Complete Affiliate Marketing Course for Beginners

Hey, it’s Sam Oh, and welcome to our affiliate marketing course for beginners. This course is made up of 16 lessons and will walk you through the process, tactics, and strategies to create your own revenue-generating affiliate site. There’s no fluff, no BS, and no sales pitches for a premium course. So, let’s get started with the first lesson, where we’ll talk about what affiliate marketing is and how it works. So, affiliate marketing is when you promote another company's products. And when someone makes a purchase because of your referral, you're compensated with a commission. Now, in order

for the affiliate company to attribute sales to the right person, the merchant usually uses a unique link that looks something like this, which is called an affiliate link. When a visitor clicks that link from your blog, website, or wherever, a cookie is stored on their device. An affiliate cookie does two main things. First, it helps the merchant attribute the sale back to the right person. And second, cookies usually hold an expiration date, meaning people don't need to immediately purchase the product after clicking your link. Let's run through an example, so everything is crystal clear. Let's

say a visitor comes to your post about gardening hoses and clicks on some of your affiliate links. This leads them to a product on Amazon. But wait... they have to go and pick up their kids from soccer practice. So they do that, have dinner, and then go back to Amazon.com in their web browser. They find the product again and then purchase it along with a game console controller. Because they clicked on your affiliate link, a cookie was stored on their device. And because Amazon has a 24-hour cookie duration, you would still get compensated a percentage

for both the garden hose and the console controller, even though you weren't promoting it. Now that we've covered the basics of what affiliate marketing is and how it works, let's talk about what you'll need to get started with affiliate marketing, which is coming up in the next lesson. In this lesson, we're going to talk about the two things you need to get started with affiliate marketing. The first is a property or platform. A platform is simply a place where you can recommend your links. So, that might be your own website or YouTube channel. Now, creating

either of these is pretty straightforward, so we won't go into things like how to make an affiliate website because this course is about the actual marketing of an affiliate site. The second thing you'll need is relevant and consistent traffic. Relevant traffic means that you're attracting visitors to your website who are interested in a topic and ideally want to make a purchase soon. One of the most important parts of getting relevant traffic is by creating content, which will house information as well as your affiliate links. So, that might be reviews of products, best-of comparison lists, and

how-to articles. We'll talk about how you can come up with these topics in a later module. As for getting consistent traffic, much of that will come down to where you get your traffic from. Three of the most popular channels are social media, ads, and search engines. Now, social traffic is typically inconsistent because social media networks are designed to surface new content. But many affiliate pages can actually be somewhat evergreen. So, if you don't have a significant following and brand, I wouldn't count on social media as a reliable primary source for traffic to an affiliate site.

Now, ads can be great because you can get highly relevant traffic fast. But you have to pay for every single person who clicks on your ad. So, unless you're a part of a very high-paying affiliate program and you have the expertise with ads and conversion rate optimization, I'd stay away from ads because you'll find yourself underwater fast. Now, search traffic is free, consistent, and passive. The way you get search traffic is through a marketing method called search engine optimization, or SEO. It's the primary traffic source I recommend, and it's what many multi-million dollar affiliate websites

rely on. We'll go much deeper into the tactical and strategic elements of creating content and getting relevant and consistent traffic in a later module, but first, you need to know whether the reward will be worth the effort. So, in the next lesson, we're going to talk about how to make money with affiliate marketing and how much you can actually make. In this lesson, I'll give you a high-level overview of how to make money with affiliate marketing. Now, as we discussed in the beginning of this module, when you join an affiliate program, you're able to generate

unique affiliate links. When someone clicks on one of your links and makes a purchase within a set period of time, you're paid a commission. So, very generally speaking, the more relevant traffic you get, the more clicks you'll get on your affiliate links. The more clicks you get, the more conversions, which equals more money in your pocket. And as long as your revenue exceeds your costs, you'll be profitable. Now, you might be wondering how much money you can make as an affiliate marketer. The simple answer to that is that there is no limit. For example, Pat

Flynn used to share his income reports and reported over $100,000 in affiliate commissions in December 2017. Ryan Robinson also shares his income reports, and in October 2019, he reported over $19,000 in affiliate revenue. Both of these gentlemen have done an excellent job building their brand, and I'm sure it’s taken a lot of hard work and time to get to where they are. But the reality is that your checks might look more like this—at least when you're first starting out. Now, if you want to make a sustainable income with affiliate marketing, you need to think of

your affiliate site as a business. It will be a grind, and there will be some disappointing times. But that's totally fine because when you adopt this business mindset, instead of seeing it as a way to "hopefully" make a few bucks here and there, you'll be setting yourself up for success. So, with the fundamentals in the books, let's move on to the next lesson where I'll give you a high-level overview of what it looks like to start and grow your first affiliate site. In this lesson, I'm going to give you a high-level blueprint to start your

first affiliate website. This lesson will give you a good idea of the skills, techniques, and strategies you'll learn throughout this course. But... First, let's recap some key principles we've covered in the previous three lessons, which are going to play into your strategy. So, at a high level, your affiliate site is going to be made up primarily of blog posts. The types of content you'll create will mostly be informational pieces, such as how-to articles and comparisons of different products. Within the content, you'll add your affiliate links to products you recommend. Now, when someone clicks on one

of these links and makes a purchase, you're going to be compensated by the affiliate merchant or partner. Not only will your content convert visitors into revenue, but it's going to attract visitors to your website, too. The marketing method we'll use to get traffic to your affiliate site is search engine optimization because the traffic is free, consistent, and passive. Best of all, SEO traffic will help you generate consistent revenue that compounds over time. There are actually quite a few steps to get to the point of generating consistent traffic and revenue. To give you a high-level overview,

we can break down the process into four macro steps: finding a niche, planning your website, building your website, and getting traffic to it. Let's go through these phases at a high level, starting with finding a niche. When you're starting an affiliate site, especially if you're relatively inexperienced, it's beneficial to start with a heavy focus on a niche. For example, it would probably be better to start a barbecue recipes site rather than a generic one on all types of recipes. Broader topics tend to have more competition, and as a result, it'll be tough for you to

get traffic to your site. Without traffic, there is no revenue. This is just one small example of the things you'll need to consider when choosing a niche. There are other things to evaluate, such as breadth of the topic, personal interest, commerciality, and more. We'll go through some techniques in Module 2 to do this, and I'll give you a checklist that will provide you with the best chance of creating a successful affiliate website. Alright, the next stage is planning your affiliate site. This is where you'll create the blueprint for your affiliate website. There are two things

in particular that you'll need to plan: 1. You'll want to plan your content strategy. This is a super-important step because it's foundational to both traffic and conversions. The majority of the planning will be done through an SEO technique called keyword research, which is a process to understand the queries people use to search for products, services, and general information in search engines. 2. The second thing you'll need to plan is your site or content structure. By structure, I'm mostly talking about grouping, which is done with internal links. We'll cover all of this in great detail in

Module 3. After you've finished planning your site, you'll need to build it out. This includes making a website and setting up tools for things like tracking. The most time-consuming and important part of this stage is creating content because content is what will help you rank in search engines and what your visitors will use to make buying decisions. We have an entire module dedicated to content creation, where we'll talk about the content creation process, the types of content you should create, and I'll also give you templates you can follow for various affiliate types of content. Getting

traffic through SEO is much more challenging than just writing good stuff. A key ingredient to ranking high in Google and attracting a ton of visitors to your site will be backlinks. We'll discuss some basic strategies that any beginner can implement, which should help power your pages to rank for their target queries and hopefully put some money in your pocket. Now that you have a high-level overview of what building your affiliate site will look like, let's get our hands dirty and move on to the second module, where we'll dig deep into finding niches, qualifying them, and

choosing one that's right for you. In this module, I'm going to show you how to find, choose, and qualify a niche that's right for you. Before we get to the techniques for finding and qualifying a niche, you need to know what to look for in a niche. There are four factors we'll focus on. The first factor is competition. Since we established in the first module that we'll be creating content and ranking it in search engines like Google, we'll look specifically at SEO and keyword competition. The main purpose of this is to get an idea of

whether we could somewhat easily rank for keywords that are relevant to an affiliate site. There are many aspects to assessing keyword competition, but at this stage, we want to gain a high-level overview of a niche. We'll use a simple three-step process to do this: Step 1: Generate keyword ideas. Step 2: Filter for low-difficulty keywords using a metric called "keyword difficulty." Step 3: Narrow in on affiliate keywords. To get started, search for a phrase related to your niche in a keyword research tool like Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer, then go to the Matching Terms report. To filter for

low-difficulty keywords, set a keyword difficulty filter to have a maximum value of something low like 10. Finally, filter for affiliate-type keywords. For example, keywords that include the word "best" tend to surface product roundups like "best golf clubs." Keywords that include the word "review" will usually surface product reviews like "Stix golf clubs review." To do that, hit the Include filter, choose the Any tab, and in the text field, add words like "best" and "review." When you hit the Show Results button, you'll see thousands of relevant, low-difficulty keywords that cumulatively have high search demand. Again, we've only

scratched the surface of keyword competition, and we'll go into more detail later. But if you want to learn more now, I recommend watching our full tutorial in our free SEO course for beginners on how to assess ranking difficulty for any keyword. I highly recommend watching the full course, as the concepts and techniques will be fully applicable for affiliate sites, too. Alright, the second factor is commerciality. Not all niches are created equal. Some have insane commercial value, which can lead to millions of dollars in monthly revenue, while others might only result in a few hundred dollars—if

