Link Building for Affiliates

[djbaxter]

Link Building for Affiliates
by Julie Joyce, Search Engine Watch
November 20, 2012

Affiliate sites are automatically at a bit of a disadvantage because they're trying to compete with the manufacturer or home sites of the products they're selling. If those home sites aren't great, you're going to have it easier of course, but outranking big brands can be very tricky.

Affiliates can't solely focus on rankings. While this is common sense to those of us who live and breathe SEO, it isn't always common sense to people who decide they want to make money online.

Instead, focus on raising your visibility wherever you can get converting traffic, and focus on making sure that when someone clicks through from the SERPs, you can keep there until they convert.

For many affiliates, the key is to draw traffic through capturing different types of searches that the big brands might attract. You don't need to rank for brand terms in order to capture brand traffic.

For example, if you're wondering which smartphone is the best bet, you probably won't simply search ?iPhone? and ?Android.? You'll search for long-tailed keyphrases like ?what's the best smartphone?? or ?differences between iPhone and Android.? An affiliate marketing smartphones could easily take advantage of this desire for information and provide enough content to make the user feel confident in making a decision, and hopefully purchasing through the site.

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