Hey, it's Sam Oh and 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."
And 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 because golf is a huge topic.
This is why focusing on a sub-niche is a much better approach to building
topical authority.
And 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 more likely 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.
And 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.
And 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.
And we'll be using our keyword lists to do this.
Now, if you get 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.
So 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.
Now, because general comparison topics will require product comparisons and
recommendations, we'll need to choose some car seats to compare in our post.
And 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.
Now, I also have a couple kids that are now older than three and 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.
Now, 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."
Now, another car seat we have is the Britax Marathon which I also like and
would recommend.
So let's add another branch.
Now, 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.
Now, I've already gone ahead and looked at product specs, reviews,
and installation videos for 14 different convertible car seats.
And 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, 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.
So 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.
And 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
"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 a writing 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 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.
I'll see you there.