even. Ideally, You want to choose a niche that has mid to high commercial value so that you don't reach a point where you'll max out on your profit potential. A few things you can do include market research on the niche, looking at commissions for relevant affiliate programs, and examining advertising costs to get an idea of how valuable certain queries are to different companies. We'll talk more about understanding commercial value in the next lessons. The third factor to consider is personal interest. Plain and simple, you don't have to be passionate about a niche to make a

successful affiliate site, but it doesn't mean you should choose a niche just for profit potential. From my experience, choosing a niche that you're at least somewhat interested in is the best route to go because people often quit their affiliate sites due to zero interest in the products they're recommending and in the content they're creating. Losing drive may be the #1 killer of affiliate sites. The fourth factor to consider is the breadth of the search market. Again, because we're going after search traffic, you want to get an understanding of how much traffic you can attract to

your content from search engines. Fortunately, keyword research tools make this easy for us because they provide search volumes, which refer to the number of monthly searches that occur for a query. SEO tools can also give you search traffic estimations for your competitors, which is even more helpful than search volumes, because what we want is traffic, not searches. By understanding the breadth of the search market, you're essentially getting an estimation of how many people are interested in the topics you'll be writing about, how much traffic you can get from these topics, and, in turn, how many

clicks you can get to your affiliate links, which should directly correlate with your revenue. As a general rule of thumb, you'll want to start off pretty niche because competition will likely be lower. However, your niche should be tied to a larger industry so you have the opportunity to niche out, giving you room to eventually reach more people. For example, you might start an affiliate site in the bed frames niche. After doing some quick keyword research for affiliate keywords, you'll see that there's a cumulative search volume of over 130,000 monthly searches in the U.S. just for

"bed frames." That’s not small at all, but it's also not huge. The great thing about bed frames is that it’s quite natural to niche out to topics like "mattresses," "pillows," "sheets," and even to the broader topic of "sleep." There's tons of room for growth. Now, what you're going to find as you're researching niches is that a lot of these factors are connected. For example, niches that are highly commercial will also have high competition, and niches with low competition will often be things you're not interested in. It's all about finding a balance among these criteria and

then committing to a niche. In fact, these four factors we've discussed will help you rate any niche so you can qualify one that's right for you. But before we get to qualifying, we need to start brainstorming a list of niches and doing our research. That’s what we’ll be discussing in the next lesson. Now, before we get into the research and qualification methods, let's quickly recap the four things you should look for in a niche. These are: the level of SEO competition, which will tell us who we'll be up against or even if we can compete;

commerciality, which will give us hints into how much money we can make; personal interest, which is important to most people because you want to actually enjoy what you're doing; and the breadth of the search market, which gives us an idea of the size of our addressable market—at least for the type of traffic we'll be targeting. These criteria will help us qualify a niche so we can make an informed decision when it comes time to choose one. Now, the process to find and qualify niches depends on where you are in your niche selection process, and you'll

probably fall into one of two buckets. Bucket #1: You already have a general idea of the niches that interest you. Bucket #2: You don't yet have a concrete idea, but you're open to any and all opportunities if they seem interesting. Let's go through the process for Bucket #1 first, and I'll show you how you can find information to check off items on your qualification checklist as we go. Alright, assuming you already have a general idea of niches that interest you, the first thing you'll want to do is write them down. For me, that would include

topics like golf, clean energy, and personal finance. Because these are all things that I'm interested in, we can add a plus to the "personal interest" qualification factor. For each of these topics, you'll want to brainstorm some broad topics and products related to that niche. For example, if we were to do this for the golf niche, I'd jot down ideas like "golf," "putter," "irons," and "wedge." With our subtopics in hand, the next thing you'll need to do is about three minutes of preliminary keyword research. You'll need a keyword research tool for this. I am using Ahrefs'

Keywords Explorer; all I'm going to do is paste my list of subtopics and run the search. Next, I'll go to the Matching Terms report to get a list of keyword ideas. Not all of these keywords will be relevant to an affiliate niche; we want to find topics where it's easy to naturally recommend different products. Fortunately, so-called "affiliate keywords" are easy to find using keyword modifiers, which are just add-ons to a base keyword. For example, when a query includes the word "best," it usually means you need to create a product roundup. Queries that contain the word

"vs" or "review" usually mean you'll need to write a review or comparison article to rank in Google. We'll get into the details in a later module, as this is more related to SEO, but we're not quite there yet. If you can't wait, you can watch our video on search intent in our free SEO course for beginners, which I'll link in the description. Now, because we know we can find "affiliate keywords" by looking for queries that... "Contain the words 'best,' 'vs,' or 'review,' we can take these words and paste them into the 'include' box in Keywords

Explorer. I'll also hit the 'Any word' tab because we want to see keywords that contain any of these keywords in addition to one of our searched topics. Hit 'Apply,' hit 'Show keywords,' and we now have a list of mostly commercial topics that would be valuable to a golf affiliate site. In fact, the fact that there are nearly two million monthly searches in Google from just the US alone tells us that the breadth of the search market is quite large. So we can add a plus to that factor on our qualification list. Now, some of these

are going to be quite competitive to rank for, but we can actually filter for low-difficulty keywords using the Keyword Difficulty filter. All you have to do is set the maximum KD value to something low, like 20. And right away, you'll see that there's still nearly a million monthly searches that happen for these low-competition keywords each month. So both SEO competition and search breadth seem good to me. Now, to get an idea of commercial value, you can scan through the CPC column to see how much advertisers are willing to pay for a click for a specific

query. But these values are only for one query, which isn't that helpful because you want to get a full picture of how valuable your traffic would be if you were to rank for a lot of these affiliate-type keywords. And the way to do that is to find a competing affiliate site that's already ranking for queries that you'd want to rank for and are not mega authorities in your niche because they'll be too tough to compete with, at least when you're first starting out. So to find these competing websites, you can use Ahrefs' Content Explorer. Just

search for something like 'best golf' and then set the search mode to a 'Title' search. And this will show us pages that contain the words 'best' and 'golf' in the title of the pages. Basically, it's going to show us other golf affiliate pages, many that are from dedicated golf affiliate sites. Now, because SEO competition is a big part of qualifying a niche, especially for beginners, I recommend setting a Domain Rating filter to have a low maximum value of something like 20. And again, Domain Rating is a metric that tries to measure a website's authority. Hit

'Show results,' and now you have a list of pages from low authority websites that are likely posting affiliate content on golf products. But we don't need to see pages at this point. We want to know more about how websites are performing as a whole. To view the top websites, just click the 'Websites' tab. And now you can see a list of low-authority websites, the amount of total organic traffic they get, and their traffic values. Now, traffic value tells us how much it would cost to pay for this amount of organic traffic if you were to

buy it from Google Ads. And the reason why it's a decent proxy to understanding a site's commercial value is because if advertisers are willing to pay this much money to get this traffic, then it's likely valuable. Now, it's important to note that when you're looking at these metrics, you need to make sure that the sites you're analyzing are actually going to be competing niche affiliate sites. Just scan the domain names, and if it sounds like it might be a niche blog, click it to investigate the types of content they create. So for this site, it's

clear that it's an affiliate website, as the content is primarily based around reviews and product round-ups. Now, going back to Content Explorer, you'll see that the site gets a ton of monthly search traffic and has a traffic value of around $70,000/month, while being a low-authority site. Now, to be clear, it doesn't mean that this site makes $70,000/month, but it tells us that the topics the site ranks for have clear commercial value. So let's add a plus to that qualification factor. Now, it's important to note that you shouldn't use traffic value as the only means to

understand commercial value. One key component that we didn't talk about here are the affiliate programs that these sites are using. And I'll show you how to find affiliate programs for a niche in the next video, so stay tuned for that. Alright, now let's talk about finding and qualifying niches if you're not quite sure of the topics you want to cover. There are two effective ways to find niches. The first is to look at the sites that are linking to a big affiliate program like Amazon. For example, that golf affiliate site we found earlier is an

Amazon affiliate. And if we hover over one of the affiliate links, you'll see that the link points to a page on the domain amzn.to. This is Amazon's shortened URL. So with that domain in hand, let's go to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, type in the URL amzn.to, and run the search. Next, head on over to the Backlinks report, which is going to show us all pages that link to this website. Now, because SEO competition and breadth of the search market are important considerations when choosing a niche, we can set some filters to narrow down the results, seeing

as amzn.to has nearly 50 million links. First, I'll choose 'One page per domain' because we're interested in website data and not so much page-level data at this point. And then I'll set the Domain Rating filter to a maximum of 20 to filter for low-authority websites. Next, I'll set the Domain Traffic filter to have a minimum value of 10,000, which will help us understand breadth to a certain extent. Finally, I'll click on 'More filters' and choose 'Language.' And I'll set this to English. All looks good, so let's hit 'Show results.' Now it's just a matter of

skimming through the referring page column and using some common sense to infer what the site may be about. For example, this one is a stock checker, this one is on headphone reviews, and this one is on knives. The knives one is actually pretty interesting because this website only has a Domain Rating of 6 and gets around 100,000 monthly search visits from Google each month. So this tells us that SEO competition is likely weak for this niche, and the breadth of the search." Market, even for low-difficulty keywords, will be decent. So let's add a plus to

those factors. Now, to get an understanding of commerciality, we can look to the traffic value for this site. To do that, I'll just run a new domain search in Site Explorer for nothingbutknives.com. As you can see, the site has a monthly traffic value of around $50,000, which is pretty impressive for such a low-authority site. Now, as for personal interest, that's up to you. Alright, the second way to find niches is to search for "best of" posts in Content Explorer. To do that, just search for "best" in the search box and set it to a Title

