What’s the best affiliate marketing advice you’ve ever heard? My answer, coming up in this blog. WPX Hosting created a $5,000 affiliate marketing challenge where a boatload of contestants submit their best affiliate marketing tips, advice, and hacks. They asked me to be the judge, and of course I told them, (beep) yeah, I’ll do it. What were the prizes?
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The winner takes the $5,000 grand prize, while the second and third placers get access to my affiliate marketing course and mastermind, The Affiliate Lab, worth $1000. In this blog, logo design service in usa going to reveal the top three affiliate marketing strategies from this contest. I’m going to talk about each strategy one by one, what I liked about it, but most importantly, actionable advice and how you can implement the strategy right away.
The Affiliate Lab
The Search Initiative, Authority Builders, and the affiliate marketing agency, LeadSpring. My primary income source is affiliate marketing through the vehicle of SEO. I sold millions of dollars of websites through Empire Flippers and Investors Club. You can say I live and breathe affiliate marketing. Now, before we get started, I have two important things to mention. First, I’m judging this contest based on two criteria. The first criteria is effectiveness. I’m looking for affiliate marketing tips that will actually get results and bring in those tennies.
Second Is Creativity
I want to see some outside the box (beep), something more creative than say split tests or call to action buttons. Next, because I wanted this contest to be fair, I asked WPX to send me these entries without the names of who submitted them. I’m judging this completely blind with no bias towards anybody who would have applied. – Fair enough. – All right, now then we set the ground rules, let’s start dropping some knowledge bombs. But real quick, can you please drop a bomb on that like button? Complete destruction of the like button helps my channel out a ton, and encourages me to make more videos, just like this one, for your viewing pleasure.
Find Expired Domains
Coming in at third place is a super slick way to find expired domains with top tier backlinks for your affiliate SEO website. Building your website in an expired domain is a killer way to get a head start in your search engine optimization journey. Why is that? Because if you find a sick domain with tons of powerful backlinks, you don’t have to build those links yourself, and you can sometimes blow past your competition in weeks, rather than years.
Gangsta Level Links
This particular strategy finds you domains with some gangsta level links, links that will make you say- – Damn. – Here’s how you do it. Step one, use a tool like Ahrefs and type in a top tier domain like forbes.com into the field at the top. We’re looking for sites that Forbes links to. If a site has a link from Forbes, there’s a high chance that has other awesome links from Inc.com or entrepreneur.com, et cetera. Essentially, you can put any top tier domain in on the step.
Linked Domains
Yes, click down here on linked domains, you’ll pull up a list of all the freaking websites that Forbes links to. Export this tasty list out to an Excel sheet. Step three, import that file into GoDaddy’s Bulk Domain Search. This is going to tell you which of these domains are available for registration, auction or private purchase. You’re going to export out another list from here too.
Available Domains
The list of available domains that forbes links to and put it back into ahres batch analysis. Dig around for a high authority domain with an excellent backlink profile. Step five, buy that killer domain and start to build out a site on it. I recommend setting up the site, putting up some basic content, and letting it sit for a couple months. Wait until it starts to rank for its own domain name.
Profit
I like this strategy because it’s so simple and so effective. The only reason I didn’t score it higher is because it’s mostly an SEO strategy rather than an affiliate specific strategy. Nonetheless, great job to whoever submitted this. Welcome to The Affiliate Lab. The second place strategy is a clever growth hack that can get you a huge traffic jumpstart before you even launch an affiliate website, and that’s by acquiring high engagement Facebook and Pinterest pages in your niche.
Start A New Site
Let’s say you decide to start a new site in the food and recipe niche. Start digging around Facebook, looking for niche specific fan pages. On Facebook, you’re looking for engagement. Look at how many people are liking, commenting and sharing posts, compared to how many people are following the page. You’ll start to get a feel for which numbers look good in a niche by looking at a dozen or so of these pages. Next, look at the volume of posting. You want an active page.
Content That Works Well
Check out the type of content that works well on the page, is it videos, memes, guides? And most importantly, links back to websites, which is what you’ll eventually do for your own website. Lastly, the total number of followers from tier one and tier two countries. On Pinterest, you’re looking for growth rate of the account, total follower count, and engagement and relevancy of the board to your niche. Next, you reach out to the admins and set up a meeting to discuss a partnership.
Price For Posting
Start to small talk about the price for a posting, then drop the bomb on them, ask them how much just to buy the page from them. With any luck, you can get a 150,000 follower Facebook page with 16% engagement for around $2,500, which is what the content participant quoted. Now you have a blueprint showing you what types of content and images already resonate with your audience. But most importantly, you have an engaged traffic source to send back to your site when you post up your content. You know what else is awesome?
Online Businesses On Marketplaces
Buyers of online businesses on marketplaces like Empire Flippers love affiliate properties with multiple traffic sources. You just built that on day one. I love the creativity of this tactic, it’s totally outside the box. I also love how it thinks about the big picture. While most affiliates are concerned with paid and organic Google traffic, this one focuses on the highly overlooked social channel. Good on you contestant, welcome to The Affiliate Lab.
