Doing the KGR calculation for this
We get a figure of 3.90625
That is way higher than 0.25.
So, our efforts were futile. Should we give up?
Nope.
If you search for the term, ‘free pregnancy apps’, you will see that at the bottom of the 10 Google search results on your first page, there are other searches related to free pregnancy apps.
One that captured my attention was ‘best pregnancy app for dads’. So, I want to examine whether it is a good keyword.
Again, I go back to Ubersuggest and see whether it has a search volume.
And yes, it does have a search volume of 210.
Let me see its allintitle search results
It has 6 allintitle search results.
Does if fit the KGR compliance calculation?
Yep. Because 6/210=0.028
So that makes a good keyword. If my niche was pregnancy, it would be one of the keywords that I would write content on.
If I do a Google search for ‘best pregnancy app for dads’ so as to see related search results, I get this
Maybe this other related searches could make some good keywords for my niche site on pregnancy.
So, I grab ‘pregnancy app to share with partner’, ‘best pregnancy app for couples’ and ‘pregnancy app for mom and dad’ to examine their search results and KGR compliance.
This has a search result of 30 . Lets see its allintitle search results
Woo hoo, it seems we have another keyword here. Because KGR=1/30=0.033
So, that’s another keyword, we could focus on in our pregnancy niche blog.
Lets go to another keyword
And the allintitle for this
This shows that there are 0 allintitle search results.
Wow, another good keyword there to blog about!
I will leave you to carry out the analysis for the last keyword ‘pregnancy app to share with partner’
Other Considerations to be made in Keyword Research
Though the KGR technique works (and I have indeed proved that it really does work), you need to observe the following.
- Search for each keyword. Look at who is ranking and check out their content for gaps. Make sure that your article is way better than theirs.
- See how many backlinks they have. If possible to replicate them, do it.
Lets examine the first example keyword on ‘best pregnancy apps for dad’.
A simple Google search for that keyword shows us that the site that scooped position one for that keyword is this:
Infact this webpage https://redtri.com/5-pregnancy-apps-every-dad-to-be-should-be-using/ scoops the featured snippet.
If we use the ahrefs free backlink checker tool to see the backlinks built for this site, we will see this:
19 backlinks! That is a lot, right?
But on further examination, you will find that some of the backlinks are somehow spammy and do not have that high authority.
The content is not that long form. If I were to compete with this web-page, I would make sure that I do more content than them.
At the moment, there are about 703 words in this post.
In the site, they have reviewed only 5 apps for dads. I would try to do more in my article on ‘best pregnancy app for dads’
I would also go ahead and write reviews of each of the apps and have those reviews linking back to my main content. That way, I would have better topical relevance.