search. Next, we'll set a DR filter to have a maximum value of 20. Just like we did before, I'll set a website traffic filter to have a minimum value of 10,000. We'll set the Language filter to English and then hit Show results. This is basically showing us pages from websites that get a lot of traffic, are low-authority, and are in English. Now, if you want the summarized version, you can hit the Websites tab to see the top 100 websites in Content Explorer's search results based on their organic traffic. Then, just skim through the domain names

to see if there are any obvious niche sites that you might be interested in exploring. For example, this site looks like it's on work boots, which gets a ton of search traffic, has high traffic value, and has very low website authority. There's a triple plus for our work boots niche. For good measure, I'll click through to the site, and yes, it is an affiliate site all about work boots. Now, that is a niche I would have never thought of. If you want a bigger list to skim through, go back to the pages tab and hit

the "One page per domain" filter. Finally, hit the "Exclude homepages" filter, and you'll have tons of results you can look through along with their SEO metrics to help qualify niches. The qualification methods we went through are just quick checks, especially for the commerciality factor. The affiliate programs associated with the niche will often determine the potential revenue you can generate because different programs offer different commissions. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you the best affiliate programs to join and how you can find niche affiliate programs that are worth exploring. So let's kick things off

with possibly the most popular affiliate program, and that's Amazon Associates. This is Amazon's affiliate program. They have millions of products you can promote, and it's probably the most trusted e-commerce brand in the world. So, in my opinion, Amazon Associates is the best catchall affiliate program in the world. Now, their payouts differ based on the category of the product, and commissions can range from 1% to 20% of the sale price. Let's look through the pros and cons of this program, starting with the pros. We already touched on one, and that's the fact that you have a

huge inventory of products to choose from. Another pro is that you can monetize international traffic using their OneLink feature. Basically, you create a single affiliate link for a product, and depending on the location of that visitor, they'll be sent to their local Amazon site. For example, let's say a person from the US clicks your affiliate link. They'll be directed to the Amazon.com product page. But if someone from Canada or the UK clicks that same link, they'll be redirected to the amazon.ca or amazon.co.uk product pages, assuming they exist. The final pro is that Amazon's conversion rate

is extremely high. Because it's Amazon and most people, at least in the US, have an Amazon account, there's very little friction from product page to checkout. And remember, as an affiliate, you don't get paid for clicks. You only get paid when the merchant gets paid. Now, the main con with Amazon's affiliate program is that the commissions are generally pretty low. For many niches, there are other programs that offer better payouts. We'll get into finding these affiliate programs in a bit. The next affiliate program is Target. Target is a big-box store in the United States and

has a huge inventory of products, much like Amazon. Their payout is pretty low at "up to 8%." But one differentiator from Amazon is that Target offers a 7-day cookie life, while Amazon only has a 24-hour cookie. This means that if someone clicks your Target affiliate link and makes any purchase within 7 days, you'll be paid a commission. Whereas, with Amazon, the person who clicks the link needs to make a purchase within 24 hours. The next affiliate program is Commission Junction. Actually, CJ is an affiliate network. Basically, companies that want to start an affiliate program will

sign up with Commission Junction, and they'll handle all the tracking and software-related things. The pros of CJ are that you get access to a directory of thousands of affiliate programs. They also share stats like the average earnings per click over 7 and 30-day time periods, as well as the commission rates. Another pro is that, unlike Amazon, you're not limited to physical products or Amazon subscriptions. There are companies that offer intangible products, like Booking.com, which handles travel bookings, and software companies like GetResponse, which offers email marketing services. A downside to CJ is that you have to

actually apply for each program and get accepted. Most of these affiliate merchants, from my experience, are much pickier in who they allow to become an affiliate compared to Amazon. So, while it doesn't hurt to create a CJ account and apply for these programs, you may initially get rejected until you reach a certain amount of consistent traffic. But there shouldn't be anything to worry about because if you follow the steps in this course, you should be able to do that with SEO, which we'll get into in another module. Alright, the next affiliate program is ShareASale. Actually,

this is also an affiliate network. I won't bother talking much about ShareASale because it's pretty much the exact same as Commission Junction, but there are different merchants that use it. For example, Etsy and Weebly both use ShareASale to run their affiliate programs. Now that we've covered some of the more general affiliate programs and networks, let's talk about how you can find niche affiliate programs that are likely high performers in your niche. And it's quite simple. You just need to look. At which affiliate programs your competitors frequently link to? After all, if a lot of your

competitors are using a specific affiliate program, then chances are it converts and/or pays out well. And there are two ways to do this: The first is to go to Google and search for something like "best [product name]." For example, in the previous lesson, we found an affiliate site about knives. So I might search for "best knives for camping." Then you can click on a few of the articles to open them in new tabs. All you have to do now is hover over their affiliate links to see who they link to. Now, this is functional, but

it's not exactly efficient. A better way is to use a free feature in Ahrefs' SEO toolbar. Just click on the icon, choose the Links tab, and select "External" from the dropdown to see all external links on that page. As you can see, this page only seems to link to Amazon's affiliate program. Now, if we look at the next ranking page, you'll see that they link to Amazon and another one called "Avantlink," which is an affiliate network that companies like REI and Campsaver use. To research the programs further, you'd need to sign up for an account

at Avantlink and check out the metrics they provide on these programs. Now, the downside to this method is that we're looking at just one page, and this page happens to be about knives for camping. But a site about knives would probably talk about kitchen knives too, and you don't buy kitchen knives at a camping store. So, a much better way to get a holistic view of all affiliate programs in a niche is to see who your competitors link to most across their entire site. For example, in the last lesson on finding niches, we found this

niche site about knives. According to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, it gets a ton of search traffic, which is quite valuable, as you can see from their monthly traffic value. To find the affiliate merchants that this knife site links to, you just have to go to the Linked Domains report in Site Explorer, which shows you all the websites that this site links to. Just sort the table by the "Links to Target" column to see who this site links to most. Now, all you have to do is skim the domain names to see if they look like they

would lead to an affiliate program or network. We already know that all of the Amazon links will be affiliate links. Then you'll see this shortened URL shrsl.com, which this site links to hundreds of times. This is Shareasale's shortened URL for affiliate links. Now, if we click on the number for this row and click one of the affiliate links, you'll see it leads to a knife company called BladeHQ. If we look up that site in Shareasale, you can see the commission amount and earnings per click metric. Scrolling further through the list, you'll see that this affiliate

site also links to avantlink.com. If we expand these links in Ahrefs and click one of those affiliate links, you'll see it sends us to another site called Buck Knives. Then it's just a matter of researching the details of their affiliate program. If you rinse and repeat these steps for a few popular niche affiliate sites, you should be able to find some common programs, which will be helpful when choosing the best affiliate program for your site. Your competitors have basically done the research and testing for you. Now, when you're choosing an affiliate program, you'll want to

consider two additional things. The first is product and brand reputation. Beginners often choose programs that have the biggest payout, but the reason why a lot of affiliate programs offer huge payouts is that their product is inferior to many of their competitors' products. Remember, after someone clicks your affiliate link, they have to make a purchase in order for you to get compensated. Also, people who purchase poorer quality products are more likely to return them. When refunds from your referred sales happen, you lose your commission too. By recommending good quality products from solid and well-known brands, you'll

help your visitors and your bank account. Quick sidenote: this is actually why I don't recommend using Clickbank as an affiliate program, as I've never once seen a quality product or brand run their affiliate program there. Alright, the second thing to consider is conversion rate. Most affiliate programs won't list conversion rates for their product and landing pages, but if you happen to be working with an affiliate manager in one of your programs, it doesn't hurt to ask. To illustrate the importance of conversion rate, let's run through an example for the knives niche. According to Amazon's commission

table, sports and outdoor goods pay out 3% of the sale, and most camping knives will fall into this category. But that other affiliate program we found on Shareasale, BladeHQ, pays out 5%. Let's say you get 100 clicks to your affiliate links, and the average order value is $100. If 7% of those clicks convert on Amazon and only 3% of clicks convert on BladeHQ, then that means your commissions from Amazon would be $21, while your commissions from BladeHQ would be $15. Despite the fact that BladeHQ has a bigger payout, Amazon would be the affiliate program to

go with in this scenario. Now, this example is a bit oversimplified because you need to consider things like traffic source, your content, and the intent of the visitors. These are all things we're going to cover over the next three modules. In fact, the next module is all about planning your affiliate site's strategy, which is going to give you a blueprint to follow for the rest of this course. In this module, we're going to do some planning for your affiliate marketing site. Before we work on the actual tasks involved in site planning, it's important we get

on the same page and go over the affiliate marketing strategy we'll be using for our site. We'll basically be expanding on the affiliate blueprint that was covered in lesson 1.4. As a quick refresher, we want to create an affiliate site that'll generate consistent revenue. To do that, we'll need consistent traffic to pages that organically recommend affiliate products. The best way to get that traffic is through a marketing technique called SEO, or search engine optimization, because traffic is free, passive, and consistent. Now, the general process to get SEO traffic will follow... Three basic steps. Step 1

is to do affiliate keyword research, which is the process of finding topics suitable for an affiliate site that people search for month after month. Step 2 is to create content that people want to see when searching for these products. And step 3 is to get backlinks to these pages, which will help you rank high in Google search and get that consistent traffic to your pages, which again, can allow you to build that consistent revenue. Now, these are the technical and creative things we'll have to do to get to our end result. But what we haven't

really talked about yet is what the overall strategy looks like from a bird's-eye view. The basic idea is to choose a niche that has plenty of things to talk about and then to choose a sub-niche from that niche. For example, you might choose golf as your main niche and then "putting" as your sub-niche. Then you'd cover absolutely everything in the putting category before moving on to the next sub-niche. Let's dive deeper into an example to help you visualize what this strategy looks like. So let's say your niche is fitness equipment and your sub-niche is dumbbells.