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I Reveal The Big Winner
Before I reveal the big winner, here’s some honorable mentions. The first honorable mention is a HARO hack that will allow you to build tons of backlinks, way more than the typical strategy can build. Help A Reporter Out as a platform that connects journalists with niche experts. People use it for link building. You’ll answer the questions that the journalists put out there, stuff like can a tax expert please give me their opinion on the new tax law.
Submit Your Answer
If the journalist uses it, they link back to your website. This hack requires you to have two websites in the same niche. From one site, you act as the journalist and you put out a request for expert content, but when you get your submissions, you ask the expert if they could provide a link to your other site in exchange for you using the quote. The quote giver is going to do it too, because otherwise they just wasted their time for nothing.
Naughty
Again, this is an SEO growth hack rather than an affiliate marketing play. Nonetheless, I love it. The next honorable mention is a strategy that uses private sponsorship deals with YouTubers that will promote your website content for you. I know this to be true. YouTube converts really well. And since most YouTubers aren’t used to being offered deals, they’ll work with you for cheap. Put it this way. I haven’t been approached a single time for a video or channel sponsorship.
Youtubers On Board
Just kidding, all good, I’m fine. Anyways, what do you want to do is get these YouTubers on board with creating a video on your content pieces and their call to action in the video is the read your full article, which they happen to use for their research. For example, if you wrote an article on the best gaming mouse, then they can make a video. In that video, constantly refer back to the research in your article. You can also have them make a quote unquote reaction video, fully reviewing your article and giving it praise. The approach looks like this.
Short List Of Channels
Make a short list of channels in your niche with the least 1000 views or so on all their recent videos, gather five to 10 of these channels. Get their email addresses from their YouTube About page or their website’s contact page. Then arrange a call. Agree on a fair rate and format of the sponsorship. Make sure they agree to link to the article at the top of the description. And lastly, profit.
High Converting Traffic
Enjoy your cheap high converting traffic. I do a similar tactic to this one to get influencers to write for my sites. And I’ve left a link to the video in the description, so make sure to check it out after you watch this video. The next honorable mention is so simple I slapped myself for not thinking of it earlier. What you want to do is create a password protected page where you share coupons and vouchers for your best recommended products, affiliated products, of course.
Scarcity VS Exclusivity
The scarcity and exclusivity of getting access to the special page will make people interested. So interested that they’ll probably trade an email address for it. So now you have two wins at once, affiliate income and people signing up to your email list to get that password, genius. All right, here we go, let’s take a look at the top affiliate marketing strategy and the winner of the $5,000 prize.
Mindset Shift
The strategy is more complex than the others mentioned before, it’s less of a quick win and more of a complete mindset shift, but the profit potential is mad. The top affiliate marketing strategy is to convert a portion of your affiliate site into an e-commerce store. It’s entirely possible for the same website to rank for both affiliate review type keywords, such as best protein powder, and e-commerce keywords such as buy protein powder at the same time.
Control Both Sides Of The Coin
The recommendation engine and the purchase engine, you control the whole chain. Where have you seen this before? Well, if you’ve been doing affiliate SEO for any period of time, then you’ve seen Amazon competing with you. Here’s Amazon ranking high for the keyword best wallets for men, which is clearly an affiliate review type keyword, but here they are again, ranking for the e-commerce version of this keyword buy wallets for men, with another page on their site.
Amazon.Com
Apparently, you can dip into both. But this is Amazon we’re talking about, they’re massive. Bodybuilding.com does it as well. They rank here for best fat burner, and here again for straight up fat burner. Here’s a stereo website called the Worldwide Stereo. Here in Ahrefs’ Keywords Report, it ranks number one for best home theater system and number three for straight up home theater system.
Diggitymarketing.Com
Hell even my website, diggitymarketing.com ranks for both SEO web hosting and best SEO web hosting. Maybe I need to start my own hosting company, just kidding WPX. I’m kidding, jeez. You know where else you’ve seen this before? Your own freaking website. I’m sure you’ve seen yourself ranking for e-commerce terms before, and not just the review version of that keyword. Here’s what I do in this case.
Protein Powder Page
If your best protein powder page is ranking for buy protein powder, you’re already doing it, you’re already a hybrid affiliate e-commerce site, and you’re doing it with a page that wasn’t built for it. Now give them what they want to see. Create an e-commerce style page with rows and columns of various product, buy now links, a shopping cart, all of it. For the products, just to have all these images here to go to various products on Amazon. You’re just testing things out. See where Google places you in the rankings. It’s going to be good now that you have the search intent correct.
Private Labeling
Once you’ve proven you can rank for the keywords, start to work on private labeling. Make a deal with a manufacturer and get your third party logistics going. Start making one product at a time and start replacing the products in the top positions one by one. Now, since you own the whole funnel, set up retargeting pixels on your affiliate content. Start remarketing your protein powder on Facebook using a super targeted Facebook audience. And let’s not forget, profit.
