There is a noted and obvious bias from Google and other search engines toward large, well established companies that can often make it more difficult for smaller operations to rank. Affiliates have a much harder time ranking when they are competing on a playing field that is already uneven and is made more so either by intention or by a programming quirk. Either way, it means that more care and attention has to be taken to market affiliates online.
The thing is, while it may take extra effort on your part in order to engage in affiliate marketing, the techniques used are basically the same. Rather, what you’re looking at is a more concerted effort to highly focus those techniques into the most productive channels in order to get the biggest return on your efforts. Link Building Strategies play a critical role in an affiliate marketing. Here’s what that means.
Giving Them What They Want
The advantage of a small affiliate is that you are immediately closer to the customer. What you can offer that they can’t get from a larger retailer is personal service that adjusts rapidly to meet their needs. However, you can only do that if you’re paying attention.
The first thing you have to commit to doing is looking over your numbers to see what works and what doesn’t. You can’t give people what they want if you don’t know what they want, so make sure you’re making the effort to find out and adjusting your approach when you notice something that could benefit you.
Part of adjusting your approach is providing value to your prospective customer. That means that you can’t just give them a site, even if it’s a high quality one. They want additional information, they want insightful commentary, they want something that will improve their lives other than just direct sales of the product in question.
Actions You Can Take
Other than just providing high quality, highly targeted content, there are a lot of things that you can do in order to make sure that search engines also give you the attention that you deserve.
For example, like with any other website, you’re going to want to do a lot of keyword research. This is a time when you really have to mine for those under-saturated words and phrases that will give you traffic without having to fight tooth and nail for every SERP ranking. It also gives you a chance to find product-based resource pages that you can later solicit for links.
You should also consider partnering with blogs and industry resources as a contributor. While your affiliates may not be big quite yet, becoming a contributor to a larger industry resource gives you not only the exposure that you need to build an audience, but it also gives you a high quality link. In fact, if you use yourself to support your claims, then it can provide multiple high quality links.
You should also consider multiple forms of media. Video, for example, can be a great way to reach an audience that isn’t interested in reading your content but would love to see a professional-quality film explaining the same thing. You could also consider slideshows that boil down the message to its essentials and presents it in bite-sized pieces that can be viewed at leisure. The additional benefit to this is that you are able to reuse the same content — the same ideas and phrasing in a lot of cases — while getting credit for creating something different. Your writing is done for you, it’s just a matter of finding visuals (or potentially audio if you do a podcast) to go with it.
White Hat Techniques
There are a number of White Hat SEO techniques that you can also employ to build your links and appeal to your potential customers. Seeking citations, for example, is a great way to get easy links just by manipulating your content. You can put out press releases on syndication sites that will spread your link to potentially hundreds of locations around the web. You can even engage in targeted blog comments in order to build a reputation for yourself.
The fact of the matter is, there are plenty of ways that you can build links for your affiliates that will get them respectable placing on the search engines. It’s not easy, but it ultimately pays off in increased traffic.