That means you're going to cover everything under the topic of dumbbells. As an example, you might create equipment roundups on "the best adjustable dumbbells," "the best dumbbell sets," and "the best dumbbells for home." Now, let's zoom into adjustable dumbbells. So let's say you cover five different adjustable dumbbells in your post, like these ones. Well, to cover this in full, you now have five new reviews to write up. Now, let's say you also want to write up content on dumbbell exercises. Well, you can now write about dumbbell exercises for chest, biceps, triceps, back, and legs. Let's

zoom in on dumbbell exercises for biceps. This would be a listicle that talks about all sorts of great exercises for your biceps. And assuming you cover these bicep exercises, you have a bunch more posts you can create. Now, assuming your content is great, what you're essentially doing is positioning your site to be the authority on dumbbells in the eyes of visitors, which will help with conversions and search engines, ultimately leading to more traffic. Now, assuming you get through the hundreds or maybe even thousands of dumbbell-related content, this is where you'd revisit your main niche and

then choose another sub-niche—let's go with barbells. Then you'd become the authority on barbells and do the exact same thing. And what you're essentially doing here is creating a massive web of related content that's going to lay the foundation for not just an authoritative affiliate site, but a business that has the potential to go beyond affiliate marketing. Now, I need to pump the brakes here because before we can even think of becoming this mega authority site, we need to start from square one and find some topics that would be appropriate for our site. So throughout the

rest of this module, I'm actually going to do all of the work with you to plan for this hypothetical affiliate site. And in the next lesson, we're going to go up here to step 1, which is to do affiliate keyword research for your niche. Now, keyword research is the first step in our flowchart in our journey to a consistent income through an affiliate site. And it's basically going to set the foundation for the topics you'll create content on. So simply put, keyword research is the process of finding search queries people use when looking for products,

services, or general information. Now, because we won't be selling products or services directly to consumers with an affiliate site, we ideally want to find topics where it's easy to organically recommend products. But before we get into the techniques to find topics, it's important that we talk about one foundational thing that's massively important in SEO. And that's search intent. Search intent tells us about the purpose of a searcher's query. And by understanding the intent of a query, you'll be able to determine whether you can easily recommend products or not. For example, if someone searches for "best

protein powder," chances are, they're in the market to purchase a product, but they want to weigh out the pros and cons, look at different brands, and assess variables like price, quality, and so on. As a result, you actually need to recommend products, and the people who read this article may very well click affiliate links to the products and make a purchase. Whereas a topic like "what is protein powder" is more informational in nature. Based on the keyword alone, we don't know whether the searcher is writing a research paper, exploring the world of supplements, or wants

to know which type of protein powder to buy. Simply put, this topic probably wouldn't generate many clicks to protein powders because the majority of people aren't in the market to buy any. So, adding product recommendations would probably be unnatural. Now, in general, there are four types of so-called affiliate keywords we'll want to go after. And these are: general comparisons, branded comparisons, product reviews, and T&A keywords. Now, before we get into how you can find these types of keywords, I'm going to choose a niche and do keyword research with you. So, to set some context, I'm

choosing baby products as my main niche. And as I taught in the previous lesson, I'm going to choose a sub-niche to start. Let's go with car seats. Alright, so let's talk about the four different types of affiliate keywords, how they fit into an affiliate marketing site, and how you can find them for your site. The first type of keywords are general comparisons. These are your typical "best [product name]" keywords. For example, "best car seats," "best booster seats," "best strollers," etc. It's super easy to recommend products in posts targeting these keywords because searchers are looking for

product comparisons. After all, the keyword "best" implies that a comparison needs to be made. On top of that, people searching for these "best product name" keywords are likely in the market to purchase something in the near future. They just don't know which product. So, to find these keywords, you'll need a keyword research tool. And I'll be using Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. Alternatively, you can follow along with this tutorial using Ahrefs' free keyword generator. To get started, I'll search for a few broad queries related to my sub-niche, like "car seat," "car seats," "booster seat," and "booster seats."

Let's run the search. Next, I'll head on over to the Matching Terms report to generate keyword ideas. Now, since we're looking for general comparison keywords, I'll click the "include" filter. and type in "best." Apply the filter, and you'll see over 18,000 keyword ideas that include at least one of our seeds and the word "best." Now, since there's probably too many keywords to filter through manually, let's narrow this list down to just low-competition topics to get started. And to do that, we'll set a maximum keyword difficulty filter to something low, like 20. There are some great

topics here worth considering, like "best rotating car seat" and "best car seats" for various different ages. From here, you can jot down some keyword ideas that interest you, or if you have an Ahrefs account, you can actually add these to a keyword list, which is what I'll do. Now, if you don't have an Ahrefs account, you can still use our free keyword generator and search for something like "best product name." You'll have limited data, but it should be good enough to set you off on the right track. Now, a quick but important sidenote: you shouldn't

just go after keywords with low keyword difficulty scores. Higher competition often indicates that there's more popularity and/or commerciality to a topic. For example, the query "best car seat" is significantly more competitive than the ones we were looking at. According to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer, the top-ranking page for this query gets around 38,000 monthly organic visits from the US alone. So, these types of keywords are worth adding to your keyword list too to tackle at a later time when your site is a bit more established. Alright, the next type of keywords are branded comparisons. These are keywords

where a searcher wants to compare the differences between two branded products. For example, that might be "Chicco car seat vs Graco." These types of keywords usually have lower search demand, but they typically convert better than general comparison keywords because the searcher has likely narrowed down their purchasing decision to a few key products. The easiest way to find these keywords is to create a list of brands or products in the same category. So, assuming I wanted to find branded car seat comparison keywords, I could search for a bunch of car seat brands and run the search.

Next, I'll go to the matching terms report. Again, I'll go to the Include search box, and this time, I'll type in "vs," and I'll also add the phrase "car seat," since these companies make all sorts of baby products. Apply the filter, and we now have a list of keywords that would work perfectly for branded comparison blog posts. Now, if we do the same thing but instead of brands as our seeds we use a list of specific car seat models, you'll find even more great branded comparison keywords to add to your list. Now, if you don't

have an Ahrefs account, you can do something similar with our free keyword generator tool. Just type in something like "product name vs" and run the search. Jot down any keywords that are of interest to you, then rinse and repeat for the next brand. Alright, the next type of keywords are detailed product reviews. These queries will typically follow the format "product name review." People who search for queries like this are likely very close to making a purchase. They've researched multiple products, something caught their attention about a specific model, and now they want a more in-depth review

on it. Now, just like the branded comparison keywords, search volumes will be lackluster, to say the least. So, if you're going to buy these products and actually review them, choosing products that people are actually searching for may be a smart way to do it. A simple way to find brands and models worth reviewing is to go to a popular e-commerce site and look through the different categories and brand names in their navigation. So, right now, I'm on buybuybaby.com, and I'm looking at their "shop all car seats" page. Now, if I click on the dropdown for

Brand, you'll see a list of brand names that you can jot down. I've already gone ahead and done that and saved a list to my clipboard, so I'll paste a bunch of these into Keywords Explorer and run the search. Let's head over to the matching terms report. Again, we'll hit the Include filter, but this time, we'll search for the word "review" and add an asterisk at the end, which will act as a wildcard. Just like that, we know exactly which brands we'd want to review and some specific models for which we now have keyword metrics.

So, take some time to add more keywords to your keyword list, and when you're ready, we'll move on to the last type of keyword, which are T&A keywords, which stands for "Trust and Authority." Now, in order to rank your pages, you need to have some kind of page-level and website authority, meaning you need backlinks. But since all of the keyword types we've discussed so far are commercial in nature, it'll be tougher to get links to these pages. I mean, would you rather link to a post about 10 random car seats or one about car seat

safety? Probably the latter, right, seeing as it's non-commercial and provides more objective value for your audience. Now, while these keywords may not directly contribute to your revenue, they'll still serve two important purposes: #1. You'll build trust with your audience since you're creating helpful content. And #2. You'll build authority through links – hence, "trust and authority." To find these keywords, let's search for a few seeds that are related to car seats like "car seat," "car seats," and "booster seat." Next, I'll go to the matching terms report and then I'll hit the Questions tab since we're looking

for informational topics. Let's set a keyword difficulty filter to a max value of 20, and we now have a list of relatively easy-to-rank-for keywords. So, I'll add some to my list until I'm satisfied, and you should too. Now, if you don't have an Ahrefs account, you can use our free keyword generator. Just search for a seed keyword and then hit the Questions tab. Then you can rinse and repeat to build out your keyword list. Alright, so by now, you should have a nice list of keywords from each of the four affiliate keyword categories: general comparisons,

branded comparisons, product reviews, and T&A keywords. But all we have at this point is a brainstormed list of topics. There's no real order or structure to the content, which is important in SEO as it helps to build. out that huge web of related content that I showed you earlier. So, in the next lesson, we'll take your list of topics and actually plan out specific content pieces we'll need to create and start building out what SEOs often call "topical authority." In this lesson, I'm going to walk you through a simple affiliate marketing content strategy. More specifically,

