Welcome back!  Over the next couple  tutorials, we’ll discuss in detail how to create content for your affiliate marketing website.  First, we’ll talk about the fundamental principles behind topic selection and then we’ll get into the specific nuts and bolts of writing your content.

The Purpose of  Affiliate Website Content

The first thing to understand about creating content for your  website is that every single page (or post in the case of  Wordpress) that you create must be  focused on one (or both) of the following goals:

1. Bringing relevant, targeted traffic (or “qualified leads”) to your site; and

2. Converting those qualified leads into buyers of your affiliate product.

(In case you’re wondering, the term ”qualified lead” is just fancy marketing talk for a person who is a likely buyer of what you are selling.)

So, every time you set out to write a new post on your site, first evaluate it with those two goals in mind.  

If it doesn’t serve at least one of those two purposes,  don’t waste your time writing it! 

The Importance of Keyword Relevance

Affiliate Marketing - Content Is King

You will recall that we introduced the concept of keyword relevance in the earlier tutorial on affiliate keyword relevance and selection.  If you’re not sure what keyword relevance is or why it’s so important to your success, please go back and review that tutorial now.  It really cannot  be overstated just how important keywords are to your success with content creation and affiliate marketing in general.

Now, if you’ve done your keyword research at the outset, you will have come up with a list of good keywords which: (a) are highly relevant either directly to your affiliate product or to the problem that your visitors are trying to solve; (b) have decent search volume; and (c) are not overly competitive, meaning that you stand a good chance of getting your content ranked on the first page of Google’s search results. 

To see how keyword research and relevance plays into content creation, let’s look at an example. 

Say you are marketing a hypothetical ebook on building home-made solar panels called “The Amazing Solar Panel Solution”. 

And let’s say you have done your keyword research and determined that the following keyword phrases are your best choices, ranked first to last (again, these are totally hypothetical):

1.  Amazing Solar Panel Solution Review
2.  How To Build A Solar Panel
3.  Home Made Solar Panels
4.  Solar Panels for Dummies

What’s the best place to start with your content creation?  With your best keyword phrase, of course!   Again, you have chosen this keyword phrase on the basis that it is directly relevant to your product, gets good search volume and doesn’t have too much competition.  So why on earth would you start anywhere else?  Always start with the lowest hanging fruit and then work your way out from there.

So, in this example, you could begin by writing a post which reviews the product.  You would talk about the problem the product solves and all of its great benefits and features.  At the end of your review would be a recommendation or call to action followed by your affiliate link.  Of course, the post would be entitled “Amazing Solar Panel Solution Review” (you’re targeting those keywords remember!) and you would use that keyword phrase throughout.   

For your next post, you would want to incorporate your second-best keyword phrase “How To Build A Solar Panel” (which would also happen to be a good title for the post).  In this post, you could provide some general advice and tips on the subject of solar panel construction leading up to a recommendation at the end of the page for….you guessed it… your affiliate product!   Again, the post would be centered around your chosen keyword phrase (”How To Build A Solar Panel”) and you would include that keyword phrase several times throughout.

You could then complete this process for your remaining keywords.  Finally, you might consider “filling out” your site a bit with a few more posts about solar panels which will enhance your site’s authority in the eyes of your visitors. 

In those posts, you won’t obsessively focus on your best keyword phrases but should still target keywords that are relevant to your product  and then work your top key phrases in where you can without being too obvious or overly-repetitive.  (Remember, you are trying to write content that your visitors will see as helpful or informative with the ultimate goal of leading them to reach for their credit card.  Stuffing your keyword phrases into every nook and cranny or talking about the exact same thing in every post will make your content unenjoyable to read and will turn your visitors off.)

Hopefully you can see at this point why keyword relevance is so important to your search engine rankings and should form the foundation of your topic selection and content creation.  If you don’t use this keyword relevance approach when creating content, you run a serious risk of  building content that brings in very little, if any, search traffic.  And the traffic that does trickle in won’t convert into sales.

Conclusion

Using the principle of  keyword relevance as the foundation for your content will help you accomplish your goals by delivering targeted traffic and achieving content that is relevant and meets the needs of your visitors - both of which are key to generating affiliate sales.

Up Next:  We’ll get into the specifics of creating your affiliate website content.