Affiliate marketing thrives on content and in this article we are going to talk about affiliate website content. This is because content on an affiliate website should be in a particular way to achieve the purpose it has been created for. Content is accessed on a website via a URL and displays as a webpage on your browser. As an affiliate marketer you need to know the what, how and where of the webpage on your affiliate marketing websites.
This article is not necessarily about how to write content for affiliate marketing but more to do with affiliate content meaning and understanding it more. If you did not know how to start affiliate marketing or how to do affiliate content marketing this be worth your read. You might not need an affiliate marketing course!
What Is Affiliate Content?
Affiliate marketing definition, according to Investopedia, is an advertising model where a company pays compensation to third-party publishers to generate traffic or leads to the company’s products and services… read more!
Affiliate content is content for affiliate website in the form of a webpage, or a promotional PDF or email sent to subscribers or any other advertising model that has a potential to sell a product and earn an affiliate marketer a commission. Here we will dwell more on affiliate website content as a form of advertising model employed by an affiliate marketer. And the marketer relying heavily on search engine optimization (SEO) techniques for advertising.
It is important to note Webpage (URL) and SEO!
Affiliate website content is the flesh of your website, it is what gives it shape so to speak. Sitemap is the backbone which needs the flesh (content) to take shape. Sitemap is the canvas, the plan, the layout of the website. This includes the layout of pages, posts, categories, tags, etc. Setup is the environment where the sitemap sits. The environment encompasses the platform or CMS, the plugins, etc.
What You Need To Know About Affiliate Website Content
So affiliate website content is what will fill the canvas. The content goes into pages, posts, etc. Remember when you plan out the website or when you create a sitemap you do not have content but rather a layout of what you want to talk about. At most you will have titles for pages, posts, categories, tags, images, videos, etc. but not the actual content. The content is created after planning out the affiliate website. The planning is normally much easier to do from the niche research.
Niche research will uncover keywords and products to promote. From the keywords and products you plan the website and that is when you can create content based on the plan. Content is many in forms and being to website content it can be accessed by way of a URL. This means when you type a certain URL on a browser content will display… let us call this display a webpage! So therefore content leads to a webpage and let us look at different types of content.
Being specific to affiliate website content, we have the following types of content or elements of content;
Types Of Content For Affiliate Marketing
- Keywords
- Written Text
- Images
- Video
- Audio
- Category
- Tags
- MetaData
Affiliate website content should not be limited to just written text, images, video or audio. Understand it to be a webpage that has a URL!
What You Need To Understand About Affiliate Website Content
Affiliate content by its definition should be able to earn you commissions so there are at least 2 sides to it. One side is the content part in its form, whether written content, video, image, etc. The other side is the affiliate part which implies it must earn you money. One of the ways to make the content earn you money online is using SEO techniques for organic traffic.
As an affiliate marketer who relies on organic traffic to your affiliate website content know that every URL is important because it is your advertising piece of content. As we have seen above a URL is a webpage and a webpage is content and the content is affiliate website content. So let us look at each of the above and explain why it is important to understand each and its role as affiliate content.
Each of the above can be referred to as content on its own or when combined with the other. A Keyword can be a title in whole or form part of a title. A title can have content to qualify it as content… we will explain this more below after covering the other forms of content.
Written text on its own is normally referred to as an article. A video on its own is normally not referred to as an article but rather a video content (complete like that). The same with image and audio content! At the same time you can have an article as a form of content comprising written text, images and/or video, and or audio, etc.
Content can be or can make a post or a page. A group of posts (or pages) can form or can be grouped into a category. At the same time a group of posts (or pages) can belong to or grouped by a certain tag. A category or tag page is virtual webpage because normally such content, from a website perspective, is not created as you would an article or any other form of content.
When you create an article you physically write, or when creating a video page you physically create a video, etc. as in the case of image, audio pages. In the case of a category webpage or tag webpage, its contents come about automatically generated by the platform. All you would have created would be a title or name. Say in the case of WordPress, as we will be creating WordPress based affiliate websites, WordPress automatically creates content for a category webpage or tag webpage. So these are referred to as virtual (web)pages.
It is important that you understand this because it has a huge bearing on how to take advantage of this feature in WordPress in order to create an optimized search engine friendly website.
As an example to illustrate this, say you create an affiliate website and plan to have 5 categories, 3 tags, 20 posts/pages. Though you will physically create content for 20 webpages (the 20 posts/pages) you will end up with 28 webpages i.e. 28 URLs. 8 being virtual pages from 5 categories and 3 tags.
These virtual pages will accumulate content from the 20 posts/pages accordingly as the get assigned to their respective categories and tags. A page/post may belong to one or more categories and or tags. Though you physically have 20 posts/pages you will find that by virtue of having categories and tags and having assigned the posts/pages to these, you will end up with say extra 8 webpages that have their own content. Does this make sense?
How To Write Content For Affiliate Marketing
Understanding what affiliate content makes it apparent that it is not only about how to write content for affiliate marketing, if anything it is more about how to plan, arrange, combine all the above elements and publish it for the world to see. However when it comes to writing the content be mindful of the keywords to use, how to categorize and tag the content, the metadata to use when describing the content.
Say as an example you are wondering how to write amazon product reviews for affiliate websites. In this case you are writing or reviewing a specific product. SO you will want to know the keywords people use when searching for that product to include them in your content. There are other additional details that you need to have depending on the categories of your affiliate website as well as other sitemap elements. You will want to know the brand, price, material of the product, its purpose, etc.
This way you will be able to write an informative review article and at the same time allocate it to proper categories and tags on your website. To be successful avoid creating a simple affiliate website because it may not be taking advantage of SEO they way it would if constructed with SEO in mind. We have a few affiliate websites examples, that we have constructed in-house that can show what we mean by setting up affiliate sites.
Affiliate marketing websites are not only about content but also how that content has been arranged and relate to each other. If you are an Amazon Associate some Amazon Affiliate Website Builder software overlook this, the interlinking and categorization that improves search engine friendliness and easy human interaction. A good affiliate website is both search engine friendly and human user-friendly and has a greater potential to rank high in search engines with minimal work.
The best affiliate marketing websites should expandable with the ability accommodate more products and content without having to disturb its structure too much that it can hurt its performance in search engines. When building an Amazon affiliate website from an Amazon Affiliate Website Builder, such software can have the ability to add more products as they become available for sale. However, it normally lacks that solid initial structure and if the software allows or is flexible enough to build a better structure!
This point brings us to being able to plan ahead which means you need to have a content strategy.
Affiliate Marketing Content Strategy
Content strategy includes knowing how to write content, planning when to add more content, expand existing content, expanding the affiliate website by adding more categories, knowing or anticipating how new content or content updates will fit in. Online affiliate marketing can be regarded as a game like chess and requiring a solid affiliate marketing content strategy. And each step has a purpose.
When we look at affiliate marketing strategies for beginners, it first starts with affiliate marketing ideas like having idea of a niche to go after or set of products in a certain niche. Then the strategy starts with niche research. From niche research you will know the keywords used in that niche, this includes general keywords and product specific keywords. From there you will do product research in that niche to uncover best selling products. It is always best to have best selling products.
Once you have keywords and products you can plan the affiliate website to decide on categories, tags, keyword pages, etc. The plan or structure should be such that it can allow for expansion. That is to say the website must be able to accommodate new products as well as new keywords as they get uncovered from a tracking system like Google Console.
So at the forefront planning is key in order to develop a strategy that is both flexible and expandable.