we'll be taking the list of topics from your keyword research and organizing them into logical structures that'll help grow your SEO traffic to your affiliate site. Now, as I mentioned in lesson 3.1, we want to create a massive web of related content, covering all of the important topics in our niche. And the main benefit here is that all of these relevant pages will be connected and essentially work together to build what SEOs loosely call "topical authority." If we had to define topical authority, it's when a website becomes an authoritative source on a given topic in

the eyes of visitors and search engines. Now, the two parts that make up so-called "topical authority" are topical coverage, meaning content, and backlinks. We'll talk about the latter a bit later because I want to illustrate the importance of topical coverage. Let's say you have a site in the golf niche. If you publish a post on the best golf clubs, no one's going to think: "Oh yeah…they're the authority" in golf, or golf clubs, or golf equipment. To become the go-to place for information on golf, you'd need to cover topics like "best golf balls," "best putters," "best

golf shoes," "how to hit a driver 300 yards," "what is a handicap in golf," and I could go on for hours. Plus, the content would actually need to be good. Now, even this example hardly illustrates becoming an authority in the golf niche because there's just so many things you'd need to cover, as golf is a huge topic. This is why focusing on a sub-niche is a much better approach to building topical authority. This is the way we chose a niche in module 2. So, you'd cover topics like: "best golf balls," "Pro V1 golf ball review,"

"Pro V1X golf ball review," "TaylorMade TP5 review," "how many dimples are on a golf ball," "how to properly clean golf balls," "which golf ball generates the most spin," "best golf balls for high handicappers," and add another hundred or so topics. Assuming your content is of high quality, over time, people will begin to see you as an expert in your niche, and because of that, they'll be more likely to link to your web pages because it's well-trusted. Again, I'm barely scratching the surface, but my point should be clear: building so-called topical authority a) requires extensive topical

coverage; b) is much more achievable in a sub-niche because of a); and c) building it is a win-win for visitors and website owners. For visitors, they'll find a plethora of resources to dig through on your site. And for website owners, you'll likely have better potential to rank for topically related keywords, assuming your content gets linked to. I'll expand on why topical authority may help your rankings later in this lesson. Now, if you've been building your site with me throughout this course, then you should have narrowed in on a sub-niche and done all your keyword research

for that sub-niche. I chose baby products as my main niche and car seats as my sub-niche. In total, I generated a list of 239 car seat-related keywords that I also categorized into the four different "types" of affiliate keywords: General Comparisons, Branded Comparisons, Product Reviews, and T&A Keywords. The only major thing that's left to do in this planning stage is to map related topics together so we can start building our web of related content. We'll be using our keyword lists to do this. Now, if you have no clue what I'm talking about, then I highly recommend

going back to lesson 3.2, where I walked you through how to do keyword research for affiliate marketing sites. But if you're all caught up, then let's talk about perhaps the most efficient way to map affiliate topics. And that's by creating product clusters. A product cluster is a simple content structure that connects a general comparison post with multiple product review posts. Let's look at what this might look like for my car seat site. First, I'll choose a general comparison topic from my list, like "best car seat for 3-year-olds." This topic will sit at the top of

our pyramid. Because general comparison topics will require product comparisons and recommendations, we'll need to choose some car seats to compare in our post. In my opinion, the best place to start is to draw from real-life experiences. For example, I actually own nine car seats, so it's fair to say that I've done my share of research and real-life testing. I also have a couple of kids that are now older than three, so I know that the types of car seats we'll be covering are "convertible car seats." One of our car seats is the Diono Radian 3RXT,

which I really like, so I'll definitely include it in my round-up. Visually speaking, we would just add a branch under our main topic: "best car seat for 3-year-olds" and call it "Diono Radian 3RXT review." Another car seat we have is the Britax Marathon, which I also like and would recommend. So let's add another branch. I'm not particularly happy with some of the other convertible car seats I've bought, so let's look at our product review keywords to see which other car seats we could potentially add. I've already gone ahead and looked at product specs, reviews, and

installation videos for 14 different convertible car seats. After researching, I've narrowed down our list of "best car seats for 3-year-olds" to a total of six car seats. The two that I have hands-on experience with are the Britax One4Life, Graco Extend2Fit, Graco 4Ever DLX, and the Safety 1st Go and Grow. So, let's add branches to our flow chart for each of these models. To review, we know we're going to create a post on the best car seats for 3-year-olds; plus, we're going to write six different product reviews for each model in our general comparison post, like

"Britax One4Life review," "Graco Extend2Fit review," and so on. Now, from an on-page perspective, we can simply "connect" these pages by using an internal link from our general comparison post to our product reviews. It would also make sense to link from our... product reviews to our general comparison post. We now have a product cluster. Now, the reason why I call product clusters efficient is because, as your library of product reviews gets bigger, creating content for general comparisons gets faster and easier. For example, when we go to create a post on, let's say, "the best convertible car

seats for small cars," we've already covered the Diono Radian 3RXT review in our best car seat for 3-year olds post. And that model just happens to be the go-to car seat for small cars. Now, branded comparisons also fit seamlessly into product clusters. Looking at our list of branded comparison keywords, you'll see that there's this topic on "Graco Extend2Fit vs 4Ever." Well, we just wrote two product reviews for these, so writing a branded comparison post would be super-easy. And, of course, we could easily add internal links to the product reviews, whether they're one-way or reciprocal, in

a very organic way. Alright, the last type of keywords on our list are T&A keywords, which again stands for trust and authority. And these are mostly informational topics. Now, these topics may not directly impact your revenue, but they serve important purposes: they can help you earn more backlinks, reach larger audiences, and build trust and authority. Now, unlike product clusters, informational posts on affiliate sites typically have less of a pyramid-type structure to them. For example, if you have four pages on T&A topics, they won't necessarily link together, creating a perfect pyramid. Internal linking on these pages

will mostly come down to "do it if and when it makes sense." For example, let's say we're writing a post on car seat safety. It would be perfectly natural to link to another page on "when car seats expire," "when you should turn the car seat around from rear to forward facing," and "requirements to change to a booster seat." These are all related to car seat safety, and they all happen to be topics on our T&A keyword list. Now, it would also make perfect sense to link from our post on "when do car seats expire" to

our commercial page on "best car seats" because people reading that post may need to buy a new one and could probably use some help narrowing their search to an appropriate product. As you can see, creating these structures and mapping content isn't so much about strict adherence as it is about creating a strong foundation for your content SEO. When you have a big list of topics and you prioritize based on search volumes or keyword difficulty scores, it's tough to visualize the relationships between your content. And what happens more often than not is that you haphazardly do

internal linking, creating poor structure, which just makes ranking your pages harder than it has to be. But by having a solid internal linking plan, you're going to do yourself a couple of favors that should ultimately help you rank higher in Google and get more free traffic to your pages. #1. You'll create a better user experience for your visitors by providing them with relevant resources that may be helpful to them. And #2. You'll facilitate the flow of PageRank, which will help your pages rank higher in Google. And without getting too technical, that just means that when

one of your pages gets backlinks, the pages that it links to will also benefit from that backlink—although to a lesser degree. Alright, so now that we've mapped out our content, we'll need to actually build out our site. And I won't go into how to create a WordPress blog or suggest specific themes because a lot of that is entirely up to your preferences. But I do want to talk about two super-important things related to site creation. And these are your homepage's content and your website's navigation menu. And that's coming up in the next lesson. Alright, so

let's talk about homepages first, and we'll get to navigation after. So, very generally speaking, a homepage serves three main purposes regardless of the type of website. #1. It should communicate what your brand or company does. #2. It should lead people towards a conversion goal. And #3. It can be used to help rank important pages higher in Google. Now, the first purpose is pretty straightforward. But the second and third points may be tougher to understand, especially in the context of an affiliate marketing site. So let's expand. A conversion for an affiliate marketing site happens when someone

clicks your affiliate link and buys something from the affiliate merchant. Now, the thing is, you don't have any control over the merchant's site. But what is in your control, to a certain extent, is getting people to click your affiliate links in your content. Therefore, leading people towards a conversion goal for an affiliate site just means getting visitors to engage with your content that naturally recommends affiliate products. The actual conversion that happens on your website will be when a visitor clicks one of your affiliate links. Now, as for my third point on using your homepage to

rank important pages higher in Google, this comes down to what we discussed in the previous lesson. When you link to pages on your site with internal links, you're facilitating the flow of something called "PageRank." Basically, when the linking page gets backlinks, it's passing so-called "authority" or "power" over to the pages it links to, helping them rank higher in Google. And it just so happens that homepages are often the most authoritative page on a website. Alright, let's look at a couple of examples of affiliate websites that do all three of these things on their homepage. The

first is Garage Gym Reviews. They state that their brand is about "connecting the garage gym community." And on their site, they "provide in-depth and honest reviews on everything fitness-related." Scrolling down, you'll see some of their "best in-class reviews." These are all clearly targeting "general comparison keywords." Now, according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, all these "best in class review" pages that are linked from their homepage get a good amount of search traffic because they're actually ranking high for their target keywords. In fact, all four posts are ranking in the top position for their target keywords. Here's another

example from Dog Food Advisors. They clearly state that their site is about dog food reviews and ratings. They're leading people towards their post on the "best dog foods," which is obviously an important post for this site. They're also linking to a "dog food reviews A to Z" page, which is a page that links to tons of different dog food reviews—all of which would naturally recommend products to. purchase. Now, their "best dog food" page gets around 60,000 monthly search visits. And yes, they rank in the top position for "best dog food." Their dog food reviews page

also gets a lot of search traffic and ranks for the query "dog food review." So when you're creating your homepage, consider including these three things because it works. And remember that it doesn't have to be perfect because you can update or change the homepage at any time. Alright, let's move on to setting up your site's main navigation menu. Now, your navigation menu should serve two main purposes: #1. It should help provide a good user experience for visitors so they can find whatever it is they're looking for on your site quickly. And #2. It should make

it easy for search engines to access your content. Here's what I mean. The way Google finds content on your site is by "following" links from one page to another. For example, if Google lands on one of your pages and sees two links in the navigation which point to page A and page B, then they've discovered two new pages. Then they can "follow" those links and discover even more URLs based on the pages that page A and page B link to. And this process can go on for a very long time. Now, if all links are

removed from page B, then the search engine won't be able to discover any of these URLs because the path has effectively been broken. This is an overly simplified explanation of how Google finds content. But the main point is that we want to make it as easy as possible for search engines to discover our content so they can add it to their search index. And a well-thought-out navigation menu makes this possible. Now, your navigation links will largely depend on the number of pages you have on your site or plan to have, which is typically dictated by

the breadth of your niche and sub-niches. For a small site, the solution is easy because you've already created "product clusters," which I taught you how to do over the past couple of lessons. So you can simply link to some of your general comparison posts and your blog archive page. This way, all your pages are accessible within a couple of clicks from any page on your site. Now, for a larger site where you have too many comparison posts for your nav menu, you'll want to create category pages and link to them from your navigation. For example,

if we look at the Wirecutter, which is a huge affiliate site, you'll see they have various categories in their navigation menu. Now, if I hover over Tech and click on the "headphones" category, you'll see the majority of posts at the top of this page are for general comparisons. And these pages link out to all sorts of other posts on their website. Again, there's no exact formula for navigation or internal links. Ultimately, you want to create a good user experience for visitors and make your content accessible to search engines. Alright, so if you followed along from

lesson 3.1 to now 3.4, then you should have completed your keyword research, your content mapping strategy, and now your homepage and navigation architecture. Now it's time to actually create your affiliate content. And that's what we'll be diving deep into in the next module. In this module, I'm going to show you how to create content for your affiliate site. And there are two main goals for our content: #1. We want it to rank in Google so we can get consistent traffic to our site. And #2. We want our information to be helpful to visitors so they

can make informed purchasing decisions, and we can get compensated with affiliate commissions. Now, before we get into actually creating this content, I want to talk about something that's frequently pondered upon, and that's "how much informational vs. commercial content should I create for an affiliate site?" Before we can try to answer this question, I want you to envision two different sites at opposite extremes – one site with just informational content and another with just commercial content. Let's talk about the completely commercial site first. To help you visualize the types of content on this site, it'll be

just best of comparisons, vs. posts, and product reviews. Now, the problem with this kind of site, in my opinion, is that unless your reviews are legit, one of a kind, and demonstrate authority and expertise that's unmatched, it's going to be tough to really stand out. The only example I can think of that did this well was The Wirecutter before they were acquired by the New York Times. At that time, no one was really doing hands-on reviews of products with well-thought-out tests because it required a lot of time, money, and expertise. But the Wirecutter consistently did

this really well. As a result, they earned the trust of people and earned backlinks with ease, making it an overall authority in product reviews. The bar is much higher now. So to translate, if you're unable to at least get backlinks to your commercial pages, you probably won't be able to rank; therefore, you won't get much traffic to your site, and you won't make much in commissions. Now, let's look at the other extreme – the completely informational content. This site will have tons of how-tos, tutorials, guides, and basically anything for purely informational purposes. Now, because informational

content typically earns backlinks more easily, you'll have a better chance at ranking and getting traffic to your site. But the main downside to creating a fully informational affiliate site is that you'll stunt your revenue potential because commercial topics are going to be easier to naturally recommend products. And affiliates get paid when people click those affiliate links and make a purchase. So back to the question: what is the ideal ratio of commercial to informational content for an affiliate site? Well, as I just explained, there's positives and negatives to both types of content. And because both are

important, it's my opinion that any ratio that's roughly equal is completely fine. That might be a 40/60, 50/50, 60/40, or whatever. Now, the good news is that if you followed the steps I taught in module 3, then you've already set yourself up for success. If you remember, one of the core content structures I taught was called a product cluster. And again, these are groups of commercial content pages that connect general comparison posts with multiple product reviews as well as branded comparison posts. So if we were to transform this map into topics for our hypothetical... car

seats affiliate site, we might have "best car seats" as our general comparison, these topics as our product reviews, and maybe one branded comparison post like Diono Radian vs. Britax Marathon. Boom. Our product cluster is complete with a total of six commercial pages. Now, if we were going for a 1:1 ratio, we'd want to choose around six informational pieces about car seats. To do that, I'll draw from my keyword research list, which I created with you in module 3. Now, all we have left to do is create content on these topics. And creating content is what

we're going to go deep into in the next lesson, where I'll show you how to write commercial blog posts that get traffic from Google and convert into affiliate commissions. Hey, it's Sam Oh, and in this lesson, I'm going to show you how to write money-making blog posts for an affiliate site. And when I say "money-making," I'm referring to the three types of commercial posts we covered in module 3. These are general comparisons like "best golf balls," product reviews like "Titleist Pro V1 Golf Ball Review," and branded comparisons like "Titleist Pro V1 vs. Taylormade TP5 Golf

Balls." Now, when you're writing these kinds of posts for your affiliate site, you should have one primary goal in mind for your content, and that's to serve the intent of a visitor, meaning you want visitors to be happy with the information they find on your page. Now, the reason this is important is because when content satisfies the intent of visitors, you increase your chances of ranking higher in Google, because Google wants to show the most relevant pages for any given query. And because these queries have commercial intent, when visitors are satisfied with the content, they're

more likely to buy something from your affiliate merchant, leading to an affiliate commission. Fortunately, creating content for these three types of keywords is quite similar. So, I'm going to give you some flexible templates you can use to give yourself the best chance at ranking high and earning more commissions. So, let's talk about the first type of commercial post, which is for general comparison keywords. Again, these posts are going to be what you use when you're targeting keywords like "best [product name]." So, "best garden hose," "best booster seat," "best golf balls," etc. Now, because the word

"best" implies that a comparison needs to be made, the format you'll use for these general comparisons will most likely be a listicle, which is just an article in list format. And these general comparison posts will typically have four main parts: the introduction, the summary, the list points, and the conclusion. So, let's start with the intro. Plain and simple, a listicle is not meant to be read from start to finish. Nearly all readers will go in with the mentality to skim. So, with our intro, we want to keep it short and sweet while building credibility so

they'll actually trust what you have to say about these products. For example, if we're writing a post on the best car seats for 3-year-olds, in the intro, I might say something as simple as: "We tested 10 car seats and rated them by comfort, price, and safety. In this post, we'll share our research to help you find the best convertible car seat for your 3-year-old." It's short and sweet, instantly builds credibility, and also tells the reader that they're in the right place. Alright, next up is the summary. As I mentioned before, listicles won't be read in

full. And that's because some, if not most, people just want the answer to what the best product is. That's why I suggest having a section like "Best [product] at a Glance." Here, you can simply add bullet points for different categories like "best overall car seat," "best car seat money can buy," "best car seat for travel," and "best budget car seat," to name a few. Not only can this help improve clicks on your affiliate links, but it provides a good user experience for those no-nonsense skimmers. Alright, now we're on to the list points, which is going

to be the meat of your post. Now, a list point is made up of a heading and description. The heading will usually be the name of the product you're recommending. For example, my post on "best car seats for 3-year-olds" might have headings like "Diono Radian 3RXT," "Britax Marathon," "Britax One4Life," and so on. As for the description, you're just describing the heading in more detail. You want to give only necessary information to help the buyer make an informed purchasing decision. Now, when it comes to writing descriptions, it's best to keep the format consistent throughout the post.

For example, if we're reviewing car seats for 3-year-olds, then we might have one sentence to describe the car seat, a few sentences about how that specific car seat scored on our test categories like build quality, safety, and performance – a supporting image of our analysis, and then perhaps an overall score with a concluding statement. Predictable formats help people absorb information more efficiently, and that's what we want for our readers. Now, last but certainly not least, we want to include links to the affiliate products and your product review page in the description. We'll get into writing

product review pages in a bit because first we need to write a conclusion. Here, you'll want to wrap up the post. You can do this by summarizing your top picks and recommending other posts on your site that might be interesting to that reader. For example, it might make sense to link to a post on the best car seat accessories at the end of our best car seats post. Now, these general comparison pages tie in directly with product reviews, because if you remember from module 3, a part of our overall strategy is to build "product clusters."

And product clusters are simply content structures that connect a general comparison post with multiple product review posts. Now, when you're writing product reviews, the intent of most visitors will likely be different than the intent of those visiting a general comparison post. People who visit a "best of" post most likely don't know which products they're interested in, whereas someone who visits a product review page titled something like "Diono Radian 3RXT Review" has likely narrowed down their search to a few products that interest them most. They're likely closer to making a purchase and want to dive deep

before they spend money. So, your goal for product reviews should be to outline the positives and negatives effectively. negatives to help visitors decide if that specific product is right for their needs. So, with that said, here's how I think a product review should be written. First will be the introduction. Much like the "best of" post, you'll want to keep it short, sweet, and on point. The two things that I think are important for product reviews are: a) showing the reader they're in the right place, and b) internally linking back to the general comparison post to

complete the product cluster structure. For example, if I were writing a post titled "Diono Radian 3RXT Review," I might say: "With its slim size and high safety ratings, the Diono Radian 3RXT has become one of the most popular car seats for kids. In fact, we classified it as one of our best car seats for 3-year-olds. But it's not all glitz and glam. The Radian 3RXT is one of the heaviest car seats and scored surprisingly low on some of our hands-on tests. In this review, we'll share the results of our research to help you decide if

this car seat is the right one for your toddler." Alright, now we're on to the body of the content. What you decide to cover here will vary based on your niche. Basically, you want to cover the most important categories that shoppers in your niche care about. For example, with car seats, that might be safety, size, comfort, ease of installation, portability, and specs. For golf balls, that might be distance, spin control, materials, feel, and price. These are the things you should cover in your product reviews, where each category will be your heading. These categories are essentially

what will create your product review template. Now, with the conclusion, you'll just want to wrap things up and perhaps suggest who the product is best for. For example, for our Diono Radian 3RXT post, I might say: "The Diono Radian 3RXT is a solid choice for children ages 2–6. In fact, it scored extremely high in all of our tests. On top of that, it's the only car seat we tested where we could easily fit three of them in the back of a small sedan. If budget is not an issue for you, then you won't be disappointed

with the Diono Radian 3RXT." And we're done. Alright, the final commercial blog post type I want to talk about is "branded comparisons." These are your typical "vs" posts. For example, "Diono Radian 3RXT vs. Britax Marathon." When we think about someone who's coming to a page like this, we know that the visitor has likely narrowed their product research down to two or more products. However, they can't really decide which one is right for them, so they want to do a side-by-side comparison. Basically, they're coming to your page to weigh out the differences. Just like with the

product review posts, we want to address that in the introduction and, again, help them make an informed purchasing decision throughout the body. Here's what the intro might look like: "The Diono Radian 3RXT and Britax Marathon are the heavyweight champions of convertible car seats. They both have all the bells and whistles; yet, they're completely different in just about every way. In this post, we'll compare the main features of both models to help you decide which car seat is best for your little one." Now, as for the body, we want to take a similar approach to product

reviews and cover important topics that someone looking to buy a car seat would want to know. Again, for a car seat shopper, that might be safety, size, comfort, ease of installation, portability, and specs. A key difference here is that, instead of highlighting these features for one product, we want to compare the differences between the different models. Think of the comparison tables that I'm sure you've seen on sites like Apple or your favorite ecommerce store. For the conclusion, it would be much the same. Just wrap things up. Now, two important things to note from an SEO

perspective in these branded comparison posts are to internally link to the individual product reviews as well as the general comparison guide. This will help you complete your product cluster and create that beautiful structure we talked about in module three. Writing money-making or commercial posts is pretty straightforward for an affiliate site. Creating informational content, on the other hand, is a bit more nuanced. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to write informational blog posts that are likely to rank and demonstrate how you can turn informational pieces into silent profit generators. Hey, it's Sam Oh, and

in this lesson, I'm going to show you how to write informational blog posts for an affiliate marketing site. By informational blog posts, I mean how-tos, step-by-step tutorials, definition posts, and basically any type of content where the primary intent is to learn. On top of that, I want to show you how to generate affiliate commissions from informational blog posts that may not seem to have commercial value at first glance. Let's call these silent profit generators. So, let's get started. Before I walk you through some blog post templates, it's essential to discuss the first and most important

step to creating content for search – and that's search intent. Search intent represents the reason behind a searcher's query. It's important because you need to match intent to rank high in Google. For example, if we were creating a post about how to clean car seats for a hypothetical kids' car seats site, what do you think our content should look like? Should it be a step-by-step tutorial where you walk them through cleaning your kids' convertible car seats? Or should it have a different format? Or wait… is this for convertible car seats, infant car seats, or booster

seats? This was kind of a trick question because the intent for the query "how to clean car seats" is actually about cleaning the seats in your car – not cleaning a kids' installable car seat. How do I know this? Well, the way we identify search intent is by entering the query in Google and looking at the top-ranking pages. After all, search engines want to show you the most relevant result for a query, so the top-ranking pages are essentially a guide to what Google thinks best serves the intent of the search. A searcher. So, as you

can see, the top pages for "how to clean car seats" are all about cleaning regular car seats, so creating a post on cleaning kids' car seats probably wouldn't rank for this query because it's not matching intent. Now, for argument's sake, let's say that intent was about cleaning children's car seats. Because the keyword has the words "how to" in it, you might automatically think that you need to create a step-by-step guide. But what's interesting is that the top two ranking pages are actually listicles with a set of tips—meaning an unordered list of methods to clean a

car seat. So, if you want to compete, you should follow suit and create a post with a similar format to improve your chances of ranking high. We have a full SEO course for beginners where we go much deeper into matching search intent and actually creating optimized content for search, so I highly recommend watching that. I'll link that up along with some SEO content writing tutorials in the description. Alright, let's move on to a few blog post templates you can use for different types of informational content. All of these content pieces will contain a title, introduction,

body, and conclusion. Let's kick things off with the first post type, and that's listicles. Listicles are blog posts that contain non-chronological lists, such as tips, product recommendations, tools, techniques, myths, mistakes, or whatever. For the title, you can use any of these templates. Let's turn them into working titles: "11 Ways to Sneak Snacks onto a Plane," "7 SEO Tips that Actually Work," "4 Blogging Techniques to Grow Your Audience." Titles for listicles are about as easy as they come. Now, as for the introduction, your goal should be to build trust and excitement in as few words as

possible because most people are coming for the list points. For example, if you're writing a post on 7 SEO tips that actually work, you might say: "Ranking high in Google is more challenging than ever before. But that doesn't make it impossible. As you can see, our blog ranks for over 11,600 keywords in the top 10 of Google. Today, I want to share a few simple SEO tips that helped us get there." The intro is short and helps build trust because we have proof that we've already achieved what the reader is hoping to achieve—higher Google rankings.

The last thing I recommend including in the intro is a table of contents with jump links. This makes it much easier for visitors to navigate throughout your post, especially since listicles need to be skimmable. If you're using WordPress, there are plenty of free plugins to choose from; just search for "table of contents" in WordPress's plugins repository and you'll find plenty of free options to try. Alright, on to the main content. In the most basic form, your main content will have a series of H2s or heading tags, and content that complements the headings. Now, depending on

the type of listicle you're creating, your H2s will vary. For example, if you're doing a series of tips to achieve a goal, you'd want to use short and descriptive headings that would make the reader want to read your content. For example, if your post was on 17 Weight Loss Tips, rather than having point 5 as "Eat Spicy Foods," you might put "#5. Eat Spicy Foods to Burn More Calories." Now, as for the content that goes under these headings, you may want to consider creating your own mini-template. For example, if your post is on weight loss

tips, you might explain why your tip helps with weight loss in one sentence. Then you might explain how it works and cite some research studies. Finally, you can end the list point with two sentences that will help the reader put that tip into action. Consistency creates a predictable reading experience for your visitors, and it also helps you as a writer to avoid tangents that break flow. So, with a mini-template in hand, it'll just be a matter of filling in the blanks for each subheading, and before you know it, you'll be onto your conclusion. For list

posts, I wouldn't overthink the conclusion. The majority of people aren't even going to get here, but it's still important to create closure for those who do. My recommendation is to briefly summarize a key takeaway and then recommend additional content that's related to your post. Internal links are good to use because they pass link authority and, overall, create a better user experience for your readers. So, here's a sample of what this template looks like. Feel free to pause or rewind to make sure we're on the same page, and then let's move on to the next blog

post template, which is step-by-step tutorials. Step-by-step guides are your typical "how-to" posts where you run through a series of chronological steps to teach how to accomplish something. Now, for the title, you can use one of these formats to get started. So, if we turn these into real titles, they might be: "How to Build a Deck (7 Steps)," "How to Start a Business (Even if You Don't Have Money)," "How to Find Email Addresses for Link Building (Fully Automated)." Now, for the intro, write a short one using the PSP method, which stands for problem, solution, and proof.

For example, let’s say you have a step-by-step guide on how to do YouTube keyword research. Your intro might read: "Looking to grow your YouTube channel and attract more views? The 'trick' is to target topics with search demand. This is the approach that helped us grow our YouTube channel from approximately 10,000 to over 200,000 monthly views in one year." Now, the reason why the PSP method is effective is that people who are reading a step-by-step guide usually come with a problem. They're looking for a solution. And if you have proof of that solution, you’ll get their

attention. Alright, so with the intro in the books, we need to write the main content, which will be your step-by-step instructions. And because step-by-step guides have a logical sequence of instructions, you can use your H2s as the main steps. For example, our post on YouTube keyword research might have H2s like: "Step 1: Map out a hierarchy of topics. Step 2: Generate keyword ideas. Step 3: Check search intent… and so on and so forth." As for the conclusion, just keep it short and sweet because step-by-step guides tend to be quite long. Again, I recommend adding internal

links to other relevant posts so you don’t leave readers wanting more at a dead end. So, from our hypothetical YouTube keyword research post, we might link to our guides on YouTube SEO and getting more subscribers on YouTube—both are relevant to YouTube keyword research and serve what a reader might want to learn next. Here’s a sample of what this template looks like. Feel free to pause or rewind to make sure we’re on the same page, and then let’s move on to the next blog post template, which is for the expanded definition post. Expanded definition posts are

somewhat similar to how-to guides. But rather than being written as a logical sequence of steps, they’re meant to give a high-level overview of a topic. Now, because these posts are expanded definitions, you’ll want to make your title something like: “What is or what are [concept or acronym]” and then any additional details about your piece. For example, "What is an Oligarch: Everything you need to know." "What are SERPs: Search Engine Results Pages Explained." "What are NFTs? A Detailed Introduction to 'Expensive JPEGs.'” Now, the great thing about expanded definition posts is that there’s a clear format you

can follow for the intro, main content, and conclusion. In short, you want people to come for the definition and stay for the details. So for the introduction, you’ll want to keep it short and sweet by defining your concept or acronym. For example, our page on "What are SERPs" immediately gives the definition, shows a supporting image, and then tells you what you’ll learn in the rest of the post with jump links to each section. Now, for the main content, I highly recommend spending some time on your outline because you only want to include the most important

points that a person searching for "what is [something]" would want to know. For example, if we created a post targeting "what are NFTs," you can start by searching for ideas in Google’s People also ask box. So, from this list, these could act as potentially good subtopics. You can also look in the related terms report in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. Based on these keywords, I’d probably want to talk about the meaning of fungible, which is the F in NFT. I’d want to talk about how you can buy an NFT and how to invest in NFTs. Finally, look

at the subheadings of top-ranking pages for your target query. This page talks about what they are, how they’re different from cryptocurrency, how they work, what they’re used for, and so on and so forth. So, assuming we were creating a post titled "What are NFTs? A Detailed Introduction to 'Expensive JPEGs,'" we might have a main content outline that looks like this, where our intro solves the "what," and the rest of the article will give a decent introduction to the NFT space. Now, for the conclusion, you just need to summarize the key learnings. And again, I highly

recommend adding internal links to other articles that a beginner would want to learn more about. Because if they've made it to the bottom of your expanded definition post, they'll likely want to learn more since the content will typically be high-level. The bottom line with all of these templates is that they need to match the intent of the searcher. And the better you match it, the better your chances of ranking higher in Google. Now, I’ve previously talked about how informational blog posts can be silent profit generators. The way you do that is by creating product-led content.

Product-led content is simply content that helps people solve a problem with the help of your product. Now, since you, as an affiliate, won’t own the products you recommend, you can think of it as creating product-led content for other companies but posted on your own site. For example, let’s say you have a DIY home improvement site where you recommend various tools like drills, drivers, and other tools. You might want to create a post on how to winterize your sprinkler system, which gets an estimated 2,700 monthly searches in Google. Now, as far as I’m aware, you need

an air compressor to winterize your sprinkler system. So, it would be super natural to organically plug this product into your post. And because air compressors aren’t exactly a common household item like a hammer, some of these people will likely take your advice and buy one through your link, leading to a commission. We have a full tutorial on product-led content that I highly recommend watching if you want to learn how you can master silent profit generators for your affiliate site. And that wraps up this module. In Module 5, we’ll be talking about link building for affiliate

sites. Get good at this, and you’ll have no problems generating consistent traffic from search engines. In this module, we’re going to talk about affiliate link building tactics and a simple macro strategy that’ll help you get higher Google rankings, more search traffic, and more affiliate commissions. Now, backlinks are basically the fuel to higher Google rankings. And while you may want to jump straight into link building tactics, it's important that you first understand how you can best harness the power of backlinks and also understand the realities of link building for affiliate sites. Link building, whether it's for

an affiliate site, blog, or e-commerce store, is most commonly done through email outreach. And this is where you contact people who might be interested in linking to your web pages. Now, reaching out to some random stranger and saying: "Hey, you like gardening? I sell garden tools. You should recommend my product pages by linking to them everywhere" is kind of awkward. And beyond being awkward, it’s selfish in a weird way. There’s no benefit for the recipient of these emails, and that means you won’t be getting any or many backlinks at all. Now, let’s flip the script

a bit and let’s say we email someone saying: "Hey, Sam here from thegardenseo.com. Just wanted to say thanks for sharing your tutorial and detailed…" will automatically link to your content. You still need to respond effectively to their queries. When a journalist asks for insights or quotes, ensure you provide valuable, well-thought-out replies. Include your expertise and unique perspective, and if applicable, link to your relevant content. This approach not only increases your chances of getting featured but also improves the likelihood of receiving a backlink. Remember, HARO operates on a first-come, first-served basis, so be prompt in your

responses. Set aside time each day to check for relevant queries and respond quickly. By consistently engaging with journalists seeking expertise, you can build relationships and establish yourself as a trusted source in your niche. In addition to HARO, consider other avenues for link building, such as guest posting on reputable blogs, collaborating with influencers, and participating in online forums or communities related to your industry. Each of these strategies can further enhance your link building efforts and drive traffic to your affiliate site. As we wrap up this lesson, remember that link building is a vital component of your

SEO strategy. By leveraging helpful content, establishing yourself as an expert, and actively pursuing backlinks, you can significantly improve your site's authority and visibility in search engine results. Stay tuned for the next lesson, where I'll delve deeper into advanced link building techniques. Cheers, Sam! Are going to cite you just because you responded. And while you should go the extra mile to provide unique and insightful information, half the battle is in responding to the right questions. So, to increase your chances of getting mentioned, prioritize queries where journalists are likely looking for multiple experts on the topic. For

example, in this query, Bustle is looking for relationship therapists, as in the plural of therapist, and they want to know more about boredom in relationships. Now, the description is even more clear that they want multiple experts. She says: "I'm working on an article called '13 Common Mistakes That Lead to Boredom in a Relationship.'" So, more likely than not, she's looking for multiple experts that can fill in the blanks in her outline. If that niche makes sense for you, then provide your best answer in as short of a response as possible, and then move on to

the next query. If you're an expert in the field, then make sure to state your credentials at the beginning of your email to set a tone and then earn the trust through your knowledge and experience. I'd recommend using HARO without an end date in mind. The quality of links is just that good for the amount of effort it takes to respond. And if you're pairing HARO with the affiliate homepage strategy I taught in lesson 3.4, you'll be maximizing the mileage from these highly authoritative backlinks. Alright, the second tactic I recommend is guest posting. Guest posting

is when you create content to be posted on another website. Generally speaking, that post comes with attribution and a link back to your site. Now, while some sites won't allow you to link to yourself within the content, most will, as long as it makes sense and adds value to your guest article. So, the first thing you need to do is find websites that are likely to accept guest posts. To get started, you can use Ahrefs Content Explorer, which lets you search through billions of pages and get SEO metrics for all of them. Just search for

a topic related to your niche and run the search. Next, let's set a Domain Rating filter to weed out both very low and very high authority websites. So, I'll choose a range like 30 to 60. I'll also choose the "One page per domain" filter since we don't need to pitch the same website multiple times. Finally, I'll set the "Published" filter to the past 90 days, which will help us narrow in on websites that have published or republished content in the last three months. Now, we still have around 80,000 websites in our search results, which is

just way too many to pitch. So, let's head on over to the Websites tab, which will show you the top 100 websites from your results. Now, it's just a matter of looking at the domain names, visiting ones that look relevant, and pitching your guest posts where appropriate. For example, this site gets decent search traffic from Google, has decent website authority, and has a bunch of authors, meaning they likely accept guest posts. So, let's visit their site and take a look through some of their articles. Things look fine here, so let's head over to their About

page. Since they list their editor here, I'll probably try to pitch them with my idea. Now, if you don't know how to find these people's email addresses, I'll link up a video on how you can do that in the description. Alright, the next link-building tactic I highly recommend is to do podcast interviews. Much like guest posting, being interviewed on a podcast puts you in the spotlight as an expert in front of someone else's audience. So, if you actually have expertise in your niche, this is going to be an easy one for you that’ll a) help

you build a reputation as an authority in your niche and b) get backlinks while you're at it. Now, the thing I love about podcasts as a link-building strategy is that it only takes around an hour of your time, and links are almost a given if you choose your podcasts appropriately. Here’s what I mean: a lot of podcasts have “episodes” pages on their websites, and these pages almost always include a link back to the guest’s homepage and their social profiles. To find podcast prospects that are likely to link to your site, you can simply reverse-engineer a

podcast interviewee’s homepage backlinks or social profile backlinks. For example, if you’re in the SEO niche, you might want to check backlinks to Tim Soulo’s Twitter profile since he’s been a guest on a bunch of podcasts. To get started, I’ll go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and paste in his Twitter URL. Next, I’ll go to the Backlinks report. Now, to narrow in on links from podcasts, I’ll set a page title filter to search for referring pages where the word “podcast” or “episode” is in the page title. From here, you can sift through the results, visit relevant pages,

and pitch yourself as a guest when appropriate. The benefit of being on podcasts goes way beyond links. You get the chance to meet like-minded people in your industry, and building your network can go a long way, even from an SEO perspective. Now, if you follow the course and rinse and repeat these three tactics, you should have no problems getting some traction to your affiliate site. If you want to go beyond these tactics, then I recommend watching our full tutorial on link building for beginners, which I’ll link up in the description. And that wraps up our

affiliate marketing course. I’ve linked up a full playlist to this entire course in the description. Thanks for joining me, consider subscribing, and I’ll see you in the next tutorial.